No longer Large, and rarely in charge...

For those of you who have never met me, I'm approximately 6'2” tall, and currently weigh about 168 pounds. For all of my (reasonably) adult life, I've been a “Large”. If I needed a T-shirt, or a coat, or a sweatshirt, I was always a Large.

My consistent largeness provided comfort as I navigated the often turbulent waters of life.

But recently, things have changed. America has - and I'm sure I'm not telling you anything new, unless you've been living in a cave for the past 10 years (presumably a cave with a nice 100 MBit network, a cable modem, and a kickin' gaming system), you've probably noticed that America has been getting fatter. Not the country, which at my last measurement, was just a bit under 1000 leagues wide, but the people.

For a while, this was no issue, but clothing manufacturers have started to adjust their sizes upwards, which means that Large isn't the Large that I have grown to love. But, of couse, all of them haven't done it, so now I sometimes end up with a large, and sometimes with a medium. Not that bad if you can try them on ahead of time, but for TechEd I got two Large shirts - you have to order large because if medium is too small, you're SOL - and I swim in them a bit. I guess I could wear 10 or 12 T shirts underneath to fill it out a bit, but that hardly seems practical.

Argh.