Holiday happiness

I don’t know Ebony and Daniel. Most of the people who have come through this site in the past few weeks don’t know them either. But Jaki , one of my good friends and one of our awesome writers, set this goal to save their house. This is not something they did for themselves, it’s something Jaki thought to do as a friend.

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Go, democracy, go!

Unfortunately, I am about as disconnected from this election as an American could probably be at this point. Not because I don’t care, but because I’m not actually IN America. I’m in Scotland. And throughout most of the meat of the campaigning, I was about as far away as anyone could be: Australia and New Zealand. I can’t help but feel as though I’ve missed out on something really big these past few months.

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Lucy in November

It seems like ages since our last issue, but maybe that’s because I’ve been away for ages.

For the past month, I’ve been galavanting around Australia and New Zealand (more on that in the next issue’s leisure section) having a grand old time filled with kangaroos, sheep, wine, beer, beaches and mountains. Meanwhile, Sara and Lindsay were working their asses off recruiting new writers, getting the blogs going, and getting this absolutely awesome issue together. They really held it down with very little help from me and if I had the money, I’d send them off to Oz for a well deserved break. I just hope I can make up for all the abandonment.

As you can see, things look a little different around here. We’re working on making the site look better bit by bit. We’re also working on beefing up the content, getting relevant ads, and pretty much every possible thing we could think to be working on. The magazine is growing, sometimes faster than we imagined, and I’ve come back from my holiday full of energy for Lucy thanks to all the amazing stuff Sara and Lindsay did while I was away (and hopefully they’ve got some energy left after all that hard work).

On the long flight back from New Zealand, someone had left a copy of Cosmopolitan in my seatback pocket. I pulled it out and said to Scott, ‘Hey, let’s mock the enemy!’ We flipped through articles like ‘44 Things You Didn’t Know About Guys’, ‘53 Of Your Sex Questions Answered In 25 Words Or Less’, and ‘Is Your Friend Having More Sex Than You?’ And we got bored. It wasn’t even good enough to mock anymore. That combined with some of the Lucy reader responses we’ve seen over the past few weeks really reiterated to me that the world needs more Lucys and less Cosmos. Getting something like this magazine together can be a real challenge, but it’s the feedback we hear and the continuing awful quality of mainstream women’s mags we see that keeps us going.

Please keep the comments and suggestions coming. And if you like what you see, spread the love!

Thanks for reading,

Kate

A seven year old mystery

I can’t tell you how long I’ve been reading TomatoNation.com because I feel like I’ve been reading it since I can remember reading things online. But let’s say at least ten years. Long enough that on September 11, 2001, one of the first people I thought about was Sarah Bunting. Not because I’d ever met her or talked to her, but because Monday was new essay day on Tomato Nation and it was something I looked forward to every week. Because Sarah lives and works in New York City. Because I was worried, just like everyone else.

Her story of that day is now inextricably linked to my memories of it. Not just because I think Sars is a cool person and I enjoy her honest writing. Not just because of my concern for her and everyone else in the city.

That day, amidst all the disaster and debris, she bumped into a guy called Don. September 11th is Don’s birthday. Don was her ‘disaster buddy’. Don was there when she needed him.  And since then, no one has been able to find him.

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Ben Folds Five! One night only? Why oh why can’t I be in Chapel Hill?

Eight long years ago, I was sitting at my computer working on a Ben Folds Five fan site. (Yes. I was the dork that taught myself HTML because I didn’t have enough books to read.)

The site was nothing special. It was really a way for me to play around with bad design and waste time. But Ben Folds Five? That was my band. I loved them then and I still love them now. And I remember sitting there with my various intraweb and AIM windows open as someone broke the news that the group had split.

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So much for goals…

So it has become quite clear that there’s no way in hell I’m achieving the original goal I set a month an a half ago. The day we set up the Fit, I set my goal to lose 10 pounds in two months. I think this is a fair goal, and if I were more concerned about losing the weight, I’m sure I could have reached it. But I now have about 2 weeks left til the deadline and I’m still hovering around my original weight. In fact, I haven’t left a 4 pound radius of my original weight at all.

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It knows where I sleep…

So I’ve had the Wii Fit for about a month now, which means I’m around the time where I would normally start slacking off. Last week, I skipped two days instead of my allowed one per week. I felt guilty, but then I did walk from Murrayfield stadium all the way back into town on one of those days because we went to see a pre-season football(soccer) match and there was pretty much no chance in hell of getting a bus afterwards. It’s a pretty long walk, so I got my exercise.

