i like to read. i’m sure y’all know that. i mean, i work in book publishing….it sort of comes with the territory. and while i weed through the crappy 6th grade read-alouds by day, i try to fill my head with GOOD books by night. i recently finished reading the book Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos. amazing, i tell you. what i loved about it was that it was real. it flowed like a blog post that i never wanted to end.
so, you can imagine how i jumped at the chance to get my hands on a copy of
Petite Anglaise by
her very own blog (sound familiar??)…and Petite Anglaise is born. she gets wrapped up into this virtual world and has to deal with her online persona colliding with her real-life one. As a blogger this is something i can relate to. oh my dear god, can i relate.
and not only did i get to read this book, but today, i have the pleasure of having Catherine herself…here to make a stop on her week-long blogtour (she’s also stopped at Her Bad Mother’s, Redneck Mommy’s, and MamaTulip’s)
Three weeks ago, I rejoined my local gym. Not because I believed that in the month and a half remaining before my wedding day, I would miraculously be able to divest myself of all my extra weight, or dramatically reduce the size of my ‘saddlebags’. No, it was because I figured that working out for a couple of hours every morning would be cheaper than therapy (!), and preferable to taking the anti-anxiety pills my doctor had prescribed.
And I have to say, it’s working. Every morning when I drop Tadpole off at school, I head straight there, get changed and ram in my ear buds. I’ve mastered the scariest cardio machine (the one which imitates the movement of roller blading), taken a guided tour of the weights room and even braved some 9 a.m. ‘fessiers-abdos’ classes (which in England we refer to by the less technical ‘bums and tums’). But there is one thing that will always make me cringe every single time I have to do it: cleaning off the cardio machines after I’ve used them.
Imagine, if you will, a petite anglaise who has just finished her fifteen minutes on the stepper machine, liberally coating the two upright handles with sweat.
By my side a lithe young man in tight shorts is hard at it. Something about his zeal for butt tightening and his choice of attire makes me think his efforts may not be for the benefit of a lady. He watches as I dismount and stagger over to the paper towel dispenser a few metres away, squirt some white, slightly opaque soap onto the tissue, and proceed to clean the first handle, gripping its girth firmly within my open palm and sliding the lubricated tissue up and down.
I’m painfully aware of the action I appear to be miming, and when I move on to the second handle I find it impossible not to smirk as I rub. My iPod shuffles on to an explicit little track by “Peaches”, and I turn an attractive shade of beetroot.
**come on, that’s funny. no? just imagine that i’m a French Tony Montana and i have an M16 rifle with an M203 grenade launcher attachment. no? come on…it’s gold!
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