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Yvonne,
Happy Surgiversary! You look great and are doing great.
I have a couple of green tomatoes left over from the green tomato relish that I made so maybe I will fry those suckers up; I love them.
Enjoy the musical festival.
Today marks my 2 year surgiversary. I've come a long way.
Today is our 2nd day of the music festival that we're attending. There were some good acts yesterday. Hope today is good but I don't know any of the singers until I hear their music. I'm not good with names of groups. That was like yesterday until I heard them sing certain songs, I'm like I know them.
B, eggs, ham and shredded cheese
L cottage cheese and watermelon
D chicken breast and fried green tomatoes
I'll probably have a snack later but I don't know what yet.
Everyone have a good day.
So...what's up?
I have spent the morning reading.
B: egg, toast
Snack: cheese
Lunch: Tomato sandwich
Dinner: soup...
snack: watermelon
My journalism journey, Part 7
More in Montana
I've spent a lot of time in Montana because I had a lot of fond memories there. There were many interesting people and places there. Even though I had to leave my family and friends, I made new connections, new family and friends. I've always said I have made sisters and brothers from other mothers and fathers.
And I covered many interesting stories. One of the saddest stories involved Tim "Sox" Sullivan. He was a police officer for the Anaconda-Deer Lodge County police department, but was also involved with the local Little League. And because of both of those, I got to know him well.
Sullivan was a big burly guy, with a big shock of white hair. I can't remember ever seeing him with a serious look on his face. Wally said he wasn't really the best police officer but he was a really good person. I guess that says a lot.
I also decided one year to take a trip to Seattle to see the White Sox play the Seattle Mariners. Sullivan's wife was taking a nursing course at the University of Washington, so he asked if he could come along, and he'd split expenses with me. We had hoped to make it over there in one day, but we left late the first day and wound up staying overnight in some cheap motel (separate rooms, of course). Along the way, we talked a lot and got to know each other well.
As we were leaving Missoula, there is a big downhill. I forget to take my foot off the gas and I was going much faster than 55 mph (although most drivers in Montana at that time went faster than 55). Suddenly, I saw the police lights in my rear view mirrors and pulled over. Sullivan was chuckling. The highway patrol officer said I was going 65. "Oh, really, Officer? I'm sorry. I wasn't aware." I was shaking, I was so upset. Sullivan flashed his badge and asked if he could get up and stretch his legs while the ticket was being processed.
I thought I was really going to get hit. He hands me the ticket and says it's a $5 "waste of natural resources" fine. I could pay him there. Well, why not? I gave him the $5 and we went on our way. Sullivan laughed for some time after that. He said he was going to tell everyone in the police department I got caught speeding.
We got to Seattle and I dropped him off where his wife was staying and I checked into my motel and figured out where the ballpark was. He was going to go back with his wife, so that was the end of our trip together.
Several years later, there was an extremely busy week at work. On Wednesday, I went up with a bunch of people from Anaconda to the state capitol in Helena. They were lobbying to get the iconic smokestack named a state landmark. I was starting to get a cold at the time, and by the time the day was over, it was full blown.
Friday, I was really miserable, but we had a paper to put out, so I went through everything I needed to do to finish out the paper, then went home, took some cold medicines and went to bed early. Sometime about 10 p.m. or so, my editor Wally called and said there was a big fire in town, just a couple blocks from me. I was pretty sleepy and drugged from the medicines. I said, "Really?" and went back to bed.
Wally was pretty miffed at me the next day that I didn't go out and shoot the fire, but I was sick and not coherent when he called. So he asked me to shoot the aftermath of the fire on Saturday. It took out some fairly old buildings on Main Street.
Sunday night, I had just taken a bath and washed my hair. It was in February, I believe, and cold. Wally called again sometime around 9 p.m. and said there was chatter on the scanner about a domestic situation with a hostage situation and a police shooting. He told me to go find out where it was. He figured since I lived in town, and he was on the outskirts of town, it was easier for me to get out there.
But there wasn't an address given. I called the police and they wouldn't divulge the address. So what's a reporter to do? Well, I dried my hair, got dressed and went to the courthouse. I sat there for awhile and waited for a police car to leave, then followed it to the scene.
Wally was already there; they were bringing a body bag out. "It's Sox," he said.
Apparently, a man had gone after his estranged wife, locked his kids in another room downstairs, was raping his wife when Sox came down the stairs. So he shot and killed Sox, finished raping his wife, killed her, killed himself and left the kids alone. Sox, in a way, saved those kids.
