Flying in the Phoenix Area During the Super Bowl?

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Not likely.

Here’s the TFR graphic for the Super Bowl. As you can see, Wickenburg (E25 in the northwest) is one of the few airports outside the forbidden circle that marks a 30-mile radius from the stadium in Glendale.

Super Bowl TFR

I just spoke to my FAA guy in Scottsdale and received confirmation that the only flights allowed within the circle after noon on game day will be police and security aircraft. Glendale Airport will be closed to all traffic. And they’ll definitely be writing up violations for the folks who bust that circle.

What does this mean? Well, it means that although I can fly all day out of Wickenburg if I stay to the north and west, I’m certainly not going to be ferrying folks around Phoenix. This is a good thing — I was really starting to get worried about dealing with security anyway.

It’ll be interesting to see how many F-16s get scrambled to chase down Cessnas that day.

I have a great gig lined up the day before in Parker, AZ. Maybe I’ll just spend an extra day there.

At Macworld Expo

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Are you there? I’ll be there soon.

As this is appearing online, I’m boarding a plane for Macworld Expo in San Francisco. This is yet another one of my quick in and out trips — I really can’t afford to be away from my office for more than two days. I’ll arrive in SF around 9:30 this morning and depart around 3:30 on Thursday afternoon. In between, I’m staying at the Nikko.

I have a lot to squeeze into this trip:

  • Wednesday, 12:00 PM – meeting with two editors, one publisher, and a representative from an online publishing group regarding ebooks and ebook piracy issues. I’m tired of seeing little ebook revenue while copies of my ebooks are floating around on file sharing sites. Armed with some excellent feedback from an ebook reader, I’m going to propose some changes to the way my work appears in ebooks. I also hope to spend some time talking to one of my editors about a book we hope to start next week.
  • Wednesday, 2:00 PM – appearing at the Peachpit Press booth on the show floor. I’m doing a 45-minute presentation and hope to cover some productivity tips and tricks for Leopard users. Peachpit will be videoing the presentation for eventual distribution online.
  • Wednesday, after 3 PM – seeing the show floor. I’ll be walking around armed with my cameras: Treo for instant Web publishing of images, Nikon D80 with fisheye lens for a very different look at the show floor, and video camera for content I hope to put together as a short Macworld Expo movie.
  • Wednesday, after 6 PM – attending one or two parties (depending on how tired I am).
  • Thursday, before 1 PM – see Wedneday, after 3 PM. More of the same.

If you’d like to see photos from Macworld as they are taken, visit my TumbleLog. I expect to start sending photos as soon as I arrive in SF. I’ll try to make them interesting.

Product ImageI’ll also be giving away two copies of my Leopard book during my Peachpit booth presentation. One of them will go to the first presentation attendee who tells me he/she read about the giveaway here.

If you’re at Macworld Expo and want to say hello, drop by the Peachpit Press booth. I usually pop in now and then during my time on the show floor. I’d to meet you!

Dieting…Again

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I really need to lose weight.

Without going into specifics, let’s just say that like the majority of Americans these days, I’m overweight. I’m tall, so I can “get away with it” — to a certain point. But I don’t want to. I want to be thinner.

Why I Want to Lose Weight

Please understand that this isn’t an appearance issue as much as its a health and practicality issue.

I had a friend who was overweight and constantly dieting. One day, she told me she didn’t care how much she weighed. She wasn’t succumbing to the pressure to be thin, just to make some man happy. (She was divorced.) So she stopped dieting and basically went to hell physically.

I don’t want to lose weight to make a man happy. My husband doesn’t seem to care that I’ve developed “love handles.” There isn’t any other man I want to impress. I’m forty-something. Those days of flirting are over.

But as I age, my weight is holding me back — almost literally. I have bad knees and the more I weigh, the more my knees hurt (or creak) when I’m walking up stairs or hills. I’ve always been short of breath when going uphill, but now it’s worse. And I can’t help but wonder how these extra pounds are affecting my overall health: heart, arteries, blood pressure. Stroke runs in my family on both sides. I don’t want to go there.