What I hadn’t been getting was yoga practice, so when I did get back on the Balance Board after two days of absence, I could really tell the difference. So I’ve got to be better about keeping up with the yoga. I’ve unlocked all the different poses now, but I can’t do them all because I either don’t have the balance or I don’t have a mat to do the floor based ones.

I’m not exactly making progress towards the weight goal, but I’m in roughly the same place as I started, so I’m happy with that. Today I’ll be doing a nice long session. I try to do 2 or 3 30 minute sessions a week. My walk to work (two days a week) will be getting quite a bit longer this week too because the office has moved. Hopefully all the extra walking and stuff will allow me to catch up on my health, because I had a bit of an indulgant weekend.

Step, step, step

I’ve unlocked boxing and a longer version of the step game in aerobic exercises, and I’m pretty excited about this.

The boxing instructor has way more personality than the yoga/muscle exercise trainers. He’s a mii instead of a weird attempt at a human, and he’s got this gruff, quite motivating voice. He seems like a pretty nice guy. Plus, I’m way better at boxing to a rhythm than I am at the original Wii Sports boxing, where I tend to get knocked out pretty fast. Perhaps I should try kickboxing.

In step aerobic land, I can only be amused. After a while, I got the hang of all the stepping up and down and back and forth and kick and sideways and yada yada yada, which to me is a feat. I’m terrible at keeping up with games in which you have to stick to a certain beat (PaRappa the Rapper, Donkey Konga, DDR, etc. You name it, I get confused and the program tells me I suck.) so I can’t believe I managed to get this down in one or two practices.

For some reason, you’re on a stage in front of a full audience doing step aerobics. Scott pointed out that pretty much no one would want to go see that, much less pay for it. I couldn’t agree more. Especially when one might be able to sift through one’s mother’s old exercise tapes fromt he early 90s and see professionals doing it on a beach in Hawaii in much more ridiculous clothes and perhaps make a drinking game out of the experience.

In any case, the Wii takes miis from your mii channel to put in the step show/class thing with you. It often decides to put Mii-Liam or Mii-Ridgaway or someone as unlikely as anyone in the world to be standing next to me in a step aerobics class clapping along enthusiastically to the beat. Now, you may not know these friends of mine in real life, but I’m sure you can think of plenty of people who wouldn’t be caught dead doing step aerobics as happily as if they’d invented it yesterday, much less on stage in front of a crowd. So you understand the hilarity of the situation when a whole group of these people appear around you on screen and look as though they’re itching to throw up the jazz hands and step-class their way to heaven.

This is just SO much better than a gym membership.

Weekend hair!

I’ve been pretty good. I skipped Sunday, but I figure one day off a week isn’t bad, as long as it doesn’t turn into two and three and four.

In any case, Scott and I discovered on Saturday that the trainers in the game wear their hair down on weekends. This was after an entire session on Friday making fun of the male trainer’s ponytail. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with guys having ponytails, but this guy’s was just silly. Plus, I like making fun of the trainers. They’re just… awkwardly over-human. Or something.

I’ve unlocked the super hula hoop game, and DAMN, let me tell you, hula hooping (sans actual hula hoop) is a really good workout. And I’m only doing it for three minutes at a time. You do 90 seconds hula-hooping in either direction, and it feels like you’re really getting somewhere in terms of getting your heart going. I always feel a little silly at the end because you feel like you want to keep hulaing. It’s hard to go from hula-60 to zero in a few seconds, so I just end up swaying around for a bit. But it records your balance through the whole thing and you get to see it racing around on the screen at the end in little circles. I just unlocked the 6 minute version, but I’m not sure if I’m ready for that yet.

Also, when you hit 30 minutes of exercise in a day, your pig jumps up and down in happiness. I really do like that pig.

At long last!

A second issue!

We’ve decided to go somewhere in between monthly and bi-monthly now, so you can expect a new Lucy about every six weeks or so. In the meantime, we’re taking on a lot of new bloggers, so there will be more frequently updated content as well.

This month we’ve got some great new writers. You can also now subscribe to Lucy’s email list to be notified of site updates (just click on ’subscribe’ up at the top of the site).

Enjoy the issue!