The Anaconda-Deer Lodge police department didn't deal with a lot of officer deaths. To lose a beloved guy like Sox was a blow. The funeral was held in the high school gym. It was packed. He had coached many youngsters in Little League baseball. Everyone had been touched by him in some way.
A few years later, his youngest son, Patrick, was involved in a horrible car accident. The car was on fire and he barely escape alive. He had serious burns. The family had another terrible tragedy to deal with.
I think of stories like this many years later and try to remember all the details. I can't remember everything, but what I do remember are the faces of the people, the sadness, and the way the community responded to the event and pulled together for the Sullivan family. I often wondered what happened to them many years later.
Hi All...
I'm going to card class, then to Tracy to return an item to Michaels. Nothing much tonight. Hope all is well.
Breakfast: protein drink
Lunch: cheese, pretzel, cranberries
Dinner: thinking about potatoe soup like Jeannie. I have some veggies from the garden so I might throw those in.
Snacks: nuts, cheese, cranberries, beef jerky
Julia
I met my granddaughter's teacher last night. Turns out, her husband is a good friend of my son. While I was in the valley, my daughter loaded me up with apples from an old wild apple tree on our farm. The damn tree ha**** and missed with producing much fruit but apparently, this year, the damn thing went nuts. I already had a bag of granny smith's that I was going to have to do something with but then I come home with four large sacks of apples. I made a ton of sugar free applesauce last night and this morning, I'm making apple butter. If I have apples left, I'll dehydrate them.
Breakfast today was an egg and piece of toast with a little butter.
I have cucumbers ready for snacking.
Lunch probably beans
Dinner I am making potato soup.
Ladies, talk away.
My journalism journey part 6
Montana was glorious; living at 4,300 feet took awhile for my body to adjust. Anaconda was in a valley and every time a cloud came over, we got a little rain or snow, depending on the season. I loved the scenery. But I was a little lonely at first. The dog, Sox, ran away and so my editor's wife, Margie Mundstock, offered me one of their kittens. She had two momma cats living outdoors that each had a litter of eight kittens. My editor was frustrated with the kittens digging in his garden and threatened to take them to the creek (which he pronounced "crick") and drown. So to save the poor creature, I offered to take a pair. I had never like cats; my dad didn't like cats and the only cat I ever knew was my friend Libby Rich's cat Midnight, who nipped at me once (I'm sure I deserved it, in hindsight).
One afternoon, I went over to play with the kittens and pick out a pair. The poor babies were a bit shy. There was a little girl next door who liked to take the kittens up on the deck and drop them to see if they'd land on their feet. Years later, when I was taking photos of a girls' basketball game, I met her. She asked me to take her photo. I told her I didn't take photos of children who terrorized kittens. She said she didn't like cats; I said I didn't like children who were mean to animals and wouldn't take her photo. So there!
I settled on a pair of male kittens. One was a gray tabby with green eyes that I named Kittle after my favorite Chicago White Sox player at the time, Ron Kittle. The other was a gray tabby with a white chest and green eyes that I named Carlton, after the White Sox catcher, Carlton Fisk. Both were playful and frisky and I thought would be a good pair to take home. Margie said to come back in a week and the kittens would be ready to take home.
So I came back in about a week one afternoon; no one was home. So I played with the kittens in the yard. Carlton didn't want to come to me. Kittle did, as did a little shy black kitten whose fur was tinged with a reddish hue. I played with a piece of grass with him. He was friendly; I called him Cinnamon because of his coloring. He also had fangs hanging out of his mouth. I decided I was going to take him instead.
When I saw Margie again in the office, I told her of my decision. She said she had taken some of the kittens to the vet to be euthanized. She wasn't sure if the black kitten was in the batch. When I came to take the kittens, we couldn't find Cinnamon, but finally caught him and Kittle. I took the kittens home and they immediately hid. When Cinnamon came out, he clung to my neck and purred. Kittle played a while, then came on my lap and stole my pen while I was interviewing someone. Kittle was a character and never shy. He was always in trouble.
Cinnamon was a little shy. I could tell he had been terrorized by the little girl next door. When I picked him up, he was afraid I was going to throw him down. But he and Kittle came into my bed immediately. And I started sneezing and coughing. I thought for sure I was allergic. So I got tested. Turns out I wasn't allergic to cats but to dogs. Go figure. I lived with a dog most of my life (we had a dog named Lady Louise II, then my sister had Lady III), but I was allergic to them, not to the cats I had just adopted. I just had a bunch of other allergies to the rest of the world: trees, molds, pollens, grasses, etc. But the cats, they were OK.
