Maybe April Isn't the Cruelest Month?

 

Apologies to those of you who thought you'd gotten rid of me, here I am again! But this will (I hope) be a short post. It's just that my last update came at a time when I was feeling a bit discouraged, and in retrospect it doesn't feel like a great way to wander off.

So I had a couple of great things happen last month. And I hope I'm not the only one? I'd love to hear if there's something in the air, some ethereal springtime sprinkling of hope and promise, or if April was just as shitty as any other month in 2026 for you all. Hoping it's the former.

So what were the two great things?

The Novel Is Out! So What Next?

 

 

A few of my friends have been sending me pictures of Niccolo out and about in the world. He's a cat, so this suits him--he hates to be confined!

I'm hoping he manages to find all kinds of new interesting places to hang out. And I promise he won't claw your furniture or barf up hairballs. But he is a predator, with natural feline lust for a kill. So you never know what he might be capable of. Could be quite disturbing.

I think a couple of very kind blog regulars have purchased a copy, and thank you SO MUCH for that! And the link is right here if anyone else has an inclination to check it out: Niccolo Would Like a Word on Amazon. It's free if you have Kindle Unlimited.

What's In A Name?

Has your name ever made your life more difficult? This seems to be my year for it!

And, on what at first might not seem a related note (but stay tuned), my new book is out! Actually, it's only available for pre-order, if you're enough of a mad risk-taker to spring for a $4.99 ebook before the reviews are in. But it's only a short wait: fully available to read in ebook format, or as a $15.99 paperback on March 28. And if you have Kindle Unlmited it's free. 

More on this (much more, probably) once the book is officially launched and no one is rushing to buy it. But I thought I'd at least mention it now.

 

Check out the link here: Niccolo Would Like a Word on Amazon.

So why has my rather ordinary name caused me grief? And do I have crotchety observations about names in other contexts? Of course I do!

On Being an Outsider

 

This is just a quick post, because we just moved to San Diego, yay! But this means there are a ton of items on our To-Do list. And while it's tempting to quietly shift them to our Let's Pretend We'll Get Right On That list, they are things that actually need to get done. Whereas writing a blog post for a handful of readers with better things to do? That doesn't fit on any sensible list.

Yet somehow here we are.

Anyway, so for a few days my feeds kept adamantly pointing me to an Atlantic article about the upside of not fitting in, explaining all the nifty benefits that come from being an outsider. The underlying article is four years old, so I'm not sure why they were pushing it, other than that they somehow sensed I needed something to blog about.

I actually agreed to the premise, in theory... yet something about it stuck in my craw. I seem to be someone with a very sticky craw, given the number of things that accumulate in there. (Note: I went to double check what a craw was and discovered that all these years I'd had it wrong! It's a pouch in the throat that certain birds use to aid in digestion. I'd somehow always pictured a large Crow clutching something in its Claw.  Crow + Claw = Craw.  It's unsettling to realize one has reached one's sixties with kindergartner's understanding of a common expression for something not sitting quite right).

So what did the article say about the benefits of being an Outsider and what made me grumpy about it?

Zoned Out: So Which Damn Cardio Zone(s) Should You Aim For?

There are many reasons that Cranky Fitness stopped pretending to be a blog about fitness, and became Just Cranky instead. One of them is: health and fitness research keeps contradicting itself. Who can trust it anymore?

And yet, I can't help it: I still keep clicking on headlines and reading studies and listening to experts and watching little how-to videos. I'm frequently asking Chatty, my AI health research assistant, for her cheerfully confident yet often inaccurate advice.

But every time I'm convinced I finally know what the "best" answer is to a health question? Some new take from an equally credible source comes along and says, nope, that was all wrong! How to sort out these scientific cat fights? Who do I listen to? 

Is it best to just "zone out" and ignore it all and go with our guts? 

So I'm still struggling a bit with cardio due to hypoparathyroidism, a rare and completely bonkers endocrine disorder I managed to acquire after cancer surgery. So it feels super important to try to optimize the cardio I can get away with.

But it turns out Expert Advice has changed a bit since back in the Cranky Fitness days! So what's the surprising new twist?