I am not afraid of heights, but I am afraid of widths.

Yup, this is a fat girl story.  I’ve been up and down in my weight, more up lately than down. And entering into a recession is not a good time to be fat. First, if you lose your job you’ll be home all day snacking. Then when you go on a job interview looking like Kirstie Alley (after she got fired by NutriSystems), it’s a ding against you.

So while I hold onto my job at Motorola by the skin of my teeth, I hope, I hired a trainer and went on a prepared meals diet program.  All told, it’s costing me $2000 per month.  Which is $1000 more than I can afford. But I think it’s an important investment. So I had to find a good source of the additional money – this is a three month program, and it’s already working – so I went on the Internet and found Vernon Hills Title Loans.  I’m borrowing against my Cherokee, which is paid off now, and I’ll pay it off by the time I’m down to 135 pounds.

And I promise not to celebrate by ordering a Deerfield cake.

By the way Vernon Hills is near Buffalo Grove, Indian Creek, Libertyville, Lincolnshire, and Mundelein.

I made a list of things I do that annoy even myself:

1. I sing along with the elevator music.
2. I would rather go to work than stay home sick.
3. I constantly talk about the price of gasoline.
4. I enjoy hearing about other people’s operations.
5. I consider coffee one of the most important things in life.

Another thing is I can’t stand is having credit card debt hanging over my head. It happens – God knows, emergencies come up and you have to get out that plastic – but fall behind on those charges and you get slapped with really high interest rates. Like 28%! So to manage down my credit cards, and keep payments made in time to bring down those rates, I took out a car title loan from Lincolnshire Title Loans. It was a lower interest rate, so I was actually doing a smart thing. I thought car title loans were something for people with really desperate problems, but in fact that’s not always the case. A car title loan is a financing option – something grown ups do when they need to manage their money.

Of course, that doesn’t stop me from singing on elevators. And why should I?

By the way Lincolnshire is near Wheeling, Buffalo Grove, Riverwoods, Vernon Hills, and Deerfield.

Because I’m a man, when I lock my keys in the car I will fiddle with a wire clothes hanger and ignore my girlfriend’s suggestions that we call a road service until long after hypothermia has set in.

And because I’m a man, I held onto that “flip” property I bought in Waukegan, holding out for a better price back in late 2007, not realizing the market would crash and I’d be holding this over-renovated gem that I’m now renting out at a $600 loss per month. And because of that, I wasn’t able to afford to fix the Infinity when all the brakes needed replacing and my credit cards were maxed out.

But because I’m a man, I don’t cry. I don’t give up. I don’t give in to loser thinking. I took to the wires, the Internet, to find the solution to this little problem (getting my car working enough that I could continue driving to my job in Glenview without having to carpool with Clay, that annoying guy in HR who lives west of the 94).

That’s where this man, this person of honor and integrity and creative problem solving, found Lake Bluff Title Loans, a car title loan company that allows me to use my car’s value to pay for car repairs. (You can use car title loans for anything, but in my case it was the car itself.)

A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

By the way, Lake Bluff is near North Chicago, Park City, Libertyville, Lincolnshire, and Lake Forest.