green

Hahaha Green has always referred to him as Anal Roberts. I guess the Bible is right about wealth and Heaven, eh?

This is a very good point that you have made. A sad point but a good one. :cry

The problem is that the sheer numbers of illegals flooding the border states has distorted the economies and the infrastructures of these states. This is why it would be better for this problem to be solved. If, for instance, these illegals were made legal by being granted work permits then businessmen would be required to pay them what they must pay any other worker and the standard of living for the working class would not be dropping. Another approach would be for the federal government to work with the government of Mexico to fix the problem from inside Mexico by developing work initiatives and improving the infrastructure inside that country; indeed, the two go hand in hand. And for your state and local laws barring the employment of illegals to be strictly enforced. Mexico is a land with a lot of potential and we are presently seeing economic miracles occur in China and India. Why not Mexico?

Oh, I have great respect for you, Krystal, and for you, Purposedriven4. Keep on posting. I believe that posting here is important for both of you and it is important for those of us who are travelling with you. You oughta know that you have a gang of fans who know what you two are going through. Keeping up with the exercise routine and with your eating plan can be tough and there are times when you find yourself derailed for one reason or another. I haven't been to the gym for over a year even though I am paying for it! This has been due to a bunch of bad luck health wise and now I am afraid to go back. Stupid on my part, eh? You two do give me courage and I am sure that you give many other LBT readers courage, too, for the truth is that we all make mistakes, we all fall off the wagon, and we all end up feeling a lot of self-hatred as a result. But the two of you are honest and you are fighters, and that is very, very cool. Keep on posting and keep on fighting, grrls.

Though I have great sympathy for the illegal immigrants and, moreover, my political viewpoints are usually considered to be leftish, I am inclined to view this particular issue as one which is far too complicated for well-intentioned foreigners to be weighing in on. It is my understanding from the little which I have read in Canadian newspapers that since 2000 there has been something in the way of an explosion in the numbers of illegals currently living in the United States. One article stated that there has been an overall increase from 12 million to 40 million individuals within less than 7 years. A different article indicates that there is an estimated total of 12 million illegals but states that 4 million of these arrived after Bush became president. Both articles agree that the arrival of illegals, historically a problem, really snowballed after Bush was elected. These articles have also discussed the effect which the arrival of this mass of workers have had on the American economy. It seems it has driven down the standard of living of the American working class in real terms for businesses can get workers to work for less money and fewer benefits. Business owners benefit. Working folk lose out. The rift between the business and the working classes ends up by widening. Illegals tend to live in the southern states and these are often the least affluent states. One of the articles published in a Canadian newspaper noted that North Carolina paid an estimated $10-million to educate the children of illegals in 1995 and $210-million in 2005. While Canada has her own share of illegals the numbers are not of this magnitude. Of course these factoids which I have just noted are gathered from reading our newspapers up here in Canada and this information comes from our two more admittedly middle to right wing national newspapers. (Because I am such a natural lefty I only read centrist and rightist reportage, eh.) Nevertheless, it does strike me that the problem with which the United States is currently engaged is quite different from the humanitarian issues with which both Canada and Australia have chosen, and rightfully so, to deal. American is currently experiencing an uncontrolled flood of migrants and this has caused some considerable social and financial upheaval with respect to the country's infrastructure. The one class who is benefitting is that group who is taking advantage of the cheap labour. And the American government is doing nothing much about this issue. By this I am suggesting that at the local and state levels those laws controlling businessmen from employing illegals seem to be ineffective. And at the federal level the concept of building a big wall between the two countries is absolutely brainless! There should be on-going initiatives worked out between the two countries in order that Mexico be developed, upgraded and become a valuable working partner in the North American trading block. This is good planning, this is humane, and we must remember that we will need all the friends we can make for the next century is, global speaking, going to be a challenge, eh.

I am sorry that you have lost your mum and my thoughts are with you. My own mother died just over 2 years ago. It is very difficult to say good bye.

Yah, I agree. Losing weight is very, very complicated, and a lot of it hinges on weird physical/metabolic and genetic related issues. Weight is much more complex than a simple calories in = weight on equation. We all know people who can eat for six and yet remain thin and others who gain easily. The business of simple calories and the food groups from which you get them do play a role, however. I see people who have their shopping carts full of easy calories: soda and chips and stuff like that.

Someone could print out and mail this thread to the CEO of the company with a covering letter. There might be a response.

Hey, Senor Yoda, you are making wonderful progress!! Congratulations, eh!