The two little guys settled into my life and curled up in my heart. I didn't know how to react to them, but I quickly learned. You didn't hit cats; you lightly tapped them on their nose to discipline them, as their mom would. The kittens taught me a lot, too, just about how to handle them.
As they grew up, they delighted me with their antics. One day, I came home for lunch and was greeted at the door by Cinnamon, who had a little package in his mouth from a rattan sleigh. The two kittens had picked apart everything in the Christmas decoration and were playing with the packages in the clawfoot bathtub. I was angry but I had to laugh. He was so cute.
One day, Cinnamon wasn't eating or drinking. He was lethargic. I didn't know what was going on. I took him to the vet, who thought he either had feline leukemia, kidney disease or a blockage. As the cat lay on the steel exam table, looking scared and skinny, I said, "Doctor you have to save him, I love him." Cinnamon looked up at me with his big green eyes as if to say, "I didn't know that!"
It turned out he had swallowed a metal bracket from my stereo stand (no wonder it didn't stand straight; he had taken it off). On the X-ray, the piece looked like an "M". Wally said, "Don't you know, we brand all our cats with an 'M'?"
Dr. Dave, the vet, lived next door to me, it turns out, and after removing the piece, came over and told me Cinnamon was fine but asked if he could keep the bracket for his collection. When Cinnamon came home a couple days later, his tummy bare and stitches in the middle, he was a different cat. He wasn't afraid of me anymore. He jumped into my arms when I came home at night. He curled up next to me in bed and put his paws around my neck and purred.
He knew I loved him and I would never hurt him. And somehow, I had learned to love a cat; well, two.
Over the years, I would be owned by other cats: Bootsie (known as the ***** for her attitude), Bonnie, a Siamese; Maggie, a white kitten who was given to me by a couple I interviewed for a story (the kitten climbed on my camera bag and started licking my fingers); Scooter, who came into my life after Kittle died; Diva and Nettie, who came into my life after Cinnamon died; and now Juliette, who was adopted in Louisiana after Scooter died. They all hold a place in my heart and came along the road in my life.
I get really hungry at night...and if/when I ignore it, I often wake up at 2 or 3 am starving with my BS crashing... I am at goal - so there is not much "extra" for my body to get from - so the system freaks out.
Plus - I have adrenal insufficiency - and i take daily cortisone supplements - but I only take it during the day... We need cortisone to regulate blood sugar. (BS) my body allows my BS to drop really low - resulting in crisis before my body gets into "a panic mode" and ..overreacts with cortisone and adrenaline to correct dangerously low BS(in 30's)
so... I eat before bed... - mostly nuts or nut butters (they don't give me to bad of sour stomach)
but since i eat late at night and food just sits there - when I wake up in the morning - I am often not hungry - so I start my day with lunch... making sure i drink a lot of non caloric liquids in the morning.
i try to have a 14 hour window of not eating - that works best for my gut and my IBS...
i think eating late is OK - as long as we take into account the calories and still give out guts a break time...
I snack on nuts and seeds (sprouted almonds, brazil nuts, macadamia, sunflower seeds) ..and peanuts...
lately my gut tolerates raw carrots (it only took me 8 years) - so I incorporate that as my snack. Raw carrots a re great with PB or Almond butter...
Hala. RNY 5/14/2008; Happy At Goal =HAG
"I can eat or do anything I want to - as long as I am willing to deal with the consequences"
"Failure is not falling down, It is not getting up once you fell... So pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again...."
Okay, here's the way I started my self analysis. It's not perfect but it's a way to start your own assessment.
Back when I had gained some weight (20 pounds), I began looking at the cause. Mostly what I found was that when we have WLS, we have that "honeymoon" phase where we lose weight with little effort. Most of us can lose weight while we sleep because we are have the rerouted intestine that doesn't absorb as much, the newly constructed pouch that is still sensitive to amounts of foods that we eat, and our larger than life sizes makes weight loss easy. Because we have these factors that are pretty much a guarantee for success, we don't do much toward behavior modification nor do we work on those things that cause us to snack on the wrong foods.