Then there’s the practicality side of the matter. Every six pounds is a gallon of fuel on my helicopter when I’m flying with a bunch of other fatties. I’ve done plenty of weight and balance calculations and I’ve realized that if you put a 250+ pounder up front with me and lightweights in the back, we’re going to be nose heavy. Being lighter would give me more flexibility with loading passengers, too.

In the spring of 2004 — just four years ago! — I weighed 30 pounds less than I do now. When I met my husband in 1983, I weighted 60 pounds less. (That was a bit on the thin side, in all honesty, but I wouldn’t mind going back there.) And for a while in college, I weighed 85 pounds less than I do now. (That was way too thin for someone my height and I was having digestive problems because of it.)

I want to go back to what I weighed in 2004. And I want to do it by March month-end.

What I’m Doing About It

Okay, so I’ve restated my “lose weight” goal as a New Year’s resolution. Big deal. I’ve been doing that for the past three years.

But now I’ve decided that I’ve really had enough. And I’ve begun watching what I eat.

You know, everyone says that Weight Watchers works. I know why. It’s because you look at every thing you eat and see the impact in terms of calories, fat, and other nutrition.

I don’t want to go to Weight Watchers, but I found an alternative. It’s a Web site called FitDay. I’d actually stumbled upon it at least a year ago, but a Twitter friend (@truecolor) mentioned it just the other day and I went to check it out again. This time, I decided to use it.

FitDay is a Web-based nutrition program, that is designed to help you meet weight and other nutrition goals. You tell it exactly what you ate and it tells you how many calories and other nutritional units you’ve consumed. You can set goals, specify additional activities (like exercise programs), and, of course, enter your daily weight. FitDay performs all kinds of calculations to tell you how your diet and exercise affect your nutrition and calorie burn.

Calorie BreakdownFitDay tracks all your data and prepares charts and graphs, like this one from the other day. I’m trying to keep my carb count low, since Atkins has worked so well for me in the past, and that’s why you’re seeing so many calories from fat. I’m going to try to shift those calories to protein. FitDay makes this relatively easy by letting you view the nutritional information from a vast database of foods.

For example, this morning I really wanted some oatmeal instead of eggs. But after consulting the FitDay database, I realized that a serving of oatmeal would put me way over my maximum goal for carbs for the day. So I stuck with a nice spinach, egg, scallion, and cheese omelet. FitDay gave me the total counts for my breakfast, which included two large cups of coffee with real sugar and 2% milk:

Today's Foods

Just seeing how each item I eat affects the overall picture of my nutrition is making me think twice about everything I eat.

So far, I’ve lost 2-1/2 pounds in 3 days. While it’s too early to make a call on whether this is working, it has to work — as long as I stick with it.

FitDay also has a PC-based application that you can buy, download, and use on a PC. I’m thinking of getting it for my mom, who has always struggled with weight. I’m not a PC user — I use a Mac — and don’t think it’s worth firing up Parallels just to track food when I can do it on the Web.

What I Think

While I’m not especially pushing FitDay — the Web-based program is far from perfect — I do think that it’s a useful tool for dieting.

What do you think? Have you tried any dieting tools that really helped you out? Share your comments here.

Some Photos from a Desert Trek

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A handful of photos.

I don’t usually put a lot of large photos on this site, but I thought I’d give it a try today. Yesterday, Mike, Jack the Dog, and I went for a combination Jeep ride/hike out in the desert northeast of Wickenburg. All of these photos were taken within 15 miles of my home, so it gives you an idea of the landscape I live in.

Winter is a great time for enjoying Arizona’s Sonoran desert. Oddly enough, however, our party of seven (including Jack the Dog) didn’t run into anyone else along the way.

We started at the Rodeo Grounds on Constellation Road in Wickenburg, then headed out on Constellation Road. We made the left hand turn just before Monte Cristo Mine, followed that road for a short while and took a right where it forked off. We drove through one drag gate, closing it behind us to keep the cattle on their appropriate sides of the fence, and continued down the road. Eventually, it merged with Slim Jim Creek. We followed the dry creek bed as far as we could, maneuvering around and over two nasty places where the last flood had scattered boulders in the wash. When we reached a point where we could follow the creek no further, we pulled onto the side and parked our pickup and two Jeeps. The road continued, but there were two narrow places just beyond where we parked. Besides, it climbed away from the creek, which was our intended trail.