Hah! Re the latest weight loss, I think that much of that is due to a bowel problem I picked up in Mexico and still have. The problem showed up a few days after I came home which was over a month ago now. I went into denial about it when my doctor said that she wasn't going to prescribe me any meds until she knew what was causing it. This meant that I would have do something so utterly repellent to me that I just couldn't bring myself do it and that was to harvest my own poop. Indeed I have the kit sitting here still unopened. I figured that I would wait it out and live on Immodium. Well, it has been a horrible 5 weeks and during that time I got a cold which also wouldn't go away but turned into a lung infection. I have been feeling very lousy, using up a lot of paper products - my sinuses have been in overdrive as well - and living on Immodium, Cough & Cold syrup with codiene, and Gravol for the feelings of nausea which I have also had. I haven't had much of an appetite and anything I do eat doesn't stick around for long enough to do any damage. I think that this is how I lost those 15 lbs, girls! Anyhow, I finally saw my doc. I have to have an ultrasound of my liver. I had a breathing test which I flunked and now I am on two different ventilators. I had a bunch of blood tests done. And I really do have to get over my squeamish princessy self and harvest that damn - ugh! - poop! :help:And the only reason I am not on antibiotics for the lung infection was that I used up the ones my husband had been issued with for his trip to Mexico. They killed the lung infection but they haven't done much for my guts. blehhhh! Green is not happy at the moment :(except with her svelt body. After I get fixed up I am going for another fill. I am feeling kinda loosey-goosey at the moment.

Morsaille, I think I am peeing my pants with respect to that I beat Anorexia poster toaster. :D:D:D:D:D

I can only look, too. I am 57 and rapidly drifting towards 58 and I have a mate! Looking is good. As my mum used to say about my dad, "if he isn't looking, then he is no use to me."

As I have said earlier in this thread, I find it impossible to comment on the illegal immigrant situation in the United States for I am unaware of the stresses and strains which your society is currently undergoing with respect to the pressures exerted by illegal immigration. Canada, my country, has become a country which is now very open to accepting those immigrants who do not conform to the requirements of past, more racist times. A lot of our recent and legal immigrants come from places other than Europe. This has not proven to be a problem up here in the Great White North. This may well be because considerably fewer of our new Canadians are uninvited. Most of our new-comers are vetted by the government. Though we do have illegals, it takes a whole big bunch more work to drift into Canada than it does to slide into the United States. This is just a question of geography, eh, for Canada is a country which is more or less polar and which only shares a land border with the United States. We do get illegals. We get a float of Carribeans, some of them well known to our local police, and we seem to have arrivals of mainland Chinese who arrive via the Pacific. All of this information is provided by our media of course. While these illegals present an issue to Canadians for a number of reasons - in the case of the mainland Chinese this is because these folks are imported carelessly, like goldfish, by agents to whom they have paid a fortune and whom they themselves call snakeheads - I am left under the impression that the influx of Hispanic illegals in the States is such that your society is unable to deal with the weight of the newcomers. In my earlier post I suggested that your government could engage itself in this problem. I suggested that a Republican government could insist upon work-fare, a policy which would suit its political approach. I suggested that a Democrat government could take the approach of raising the minimum working wage, an approach appropriate with its political stance. These suggestions were prompted by my understanding that many Americans were unhappy about the number of illegals flooding the country, and that many Americans were also unhappy about the number of fellow Americans who were out of work and on welfare. You must understand that illegals would not be flooding into your country in such great numbers if your own people were not offering these folks jobs. As for this movement of migrant workers throughout North America, let us now talk about NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Association. NAFTA is an ugly, crippled, dwarfish cousin of the European Economic Union and it was brokered by the Reagan Republicans in the United States and the Mulroney Conservative government in Canada and then it was extended to include Mexico, for Mexico is part of north America. NAFTA calls for free trade within these three governmental jurisdictions. The reason that I say that this agreement is an ugly dwarfish version of the European agreement is that individual Europeans have the right to move, live, and work anywhere they wish inside those countries which are part of the Common Market. Canadians, Americans, and Mexicans do not have this right and although many Americans are quite happy about blocking the right of Mexicans to move north there are a number of Americans who are terribly anxious to avoid continuing on with their military service and would like to live in Canada. Similarly there are many Canadians who would like to spend their winter months in either the U.S. or Mexico. And of course it also occurs to me that if the third party in our kind of crappy, low-rent financial union, NAFTA, is not providing its own citizens with all the rights which we assume are correct - that is to say, environmental, health, financial, and basic human rights, then the Canuckis and the Americans should be placing pressure on their goverments to ensure that their partner conform, eh.

To tell you the truth I think that Dr. Yau is a good bet. He is younger, cuter, and he has many, many years of band work left in him.

And now for the shallow stuff: I just came back from seeing my doc and while I was there I weighed myself and I now weigh 155 lbs! Yippee!

