Winter 2025 SCHEDULE: Anne is (still) working on the new book. Nouvelles postings will be sporadic.

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|| 15 January 2025

Do Proper Exercise Clothes Encourage Regular Exercise?

Remember Susan Powter? She was the perpetually angry 1990s diet and exercise guru who screamed “It’s fat that makes you fat!”

Of course, my French-inspired system of losing weight and staying slim differed on many points from Susan Powter’s. But there was one piece of her weight control advice that I thought a really good idea.

For women who did not exercise and were having difficultly beginning a program, Susan Powter advised proper exercise clothes that were comfortable and attractive. The idea was that if you looked good exercising, you would be more likely to stick with an exercise program. It's an idea.

New book

As for the new book, it is finished and the digital files for the print edition are at the printers. The files passed technical validation. I am awaiting a proof copy. But I am considering some changes that would delay a week or so the print edition’s publication. I am trying to decide.

Once I had sent the print version files to the printers, I was ready to start work on the ebook versions. What a shock to discover how much had changed in the ebook preparation world since I last produced one. The system that I used for the ebook versions of my other books no longer work.

Medical advice for delaying cognitive decline is learning something new. Suggestions are for learning a foreign language or a musical instrument. I suppose learning how to create digital files for an ebook should work as well.

be chic, stay slim — Anne Barone

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|| 1 January 2025

Happy New Year !

So here we are on the first day of 2025. Looking back over 2024, for me it was not one of my better years. Health problems. Difficulties with the new book. Failure to finish the book by my intended August deadline. Ceiling leaks. More ceiling leaks. Electrical problems. Raccoon problems. Five days out of ten, there was a catastrophe du jour.

My grandmother would have said that the reason my year did not go well was that I neglected to eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day 2024. I grew up in a family that believed that you had to eat those dark-centered legumes on the first day of the new year for good luck. Otherwise your year would not go well.

So I am trying to start a better year. For lunch I sautéed onions and celery with some venison jerky my son gave me, added a can of black-eyed peas and simmered the mixture until the flavors blended. Tasty with corn bread.

Another of my grandmother’s New Year’s convictions was that you must be careful about your activities on the first day of the year because “what you do on New Year’s Day you will do all year long.”

So today I have refrained from doing any work on the new book. I have spent about ten times longer working on this project than I planned, I certainly DO NOT want to work on it every day of 2025. The interior pages are ready. I have almost completed the book cover. I want this much-interrupted endeavor finished and off to the printer. SOON.

I hope your new year is beginning well. Wishing you all good things in 2025.

be chic, stay slim, be healthy — Anne Barone

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|| 25 December 2024

My Christmas Good Deed

Joyeuses Fêtes / Happy Holidays

Joyeux Noël / Merry Christmas

As background, I have a problem with the local postal service delivering other people's mail to my house. Since I think that at the prices we pay for postage means delivering mail to the correct address is the post office’s responsibility, I usually send misdelivvered mail back to them to try again.

The misdelivered card Christmas Eve that caused me some consternation had stamped in the upper left corner of the envelope that it was Inmate Correspondence from a distant Texas county jail. On the back flap of the envelope was the inmate’s last name, an address indicating the cellblock, cell number, and name of the jail. (I found this very depressing.) Even more depressing was the card was addressed to two boys. Obviously a Christmas card from a parent who was in jail. I quickly realized I would have to hand deliver this card, else the boys would not receive it by Christmas.

The problem was the boys’ address was in an area that is somewhat rough. And households that have a family member in jail are sometimes ones that do not appreciate the approach of strangers. Plus they sometimes have dogs that also do not like the approach of strangers.

Before I set out I put my Medicare card in my jeans pocket along with a photo ID in case some mishap befell me and I had to go to the Emergency Room. Also, of course, I pocketed my phone.

The battery in my car was dead beyond jumpstarting so I had to walk. It was misting rain when I set out. When I got within a few houses of the address, I was relieved to see that the area had undergone some restoration since I had last seen it. I made as quick and quiet a delivery to the mailbox as I could, and thankfully, returned home without arousing objection from either animal or human. Nor without slipping and falling on the wet sidewalks.

And the boys had their card in time for Christmas.

Wishing you comfort and joy — Anne Barone

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|| 11 December 2024

Does all the stuff we do to our faces make a difference?

Speaking for myself, it does.

I was not purposely running a test. But since for the past couple of months because I was trying to devote every available second I could to working on the new book — and because I was having several health problems: a cough that still has not gone away, an eye infection, ear problems — and because in addition to not feeling well, I thought some of the products I regularly used for skin care were possibly causing irritation or slowing the healing of my health problems, for all practical purposes I stopped doing more than cleaning my face night and morning and applying minimal makeup. Some days I did not even put on eyeliner — without which I look, as my grandmother would say, “like dead warmed over.”

The peels, the retinol, the DMAE serum that works against sagging, the night eye firming serum, the Frownie patches and such, all this I dispensed with. And it didn’t take long before I began seeing wrinkles. Wrinkles! Plus sags.

Oh, dear. I was looking AGED!

So the answer to the question: “Does all the stuff we do to our faces make a difference?” is that on my face it definitely does. And as soon as I finish the book cover and get this book off to the printers, it is back to my regular skin care routine.

Now it is back to work on the book cover.

be chic, be slim — Anne Barone

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|| 28 November 2024

Happy Thanksgiving 2024

Recently I shared information about a German butcher making and selling a raccoon sausage.

Since today is Thanksgiving, I will share with you that in 1926, Mississippi supporters of the then-president Calvin Coolidge sent him a live raccoon for the White House Thanksgiving dinner. But the Coolidges were Northerners, both born in Vermont, and preferred turkey for Thanksgiving. So First Lady Grace Coolidge named the raccoon Rebecca and made it a family pet.

We are accustomed to the annual ritual of the presidential pardon of the Thanksgiving turkey. But 98 years ago, the US president pardoned the raccoon. And ate the turkey.

Happy Thanksgiving — Anne Barone

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|| 7 November 2024

The Sausage Solution

If I am not totally rid of raccoons, I seem to have the situation under control. Though I have not yet opened the garage door this morning to look inside. But I have only seen one raccoon this past week. That’s a good sign. Susan in Hamilton sent a clipping about some poor woman in Washington state who one day woke up to find almost a hundred raccoons on her property. Nightmare.

In the meantime, our Chic & Slim Special Correspondent Kat sent a link to an article in The Times UK that reported on a solution one German butcher had found for the overpopulation of raccoons in his country: raccoon sausage. And I believe he also makes a sort of paté.

When I asked my son who hunts if anyone hunted raccoons for food in the USA, he said generally not because especially in the eastern part of the country there is much rabies in the raccoon population. (Germany, like most of Europe and the UK, has been rabies-free for a number of years.)

The Times UK requires a subscription (or a friend who emails a link) to read articles. But if you have a subscription, you can read the raccoon sausage article.

Yahoo News (no subscription required but a plague of advertisements. Use an ad blocker) offers an article on the raccoon sausage with a video.

Much thanks to Susan and Kat for the information.

This wretched time change. My struggle to adjust my body clock seems particularly difficult this year. As a consequence I am unusually grumpy. Ask the cat. It usually takes about two weeks for my body clock reset and those are not a pleasant interlude. When so many doctors report stress to body and brain from the time change, why do we continue with this madness?

be chic, stay slim — Anne Barone

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