Carlene

Wasn't it? I'd rather go driving with Ted Kennedy than hunt with Dick Cheney. I know how to swim.

:clap2: Congrats, Best Me!!!!!!!!! You are sooooooooooo right. It feels so good not to have that monkey on your back any more. It feels every bit as good as losing 97 pounds! (Smoke free for 11 years next month.)

Nope....wouldn't like it at all. We drink wine. More people should drink wine in church, if you ask me.

Why do you (and others) assume that fundamentalists are "nutheads" or "weird religious people"? I'm Catholic....I think Baptists are a little strange. What's wrong with dancing, for heaven's sake? And those little Shirley Temple curls that (orthodox) Jewish men wear? What's that about? And having your Rabbi perform your son's circumsision....wow! Church of Christ...now there's an odd group. They don't allow music in their worship services. Singing, yes - music, no. Most music sounds way better than my singing, by the way. Be glad that I don't belong to your church.

Compare major gift cards. The "big guns" - American Express, Master Card, Discover, and Visa - all have fees attached. With so many other options, I will only consider giving "no fee" cards. Issuer Type Free ship? Fees? Expire? costcoElectronic N/A No No food Lion, Delhaize America Plastic Yes Yes No GapPlastic Yes No No Giant Food, AholdPlastic Yes No No Giant Food Stores, AholdPlastic No No No Hannaford, Delhaize America Plastic Yes Yes No Harvey's, Delhaize America Plastic No No No Home Depot Plastic Yes No No HomeGoods, TJX Plastic Yes No No J.C. PenneyElectronic N/A No No J.C. PenneyPlastic Yes No No Kash n' Karry, Delhaize America Plastic Yes Yes No Kohl'sElectronic N/A No No Kohl'sPlastic Yes No No KrogerPlastic No No No Lowe'sPlastic Yes No No Macy's, Federated Dept. StoresElectronic N/A No No Macy's, Federated Dept. Stores Plastic Yes No Yes Marshall's, TJX Plastic Yes No No Martin's Food Markets, AholdPlastic No No No MasterCardElectronic No Yes Yes MeijerPlastic Yes Yes No Office Depot Plastic Yes No No PublixPlastic Yes No No Rite AidPlastic No No No SafewayPlastic No No No SearsPlastic Yes No No StaplesPlastic No No No Stop & Shop, AholdPlastic Yes No No Sweetbay, Delhaize AmericaPlastic Yes Yes No TargetElectronic N/A No Yes TargetPlastic No No Yes TJ Maxx, TJX Plastic Yes No No Tops Markets, AholdPlastic No No No VisaPlastic No Yes Yes WalgreensPlastic Yes Yes No Wal-MartElectronic N/A No No Wal-MartPlastic No No No

Oh, honey.....EVERYONE needs "the country sound". It is God's gift to music!

Good call. My MIL was originally going to move into an assisted living place in W VA, where she lived, where all her friends are, but she has too much money to qualify for the low-income subsidy. So she refused. Because she didn't want to pay full freight. She has more money than she will ever spend (she's almost 87), but NOTHING is more important to her than hanging onto it. So her two "boys" can spend it, I guess. I told her one time that that was the wrong thing to do because Mary (my SIL) and I will start spending it as soon as she dies. You should have seen her face! I thought she was going to self-destruct right before my eyes!

My point exactly. I share the cost for services I don't use (my local rec center, for example, and the dog park and the Holiday thing going on as we speak, and the public swimming pools, etc). Young people pick up the tab for the senior citizens' center (I don't go there, either, but I'm constantly trying to get my mother-in-law interested), old people still pay school taxes. Once we start nit-picking how one group uses more public resources than another, there will be no logical stopping point. We have to allow other people to live as they choose - not as we would have them live. When we moved from the country in 1977 to a suburb of Ft Worth, a crotchety old neighbor told my four year-old that there was a law against having more than 3 animals (we had 4 - two dogs and two cats). Christa asked me if this was true. "I don't know", I said. "But what if they have a law like that against children?" (We had 4 children, too.) "Well", I said with my best straight face, "I guess one of you will just have to go live with Granny George." To a child who had lived her whole life in an area where there were few restraints on lifestyle, this seemed like a perfectly reasonable comparison. All my kids had a hard time understanding "city" rules. No go-cart riding on public streets. No Halloween bon fires (or trash burning) in the backyard. No horses. No pet raccoons. These are some of the things you trade for living in a metropolitan area, I know. In return you get professional firefighters and EMTs instead of Randy from the service station who volunteers part-time to put out fires and save lives, and you get proximity to the airport, and shopping malls, and better jobs. The thing is, we CHOSE to move. No one made us. I'm all for choices (most choices, anyway). I'm against making people limit their families to a size that someone else considers "reasonable". I'm against making people sell their homes if they don't want to. Who cares if the Dallas Cowboys want to build a new stadium and my house is sitting on the proposed 50 yard line? It's my house! It's already here! Go find yourself another place to build your ugly, traffic-clogging, over-rated stadium! I think the government already has too much authority over our lives. I'm against giving them one iota more.