My first husband, and the only one I actually married, and not just common-lawed, died 3 years ago this month. We got married when we were in our early 20s and our marriage only lasted five years. He was a musician and they don't tend to make reliable mates. Nevertheless, after enough water went under the bridge we resumed our friendship and he eventually became involved with a splendid woman who is now his widow. He introduced her to me and we ended up becoming very close friends. Apart from our relationships with him and his family we have a lot in common and so we remain very, very close. They had a long, long relationship and it had its ups and its downs - he was a musician, remember - but his death was a bad one and his widow, my wife-in-law as I often call her, suffered acutely both while he was dying and for the first couple of years after his loss. There is a phrase, "mad with grief," and there were many times when my friend was in that very state. To see someone go through this makes you fear losing your own mate; it is a foreshadowing for it makes you aware that relationships can and will be ruptured eventually. I find myself writing this in order to let those of us - the over 50 bunch - who have experienced widowhood know that I am aware, I think, that you have undergone an experience which is significantly different - infinitely more painful, infinitely more profound - than the rest of us.

Though it seems that you, your 14 year old mate, and your 12 year old sister have beaten the odds by going on to have sucessful marriages and to raise your children happily it is not generally considered to be a wise move to start having children at such a young age and indeed there are laws against children becoming sexually active before they reach a certain age. Before this age they are considered to be minors and these laws are in place in order to protect them and to allow them to continue to mature both physically and intellectually without having to deal with the additional stresses that starting their own families will bring. These laws are relatively recent constructs. In other eras people did get married and started having children much younger than they do now but times are different now and life is much more complicated. When families were working a farm little formal education was needed and much of what boys and girls needed to know was learned by working alongside the older folk. Now, however, the baseline of education required to get by is highschool and even then that is often not enough; college, university, technical training, or an apprenticeship is the next step. It is difficult to do this when you have babies and a relationship and no money. I believe that you and your sister have beaten the odds because you were lucky that you do have a large and supportive family. They were able to help you out by caring for your babies whenever you needed a break, and in the case of your 12 year old sister, drive her and the baby to the doctor, to the mall, and teach her how to look after an infant. It sounds as though you come from a wonderful family and that you have a wonderful family of your own. If some of us sound a little shocked and judgemental it is because both your husband and your sister were minors at the time when they started their families and for most young people this would have ended up poorly, not only for themselves, but for their babies as well.

Congratulations, Anniejo, on getting banded and your weight loss. Yippee! I also lost about 15 lbs in my first six weeks after receiving The Band. It sounds like you are off to a very good start. Denise822, thanks for answering my question concerning nutrition facts on labels. It really is surprising what you learn once you start reading this info, isn't it? And, Dynamo, I think that it is true that those individuals who project more energy do get more attention paid to them but I also believe that the old and the overweight and the plainer folks do disappear in the eyes of the public. I have read accounts on this site from fellow bandsters who have commented that as they lost weight people began to pay attention to them. They found that sales clerks were more helpful and that strangers would smile at them. BJean's idea is a good one. We will band together and kick butt.:scared:And be very noisy about it. :tea: "Ovaries with Attitude" as one of my lesbian friends likes to say.:drum:

Oh, yes, The Invisible Women!!! It seems that fat will do it and so will ageing. I remember taking my mother shopping for clothes when she was in her 80s. The woman was old but had all of her marbles. In fact I inherited a sizable chunk of my own from her. She was shopping for a dressy winter coat. The saleswoman wanted to put her in a baby blue item; she chose a black leather coat with a fur collar. We called the coat Norton because the fur reminded me of my cat. The coat is chic and I was happy to inherit it. A year later we returned to the same boutique - they did have nice clothes - and dealt with another saleswoman. My mother wanted a pair of pants. The bluddy saleswoman persisted in ignoring my mother and talking to me! I kept redirecting her inquiries to my mum but she was too thick to get the hint. I finally said, "I dunno, you'll have to ask her." I have another friend who has found that she has become invisible. She claims that this is because she is brunette. We do a lot of recreational shopping together and it is true that she gets lousy service. She truly is invisible. She uses me, the blondie, as her wing-man in these situations. Although I have gotten kinda old and it is only going to get worse and I was getting fat (before the miracle of the band) I found that I was only disappearing on the sexual front. It had been a long, long time since anyone had eyeballed me with anything approaching lust (except for old guys, my husband, and folks with bad eyesight, that is). But I seem to still be visible otherwise; now, I don't know whether this is because I am blonde (now assisted by Lady Clairol and Madame L'Oreal) or because I have a somewhat humorous extroverted personality or whether it is the way I dress or some combination of the above factors, but I do know that this will not last in a society like ours. We do live in or think we live in a society which has grown increasingly ageist and lookist, I think. It strikes me that the qualities which are valued by society, the ones which are promoted and the ones which are paid the big bucks, are youth, looks, and brawn. Athletes are valued more than scientists, are paid much more, and have much more street cred. Young people carry more weight than old people. People do age out of having a say with respect to marketing polls. Our concerns seem to become increasingly irrelevant. At the same time, I remember when I was young. I am part of the boomer generation and so I was part of the hippy don't trust anyone who is older than 30 gang. We wanted to start a revolution. I think that in many ways today's youth are more respectful than we were. Still, disappearing sucks, doesn't it? I suspect that in many ways men may have a harder time of it than we do. They are, after all, used to taking up more space than we are.

