Holidays are Fast Approaching: Duck!

[Written by Crabby]

(Photo from flikr)

So whether or not you celebrate Christmas, it's hard not to notice that everything slows down this time of year. Many of you will be off spending time with family and friends, decking your halls or donning your gay apparel or whatever. Others may not be celebrating Christmas, but instead of Fa-la-la-la-lawing, you might be working double overtime shifts to cover for those who are hangin' with Santa.

In any event, a lot of you won't be here. Things may be reeeeally slow between Christmas and New Years.

So we're going to try to chill too and refrain from writing a bunch of posts and then wondering why no one is reading them. Where is everybody? Don't they like us anymore? What's wrong? Was it something we said?

No, instead we will try to out-smart our own little insecurities and not even write those posts that you're going to not read. Clever, huh? Perhaps we'll take a little time to relax and recharge--so that after the holidays, you can come back to more of the same old shit all kinds of fresh new ideas and fascinating posts about all kinds of things!

However, and this is important, we won't close down entirely between Christmas and New Years! Sometime on Monday we'll let you know what the deal is. So please do check back.

Okay, enough of this "we" stuff since Mary's not actually here right now.

So switching subjects completely:

Some of you long-time readers may have noticed that I've been slipping out of third person and into the first person lately. (For those who are not fiction writers obsessed with point of view: "First person" is writing as "I"; second person is writing as "you"; and the third person is writing as "she" or "he" or, in this case, "Crabby.")

I still haven't figured out what I want to do about that, but I'm leaning towards wanting to write less like a Crab and more like a normal person. (Not that Cranky Fitness will ever be "normal.")

So I appreciate your patience as I experiment. I tried to switch to first person a long time ago but then it felt weird and I gave it up after a few days. So that could always happen again. I also thought seriously about it a couple of months ago too--but the day I was going to announce the change, guess what?

I followed a link and ended up here, at I Am Bossy.

As it happens, Bossy is an amazing, witty writer who can pull off the third person in a way that makes it seem all clever and doesn't alienate new readers. But you know how a gorgeous actress can wear a pair of funky looking glasses and make you think the glasses are cool? But your friends don't want to tell you that on you they're, well, kind of icky and distracting? Well, I suspect that's kind of what happened with me and Bossy and the Third-Person Nerd glasses. Just as I was about to ditch them and go get contacts, I saw Bossy walk by with the same pair I had she looked so great!

I still love third person when other people do it--but I'm not sure I want to chain myself to it for the life of the blog. (Plus, now I've got a co-blogger and a legitimate excuse to use the editorial "we" sometimes, which also comes in handy).

Anyway, hopefully I'll be chatting with some of you over the break, but for those who are hopping on a plane or packing up the minivan: safe travels and have a great holiday!

Behind the Scenes at Cranky Fitness

Since we had Leah kindly supplying actual Health-Related Content today, Crabby is free to bring you a few updates from the always busy and bustling Product Development Laboratories at Cranky Fitness!

And boy are they busy back there. Completely imaginary Dedicated workers, thousands of them, are toiling away night and day to update this site and bring you the easiest to find without even Googling latest, most important updates in health and fitness news! And it's not just up-to-the minute content, either. Cranky Fitness plans to keep Screwing around with the Sidebar Optimizing its' User Interface continuously in order to try to make a few bucks someday enhance your browsing experience!

Can you tell Crabby recently discovered how to do Strike-Through Type? She promises to cut it out. Soon. Probably. Eventually. Her recent infatuation has probably officially killed it. All the hip bloggers will move on to something new tomorrow. Check back here in about three years to find out what it is and Crabby will kill it again.

Anyway. So, changes. Innovations.

You may have noticed there are new ads again! Hopefully these will acquire some variety over time. Or maybe you will always be taunted by Snack Chips. Crabby herself found herself craving crunchy snack-foods last time she was at the store, and wonders if all the Blogher bloggers are throwing all kinds of crackers and chips and pretzels and other tempting carbs in their carts all of a sudden without even knowing why.

But the Blogher people somehow seem Way more likable as ad partners than the Google Alternative. So Crabby will just eat her snack chips and shut up about it until they get a few more sponsors going. And a cool thing about the Blogher ad process: they highlight posts from other member blogs. Perhaps you have seen these.

The downside: more clutter on the sidebar. The upside: some days, Cranky Fitness gets to clutter up the sidebars of other blogs! Crabby hopes new people will come and subliminally confuse Cranky Fitness with Snack Chips and think the blog is Tasty and Healthy and Addictive and Convenient and Brightly Packaged!