The "welfare check" is pretty much a thing of the past. From the Dept of Health and Human Services web site... What is the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program (TANF)? TANF is a block grant program to help move recipients into work and turn welfare into a program of temporary assistance. Under the welfare reform legislation of 1996, TANF replaced the old welfare programs known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS) program and the Emergency Assistance (EA) program. The law ended federal entitlement to assistance and instead created TANF as a block grant that provides States and tribes federal funds each year. These funds cover benefits, administrative expenses, and services targeted to needy families.

You can eat cream puffs? I'm jealous.

So....would you outlaw multi-generational living as well as large families? In my household there are four people. The oldest was born in 1920 - the youngest in 1992. Seems pretty harsh to put an 86 year old woman and a 14 year old out on the street because they flush more than the neighbors. Yes....anything that skews the average can impact a lot of people, but this is AMERICA, where we deal with it. We don't legislate people into the norm. It's just not right. Same thing with eminent domain used to grab land to build shopping centers and athletic stadiums. It sucks!

I can eat half a slice of prime rib. I sometimes get nostalgic for charred animal flesh when I walk in the summer and smell the aroma from all the neighborhood grills. Mostly I've moved on, however. Same thing with bread. I love bread, but haven't had a slice of the stuff in two years. I tried half of a yeast roll this past Thanksgiving. Huge mistake. When your mind is lusting for a steak (or anything else you can't eat), just remember that it's only food. Do not give it the power to make you miserable. Do not make it more important than it really is. True hunger can be satisfied with a pickle. If the only thing that will make you "not hungry" is a piece of chocolate cake, then you aren't hungry. That's the thing that most of us don't realize - we have probably never felt real hunger!

I had all those same thoughts/feelings. I even tried to get my surgeon (who does all types of WLS) to choose for me! In the end, I chose the band. One of the things that helped me decide was the fact that my doctor is banded himself. I figured, if he had access to all the procedures, and the knowledge to choose the best one, there had to be a reason he picked the band. Another of my major concerns was Osteoporosis. It runs in my family. Malabsorption means you don't absorb all the food you eat OR vitamins, meds, etc. I discussed this with my PCP and he advised me that if I wanted to go the bypass or DS route I would need to switch to IV Boniva, instead of the pill. Plus, I am not good at taking pills every day or getting check-ups, and once your plumbing is rearranged , it is imperitive that you take the supplements, have regular blood work, etc. My final deciding factor was that my son had a neighbor - a young mother - who had bypass and died from complications about 3 months post-op. It was a real "it can happen to anyone" moment. There are certainly pros and cons to every WLS. You just have to weigh them for yourself (no pun intended) and choose the one that best "fits" you. A quick weight loss was never one of my considerations, however, and I think of all the possibilities, it should be at the bottom of the list. But that's just me.....maybe losing 100 pounds in six months sounds like a good thing to you. To me, it sounded unhealthy and a sure way to develop lots of saggy baggy skin.

My DH is retired from AA and we have time AND flight priviledges, so I fly a lot. I have never had any problems. As always, though, sometimes I can eat something and sometimes I can't. It isn't the altitude - it's the damn band!

I'm a Southerner and a Democrat. I don't like guns, especially handguns. I think blood sports are barbaric. When I see a deer driving a 4-wheel Jeep with a fat ass Republican strapped across the hood, THEN I'll consider it a "sport".

As long as they are responsible for them - feed them, clothing them, providing medical care, etc - I don't see how it is anyone else's business. It is no less eco-friendly than driving huge SUVs and putting your sprinkler system on "auto", so that it comes on even when it's raining outside. Remember that in the days when it was common to have 10 children, there was about 1000 times less pollution. That's because there was no plastic to sit in landfills for 500 years before it decomposed, no Pampers, no Zip Lock bags - no disposable anything. It isn't the number of people on the planet who are destroying it, it's our lifestyle.

Oh, definitely someone like Melanie Maine, of the Dixie Chicks. He he he he he....

Paige... Better to eat around the band with blended, healthy foods than ice cream, chips, chocolate, mashed potatoes, etc - which is what you've been doing, correct? My band is tight - sometimes very tight - and I eat a lot of soup. Nothing suceeds like success, so theory or no theory, I still think it's a good idea. I apologize in advance for sounding unsympathetic, but your posts make me think that you never believed the band would work for you. I think your band was doomed to fail from day one. If revision surgery is what you want, I certainly hope that's what you get. With the RNY, however, you will be right back in the same spot within 2 years. Your pouch will stretch, the dumping will have subsided (if indeed you ever dumped at all - about 1/3 of RNYers do not ever dump), and the weight will begin to creep back. Look at Carnie Wilson. She has really packed on the pounds since her bypass! DS gives the best chance of weight loss with absolutely no help from you - except you really need to take the supplements religiously. Of course, it's major surgery and cannot be reversed. People do suffer complications. And they die sometimes. Notice that on any Lap Band message board, there is one thing very conspicuously missing....a memorial thread.

