nanooktx

thanks Tiffy and Tracy, i appreciate the responses, i may just have to bite the bullet and get some help with the mowing, my oldest is only 7, so i can't see me putting him on the mower...i don't think he even weighs enough to keep the seats safety switch engaged. :smile: although, knowing my tenacious boys, they'd try! as for the hurricanes i was worried about calories and Water, but it appears that we'll have take more shorter breaks...i don't think anyone will complain about that. as for picking up weight, i guess i'll burn that bridge when i get there. i'm definitely not going to work to the point of hurting myself. personally, i could do without a hurricane for at least 5, maybe 10 more years. Tiffy, I love your new avatar, you look great!

I was wondering what folks do nutritionally when they go through a period of increased activity? For example, I live in SE Texas and we get hurricanes. my family and I live pretty far out in the country and our land borders my parents land, giving us about 10 acres to tend to. so whatever damages we have are handled by us. After Hurricane Ike, we had around 7 trees down around the houses and another 20 or so down in the my back acres. Of course we had to clear the trees up around the house ASAP just so we could get off the land and onto the highway. looking back at this and applying it to the future, how am i going to be able to handle a 24-30 inch chainsaw for extended time and lifting logs that weigh a couple of hundred pounds? we lost a hickory that was 36 inches across and at least 150 years old! most of the wood we move is by hand and loaded onto pickups/lowboys. sometimes we split the logs on site other times we wait until winter to split them at the woodshed. With two of us working 12 or so hours a day, we ended up drinking at least a couple of gallons of Water a day, eating around 5 meals a day of military rations, sandwiches, and snack food. we drank very little in the way of sweet drinks. With all the hard work, i managed to lose about 20 pounds over the 15 days we had no electricity. we like to call it, "the chainsaw workout" one of my concerns is considering this, how should i eat and drink when i get the sleeve for these periods of intense manual labor? another question that i've been running through my mind is, is when i can i start mowing after surgery? i have a Zero Turn mower, so when we mow, it's about 5-7 hours on rough ground 2 to 4 times a month. if i have my surgery this summer, i don't want to saddle my dad with all the work, so i need to take the seasons in consideration for this as well. if it's just a couple of weeks before i can mow, then that's not a big deal, but if it's a month or months, then i have some more planning to do. also, i'm in the beginning stages of getting the sleeve from the Christus Bariatric center in Beaumont, TX, are there many folks out there that have experience with this facility? as a whole, how are they? i apologize for the long post, but i want to get my surgery done as soon as possible, but i don't want to add any work on anyone else. thanks for hanging with me, Chris