In other blog news, Cranky Fitness made A European List of the top English Language Health Blogs. How did Cranky Fitness manage to make the list at all, despite being too new for a google page rank, not very big, and weird? Well, partly it was because the blog gets so many comments! So thank you, Commenters! We came in at #79, beating out, for example, a blog called UroStream.

(Crabby didn't check to see whether UroStream was about, well, exactly what it sounds like. Who knows? Maybe it's another way of spelling Euro-Stream and its mission is highlight the important health benefits of European-style rowing. Perhaps they're immensely popular and they've got tasty photos spreads of buffed Continental crew teams with tousled hair and glistening bodies. Crabby prefers to think this, actually.)

Cranky Fitness is also now a Blogburst contributor! Blogburst is a syndicator that actual News Outlets sometimes use. So far, they haven't found anything normal enough here to pick up and distribute to the masses, but it has only been a few days. Crabby may experiment every now and then with trying to sound more like a regular health blog in hopes of getting Noticed. So if sudden Normalcy should attack the blog, do not be alarmed! It will be sporadic and temporary.

***Important Update! Cranky Fitness has now moved up to #17 on the European Guy's Top Health Blog List! Why? Who the hell knows, and it's probably a mistake, but Crabby's pleased! Also, she checked out UroStream and it's actually really cute. It's a blog written by a urologist with a sense of humor, though unfortunately it features no photo-spreads of muscular rowers.

So that's all for now, but stay tuned! Crabby is working hard to realize her dreams of making Cranky Fitness one of the very best, most informative silliest but nonetheless weirdly popular health blogs on the Net!

Third Person Crabniscient

Warning to new visitors: this post will make absolutely no sense at all. But don't worry, a new post on an actual health-related topic (mammograms) will appear before too long. In the meantime, feel free to amuse yourselves in the archives by clicking on some of the old Cranky Fitness posts that no one ever has ever read--because, well, in the early days of Cranky Fitness, there were no readers.

So, beloved regulars, Crabby has returned! She listened to her readers, who were quite articulate and persuasive, and she has banished the intruder!

True, she did promise this "I" person (also known as "Me") that she'd retreat for a week or so as an experiment. But Crabs are fickle creatures and sometimes untrustworthy. Crabby is breaking her promise already and reappearing way early to take her rightful place again as Proprietor of Cranky Fitness. At least until the next time she has an identity crisis.

However, Crabby does not want to be unreasonable. She will allow "Me" to preside over the comment section. And perhaps "I" might be permitted to do a guest post occasionally. But Crabby has decided, with the help of many of her friends, to keep things as they were. Even if it makes her look wishy-washy and amateurish. And with full knowledge that the strange Third Person format of Cranky Fitness (along with all its other weirdnesses) may send casual googlers fleeing as fast as their browsers can whisk them away.

Crabby thanks you all for your patience and apologizes for this disruption in service. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

And as always, any thoughts you wish to share about absolutely anything are most welcome.

First Person Crabular

So Cranky Fitness is celebrating its One Month anniversary today. And guess what: Crabby is already thinking about messing around with the format.

(At this point, health and fitness enthusiasts who are not writers or bloggers may want to bail; Crabby is going all Meta in this post. More Health news soon, she promises).

Crabby is re-evaluating her consistent use of the Third Person in her posts. (A tradition already broken in the comments section). This formality was inspired, she thinks, by predecessors like Judith Martin ("Miss Manners") and more recently (though only on occasion), and Miss Snark ("Miss Snark"). Crabby is thinking, as an experiment, of dropping this convention for a bit just to see how it goes.

Watch out: brutal transition ahead.

Because now I'm wondering if third person might be a bit off-putting. What if I were to address you all more directly from now on?

Don't worry; I'd still be grumpy and old-fashioned and write in a cumbersome indirect fashion. I'd still employ lots of passive voice and other frowned-upon linguistic contrivances. Perhaps I'd use the editorial "we" sometimes, as though I had a staff of eager interns, even though you'd all see right through it. And maybe I could continue to use the third person sometimes, but sparingly, not incessantly.

I can't help wondering whether I might even retain a few more visitors if I sounded more like a normal blog. I'm guessing many newcomers must mutter "WTF?" when they arrive here looking for heart rate monitor information and discover they've somehow arrived in the 18th or 19th Century.

But I'm open to feedback. How about I try it for a while and see what you all think?