I know....I had the same thought. But better Hollywood than Dollywood.

Today is my anniversary. The band and I have been married for two years now. Boy, how time flies when you are in love.....sometimes in love, that is. Sometimes not. Just like a real marriage. My band is not quite the wonderful, perfect angel I thought it was in the beginning. Reality has set in and I have to admit that the band is sometimes an evil, controlling, mind-game-playing SOB. But sometimes it's very sweet and gives me lots of warning and does not make me spew my dinner into the toilet before I even get a chance to raise the seat. It pretty much demands that I be faithful, though. Faithful to a diet without bread, pizza, Pasta, rice, cake, Cookies, fruit, and a bunch of other stuff. If I cheat, I pay for it. The band does not cut me much slack in that respect. Fortunately it doesn't hold a grudge, as I tend to cheat pretty regularly. On the up-side....my band makes me feel much more attractive than I felt before we were married. And sexier....definitely sexier. Men flirt with me now, even though I am old. I guess taste is a very subjective thing. Being married to the band has been a financial see-saw. I am a very cheap date these days, and I've saved a ton on groceries. Purchasing several new wardrobes has been pretty costly, though. I've breezed thru about 7 sizes in the last 24 months. It's very hard to find size 4 jeans that cover your belly button, by the way. So now my band and I hang out in thrift stores a lot. We can get jeans there that fit us. My daughter-in-law says that's because they have been hanging in people's closets so long that they are totally out of style, but we don't care. My band and I only need each other....we don't care what the makeover people on HGTV might say about our sense of fashion. There has been one really tense period. I gained 3 pounds recently and I knew it was 100% due to my other love - Cheetos. I've been forced to give up the Cheetos. And the band was NO HELP at all! No help and NO SYMPATHY! Evidently, I could have had them both but I tried it and found that I just wasn't comfortable with a threesome. I've heard that ice cream and the band can team up and be really seductive, too. So be careful if you're married to a band. The guilt is just AWFUL! Trust me....it's not worth it!

You should have said you were looking for a family to adopt, Wheets. You could have taken mine!

I'll give him a pass on Korea. He was about 4 years old when it started, and maybe in second grade when it ended.

You have to remember that I am a shade under 5 feet tall, so a size 4 isn't all that special. Eva Longoria wears a DOUBLE ZERO and I think she may be a little taller than I am. I read the other day that the girl who plays Izzie on Grey's Anatomy is a size 4-6 and she describes herself as "curvy". Yeah, right. She's like 5'7"...not much left to "curve", if you ask me.

From a story on MSNBC.... Southwest is not the only major airline with a large-seating policy. US Airways, Northwest Airlines and America West Airlines all can require an overweight passenger to pay for two seats but said they do everything they can to find a pair of empty adjoining seats on the plane at no additional charge. But other carriers, including United Airlines and Delta Air Lines, have no large-seating requirements. Hooters Air, an airline featuring slim, scantily-clad "Hooters girls" as flight entertainment, has no such policy, either.

Right on. It is no accident that families directly impacted by Vietnam are most likely to oppose the war in Iraq. President Bush just completed a state visit to Vietnam and I must say, the press coverage made me gag. That this man, who did everything but flee to Canada to avoid setting foot on Vietnamese soil, has the nerve to parade himself all over Hanoi now just makes my blood boil. He, of all people, should not be allowed to desecrate that ground made sacred by American blood. Vietnam is now a hot spot for tourism. Is that what all those young men died for? So they could build McDonald's 40 years later and pretend we have always been the best of friends? If you think the same thing won't happen in Iraq, just wait and see. And it won't take 40 years, either. In the long run, civil war is unwinnable by outside forces. Unless we drop an atomic bomb on Iraq and start all over, nothing will change - no matter how long we occupy their lousy, God-forsaken country. We are, and have long been, the most powerful, well-equipped military power in the world. But we lost in Vietnam....lost badly. To a bunch of rag-tag guerrilla fighters without proper training, decent armament, or air/naval support. Like the Iraqis, those people had nothing left to lose. They couldn't pull out and go home....that WAS their home. They would have fought until hell froze over....until there was not a single man, woman, or child left standing. The question now is...are we prepared to sacrifice another generation to a civil war in a foreign country? It's much, much easier to support the war in Iraq if you don't know anyone personally who died in Vietnam. Maybe right where they've built that new KFC. You could go visit. Have a Coke and a smile. And think about the 58,000 Americans who came home from their tour of Vietnam in a body bag.