Most doctors agree that after the first year, our rerouted small intestine evolves a bit so that it can absorb a little more efficiently but that alone will not cause a significant weight gain. They also agree that over the first year, most of us push the limits so that our pouches begin to lose their sensitivity to certain kinds of foods like greasy or sugary foods; unfortunately, most of us are never cured of our messed up minds about food so we do try to work the pouch to get some of our cravings met. For instance, I go nuts for chips and crackers. I can eat a ton of those kinds of foods because they slide or glide right through my pouch. Some folks keep testing the pouch for sugar, and over time and exposure, they are able to eat a little sugar. Once we have lost that sensitivity to certain foods or amounts of foods, and once our intestine begins to absorb a little more efficiently, it's only natural that our deflated fat cells will do what they do best and that is store the fat.
So, how in the hell can we keep the weight loss pace up until we lose the amount we want to lose? More importantly, how can we maintain our weight loss? I've thought about this and researched the topic over and over. I've learned about stress and how to rid my life of stress and for the stress I cannot kick to the curb, I've learned techniques for eliminating the reactions to stress. But, what I wanted to do was look at me and analyze when I most often went for the chips and figure out was it hunger, boredom, emotional, or all of the above.
I've done my eating behavior analysis and if you guys want to work on what sets you off on an eating frenzy, you can spend a week journaling and analyze your behaviors. I know....I hate doing that too but I think when we examine what and when and where we eat, we can make some educated assumptions about the reasons we are eating and maybe work out a plan that will help us handle the situations that cause us to eat and more importantly what makes us go after the bad foods.
When I did mine, I broke my journaling into my plan for the day that I write a day or two in advance. I leave space for comment sections after each eating event. I thought evaluating the meal's success, how much I ate, what was good or bad about it...that kind of thing. I realized that I need to measure food...and I need to eat it. At the end, I had a summary section that would provide some added information. I've copied a section below out of my journal so you can use as your own model but by all means, if you have some ideas for a better format, please share.
July 15, 2016
Dietary Plan:
Breakfast: Loaded oatmeal (nuts and berries)
Comment--I am going to start measuring my oatmeal. I cannot eat a lot of oatmeal because it is dense but I do put butter on it and nuts and berries. If I eat 3/4th cup of oatmeal, 1 tsp of butter, 1/8th cup of nuts, and ½ cup of berries, it is good but if I throw more butter on it and add extra nuts and berries, I can load the oatmeal with more than healthy nutrients. I use Splenda so that part is covered.
Snack: Celery and Bell Peppers
Comment--the good thing about eating raw vegetables is that they give me the crunch factor. I really need to chew.
Lunch: Avocado and tomato sandwich
Comment--I rarely eat my entire sandwich and as a result, an hour after I eat, I start looking for something to eat and usually find crackers. Today, I ate six large crackers. That is not good.
Snack: Cucumbers--and I ate the cucumbers too. Damn it
Dinner: Shrimp stir fry (four large shrimp with broccoli, carrots, and peas) No rice, no pasta.
Comment--the shrimp is good and I know I need the protein so I ate the shrimp first then I ate the vegetables. Here's the deal...I start getting really hungry about an hour before bedtime. I mean I really want to eat some chips. Tonight, I ate some cheese, tomato, and a slice of bread. WTF
Snack: Watermelon and I ate the watermelon
Summary:
Here's the deal, I am eating the crackers for no reason...I am not hungry when I run for the crackers. I swear it's not hunger. I looked at my activities and there wasn't anything stressing me out and it's not emotional because all day today, I've been happy. I am excited about my upcoming retirement and we are excited about the upcoming vacation. My daughter and I are getting along and Kenny and I are also doing good. I am not sad or depressed....so it must be boredom. Now here's the deal....I am working and am always busy when I am working so how am I bored. I talked to a friend of mine about this and she suggested that I watch the time...you know, is it happening at 2 or 2:30....and she said to beat the urge by drinking water. A lot of water so I'm going to try it. The eating before bed is boredom, I know. I rarely have that time when I am not working or thinking so right before bed, I find myself lost....I feel like I am supposed to be doing something.
My plan to alleviate the hunger right before bedtime: I will keep a sewing project close like needle point or crocheting or I will keep a book handy and when I feel the urge to gobble up some crackers, I will reach for the hooks or the books....and I will also drink the water...could my cravings have something to do with my lack of water consumption?
Tomorrow, I will time my water drinking and see if I still get those urges.
Ladies,
I am starting the thread but am going to run for coffee. Please feel free to chat away. When I get back from the coffee pot, I'm going to talk about some issues that I think we are all struggling with. Until I get back, rap away.
