It’s possible I’m having some trouble with the concept of blogging in that I’m guessing that if you have a blog, you should actually blog. I have some good excuses for my lack of updates.

I have this thing called a job. They want me to work everyday, everyday and everyday. Sometimes my head hurts and – guess what – they still want me to work.

Since I blogged last my world has been filled with two giant projects. Like Rush Limbaugh at a poetry reading, I’ve had trouble ignoring these projects and pretending I’m having a normal life.

The first thing I’ve been trying to do is “kill the beast.” I am supposed to write and edit a grown-up magazine I call “the beast.” I call it the beast because it stalks me, makes my life a living nightmare and never is completely finished. Just when I think it is done, someone comes by with new ideas to improve it. This is all complicated by the fact that I have to do humorless writing in the beast that includes sentences with subjects and verbs and commas in the right places.

The other night I dreamt that 95 percent of the students and faculty at USU had turned into flesh-eating zombies. While I was a little concerned about the prospect of having someone attack me while walking across campus, I was mostly peeved that I’d have to rearrange the magazine again to make room for a story about the zombie outbreak. I was also afraid of offending the administrators and alumni who were already zombies.

And that’s just what my life has been like if I can sleep.

The other big development is that Stephen Covey has come into my life. He didn’t come in the form of new insights from one of his many books, as he always has in the past. He accepted our invitation to become a professor at the Huntsman School of Business, which was a big deal that required a big announcement. Whenever PR people do a big announcement, they create all these materials and then send them around to each other making changes in them until minutes before the big event begins. We prepare large press packets, chock full of approved verbiage, for the press and feel quite good about ourselves if they don’t throw them away before they leave the event.

I also got a chance to interview Dr. Covey in his home, which to me was a wondrous and frightening thing. It turns out he has a real life with nine kids and 51 grandchildren and he loves them way more than anything else. He’s all centered on the right things, which means that he has no problem meeting presidents and all sorts of important people who, it turns out, all want to meet him.

I managed to spend an hour and a half with him at his home and afterward he still wanted to be associated with our business school.

Excuse me, do I get any credit for acting like a grownup for so long? No.

A little bit of me leaked out during the encounter. I told him the story of me trying to take credit for the name of his famous book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I have said that back in the olden days when I was at BYU and he was my professor, he came to me with the proposed name of a book, Two Things You Should Never Do. I have tried to convince some people on his staff that I was the one who gently suggested that he call his book, instead, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Dr. Covey laughed at my alternative universe story, which is a good thing.

Dr. Covey has quite the sense of humor and a laugh that is truly infectious. He’s also a practical joker. I’ve put some stories about this side of him in my magazine but they may not be in there when the magazine is eventually printed. Magazines like this have to be reviewed, filtered and analyzed by a lot of people. Humor just sort of leaks out in the process like a cup with a hole in it on the side that sprays your shirt without you noticing it. Not that that has ever happened to me.

The remarkable thing about all of this is that while I did this I continued to push ahead in my Biggest Loser contest and when it finally came to an end last week I was still not the biggest loser at USU. I took second place overall. I have lost 34.4 pounds. For those of you unfamiliar with weight loss, 34.4 pounds is past 30 pounds and 30 pounds is the average weight of what I used to eat on a Friday night. I have been trying to lose 30 pounds since I was two months old and learned, through the use of colorful charts my parents held over my broken bed, that I was overweight.

I’m going to keep losing weight until I am no longer a fat guy and then I’m going to continue until I become a small tiny guy, like a plastic army-man guy and I’m going to go on Jay Leno or get a part in “Toy Story V.” I’m also going to kill the beast and, I suspect, I will soon become best friends with Dr. Covey. I have offered to let him use my office and the hope that he’ll take me up on the offer has given me a new reason to come to work.

I’d get all tired and discouraged and he’d say, “Be proactive!” and “Synergize!” and I would and we’d become such good friends.

(Cut to scene with Dr. Stephen Covey and Not-Doctor Steve Eaton running down the beach, laughing, in slow motion. A huge wave hits and my small plastic body washes away as my tiny voice screams out, “Save me! Save me!” And of course he does just seconds before the staggering zombies arrive and …)

Okay, okay, I’m still dreaming. Laugh if you must but when you see the international best-seller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Beast Killers in your local bookstore; look for my picture on the cover. I’ll be the tiny one in green and the only one holding a plastic rifle.