We geared up with drinking water, lunch bags, and cameras and headed down the creekbed on foot. I figure we walked about 1-1/2 to 2 miles. The creek wound through some of the most beautiful Sonoran Desert scenery before ending abruptly at the Hassayampa River. Although there isn’t a drop of water flowing under the bridge in town, there was quite a bit at the mouth of Slim Jim Creek.

Here are my favorite photos of the day, along with some captions.

The south-facing hills were absolutely covered with saguaro cacti.

I played with my fisheye lens here. This rock face was actually quite flat, but the lens makes it look like it curves out into the river. Not very realistic, but it looks cool.

Here’s Jack the Dog with that fisheye lens again. He found some quicksand near this spot and almost got stuck in it.

The river flowed a lot higher earlier in the week. This sand shows the pattern from the receded water. It was still quite wet.

Believe it or not, this is the skeletal remains of a type of prickly pear cactus. (We also found the decomposing body of a javelina, but I didn’t photograph it, primarily because it was really gross.)

This is the windmill near the remains of Sayer’s Station, which we passed on our way on Constellation Road. The road climbs past the windmill and I took this shot from the road, just about level with the top of the windmill. I like taking photos of windmills.

Comments? You know where to put them.

Article Length

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My biggest challenge.

Yesterday, I began writing an article for a travel magazine. The magazine is relatively well-known and it pays pretty darn well. I’ve never written about travel — beyond what you’ll find in this blog — but I think I’m up to the task.

But I am facing a challenge: word count. The article cannot be more than 1,500 words.

I’m not accustomed to working with length constraints. On my blog, I can make an article as long or as short as I want to. The same goes for the articles I write for InformIt and other Web-based publishers. (That’s one of the benefits of publishing on the Web — it costs the same to publish no matter how long it is.) Even my book publishers don’t usually limit my page count.

But this is a print publication and the limits are real. And I seriously doubt that the editors there will love my words enough to make an exception for me.

Keeping It Short

The way I see it, there are two ways to keep an article short:

  • Write it short. I’m using Word 2004 (old habits really do die hard) to write the piece. Word includes a live word count feature, so I can monitor word count as I type. This is how I’m trying to write the piece. What I’m finding is that I’m about 1/4 finished writing, but have used up more than half my alloted words. As a result, I keep going back and shortening up earlier paragraphs and sentences to make room for the rest of the story. I don’t think this is the best approach.
  • Write it without worrying about page count, then go back and edit the hell out of it. This is how I usually tackle length problems — especially when I have to shorten up text that appears on a page I’m laying out. In those instances, I’m cutting out 10 to 30 words. But at the rate I’m going with this article, I’ll have to cut more than 1,000 words. This can’t possibly be productive. After all, I’m writing material that I’m just discarding.

Another Way?

It occurs to me that there probably is another way to keep it short: rethink the entire article and reduce the amount of information I want to provide.

This is probably a more professional way to go about it. It requires me to come up with an outline of what I want to discuss and budget a certain amount of words for each part. If there are too many parts, I need to cut out the parts that don’t really communicate the theme of the piece. Once I have a handle on how to approach the article, I should be able to write it close to the proper length. I can then edit it down as needed.

The key, of course, it to stay within budget for each part of the article.

And I think this is a good example of how blogging and writing for the Web can hurt a writer. When I blog, I have no editor — it’s just me. I can write whatever I want, whatever way I want to write it. Sentence fragments? No problem. Slang? Go for it! Extensive use of parenthetical commentary? Why not (since I always have more than just one thing to say)? Bloggers who are also professional writers can lose the discipline they need to produce high-quality work for publisher with very specific needs.

But I think I’ll tackle blogging and how it affects writing skills in another post.

Any Thoughts?

Do any writers out there have some advice for me? Speak up! Use the Comments link or form.