Up here in Canada every item of food that is boxed, canned, or bottled is required by law to provide the nutrition facts as part of the label. This includes calories per serving as well as a breakdown of the fats - saturated and trans - cholesterol, sodium, carbs, fibre, sugars, proteins, calcium, vitamins, and iron. Some of these numbers are expressed as a percentage of the total in-take needed by the average adult per day. Before I was banded I used to ignore this information but now I do read it carefully and it does contain some surprising news. Many if not most of the vegetable soups we eat in fact contain surprisingly little vitamin C. Eggs are loaded with B vitamins but few other foods seem to be except for such things as whole wheat pasta and bread. Most processed foods have tons of salt. This has turned into a longish post and the real reason I started it was to ask you if American law requires that all the nutritional info be listed on your packaged food, not to yap on about my discoveries. :straight

I love aged sharp cheeses, creamy yet tangy blue cheeses, and double or triple creme bries and camemberts. I adore Romano Pecorino and those horribly expensive regional Italian parmesan cheeses, and I just adore a fine aged Canadian cheddar made at one of those little country dairies. Ooooh! Yep, I've spent a lot of money on cheese over the years and gained a lot of lard. And I have a life-time subscription to Lipitor, thanks to my cholesterol readings. *sob* (Actually, my cholesterol has dropped since I got the band and cut back on the cheese in-take! How could something so wonderful be so evil????) As for the litter cake, I could never consider eating it. I have had cats and dealt with their litter for far too long now. Just looking at the photo makes me feel and knowing that it's edible makes me feel kind of strange. But I think it is hilarious in a barfy sort of way!

My husband's brother is quite greedy and kind of crass. He got married in France because it is more "romantic," came back, had a pool party in his backyard and asked everyone to bring his own chair to sit on and money instead of a gift. The invitations were made up on his computer and printed up on regular computer paper. He and his bride had been living together for years and owned a house, by the way. I was pretty grossed out and didn't bother attending.:rolleyes I later heard that quite a number of other people, including his parents, were shocked, too. I wish I had saved the invite, though.

Hmmm..... As it happens, I have enjoyed every Barbara Kingsolver novel I have read and I am deeply in love with cheese. In fact I got fat by eating cheese, lots of cheese! Weird, eh? I guess this thread cannot be killed!

Melinda was robbed.

Devana's questions are good ones, I think. I have been keeping quiet on the illegal question for although my tendancy is to be sympathetic to them, at the same time I have no understanding at all of the stresses and strains which they may be placing on American society. Up here in Canada we do have illegals but we have proportionally speaking many fewer of them than you do by all accounts. Our largest city, Toronto, the city where I live, is a city comprised of immigrants, many of them recent and I have heard it said that well over half of us speak a mother tongue which is not English. Multi-culturalism seems to work extremely well here and gives this city a real vibrancy, but perhaps this is because our citizens come from all over the globe and not from one single area. It may be that in areas where there are large numbers of Mexicans and Americans living together that relationships become more us-them and thus more socially antagonistic. The health care thing is not a sore point for us, either, because we have, as you are probably aware, universal health care. This means that while we do pay for health care, we pay for this through our taxes, not as a direct hit through an insurance policy. Then there is this point to take into account, I think. From all that I have heard the Mexicans head north in order to work and they do find employment on the American side of the border. If they weren't getting work, would they come? Aren't Americans complicit in this situation when they continue to hire illegal workers? And why are illegals doing this work when there are many Americans who are jobless and receiving welfare? Why don't the Republicans institute workfare programmes? Or the Democrats raise the minimum wage so that these jobs would become more attractive to Americans? And as to the complaint that many of the older Mexicans only speak Spanish, my hunch would be that those individuals who are illegal are afraid to move outside their own groups for fear that they might be discovered and deported. They will have little chance to learn English. Remember, too, that these are individuals who likely received little formal education at home. These are the poor people of Mexico who only wish to survive and hope that their anchor babies will have much better lives in America. Educated folks usually have no need to leave home and enter another country as illegals.