green

Yep, I agree.

This is much, much better advice than mine!!!!

If she is a really nice woman maybe you should take your taxes to her and tell her the whole truth about the miracle of the lapband as well. Ask her to keep it absolutely to herself, of course.

Yes, oh yes! But only if you like Canadians!

I am a liberal, heterosexual atheist with many homosexual friends. I also have a valued friend who has right wing views and is a homophobe. He is undecided as to whether he believes in Intelligent Design or not; this fellow does not attend any church, however, although he did have his kids baptised in the Anglican church. Though we are radically different, we occasionally find ourselves sharing a viewpoint. This is part of the value of freedom of speech, I reckon, for it does engage us all in intellectual growth. Your cartoon was silly but you have prompted an array of interesting responses and so it has met your stated goal. Thanks for posting it.

I know that this is going to sound awfully shallow but I gave myself some plastic surgery for my 50th birthday. I had my jawline excavated as it had become rather mushy and gave myself lips. I come from a family that is thin-lipped on both sides and I wanted to be able to wear lipstick before I died. I also wanted to see my jawline again. :phanvan Well, this was all microsurgery and the surgeon also filled in the lines that run between the nose and mouth while he was there. I ended looking much the same but much, much improved; tidied up, you could say. My recovery was quick and I am still happy with the results. Now that my 60th is approaching I am planning to have some more work done. A nice side benefit where I live is that such surgery is income tax deductible.

That is a terrible, terrible accident! I am so sorry that you and your family experienced that. My brother died suddenly of undiagnosed bowel cancer. He didn't like doctors and hadn't seen one for ten years. (I suppose that this attitude might be considered kind of ironic considering that our middle sib is a doctor.) He had had back pains and was suffering from periodic difficulties in his digestive system. He put this down to middle age. When the pains became excruciating he took himself to emergency. They ultrasounded him and found a huge mass. They said that they would have to operate on him ASAP but that it didn't look good. He and I chatted about this later that night on the phone. He sounded his usual self and we talked as though we had decades ahead of us. Later that night he fell into a coma, was rushed into intensive care, and died a week and a half later. He was 48. It was a truly awful blow to our small family. My mother died two months later to the day due to a botched colonoscopy. They fixed this surgically and she initially seemed to be rallying but then she quickly went down hill. This is why I think she died of a broken heart. I was already off work due to major depression. I grieved them violently for the first year. The second year was easier. This happened two years ago. Oh, and by the way, I have the same birthday as your mum. I was born on the 4th of July, too.

It is easier to lose your mother when you have seen your mother go through the pain of losing a child. My kid brother died two months to the very day before my mother did. He died after a brief but heart breaking illness. The death of my brother was probably the worst thing that my mother has ever experienced and she is a woman who has lived through a war, through the deaths of her parents, her only sibling, and her beloved husband. My mother died at the age of 87 of a broken heart. My brother's death knocked the stuffing out of her. One of the gifts that Tina can give her mother is to outlive her. By the way, your granddaughter is absolutely adorable. Thanks for posting these photos.

I have heard the same kind of stories. :eek:

My doctors always put gloves on before touching me.

In our hospitals there are dispensers of waterless anti-bacterial soap everywhere, including the entrances to the hospitals and the entrances to all the rooms. When my mother was dying I was always washing my hands! And immediately post SARS everyone had to wear a mask.

Yep, you have got that right, Mini. The interesting thing about the band is that this piece of hardware does incorporate itself with your own body and thus it does end up reacting to and reflecting your own physiological and psychological responses. If you are stressed the band will tighten up. At certain times of the month the band will tighten up. The band is likely to be much tighter in the morning than later in the day. The band, unlike a pacemaker for instance, does not remain a purely mechanical device once it is installed, that is to say, the band is not a piece of hardware which operates entirely independently of your body, its moods and fluctuations. The band really does become part of you and this experience is exceedingly interesting. This is what I have found. I have also found that the band does work. It does not permit me to guzzle foods the way I used to.

Ouch! I knew a woman who married in order to leave her parents' roof. That marriage didn't last long, either.:rolleyes

Yep! Right now everyone believes that the Left is made up of no one but us evil atheists.:phanvan

The big difference between the left and the Christian right is one of Hypocrisy!

I am with Devana. There is a lot in Tina's life to make her depressed at the moment. The unwanted 0 is just the icing on the cake. Just keep on loving her and fussing over her. This is what my mate does. It eventually gets through. How about a little get-away? Just you and Tina....... This can often break a pattern of thought, you know.

I am one of those people who can eat it but I have to chew, chew, chew. I choose not to eat very much of it, however.

Hooray for you, Yoda!!!!! :clap2: This is onderful news, grrl!

Green sez wow! I neatly avoided going to my niece's wedding a coupla years back (I could pull this stunt off because my family is dysfunctional:heh: ) but found myself agreeing to go to my nephew's wedding last summer. This seemed like a good move on my part because our mum and my kid brother had died. The family was still dysfunctional but it was badly bruised and I - lol - became the senior member. This involved more money than I could have spared had I not come into an inheritance - so this was kind of creepy - but my husband and I flew out to Halifax on my mother's dime for the family gathering and the wedding. It was a lot of hard work even though my poor nephew and his bride and her family had worked hard to make everything nice. His mother and his sister's child arrived about three weeks early. His mother set about dissing his bride and her side of the family. She also went on about how the poor girl was looking fat and kept telling everyone that the marriage wouldn't last more than a year or two. Well, it turns out that the bride was pregnant and this was something that both my nephew and his bride were quietly thrilled about because she had fertility issues and they both were anxious to have a big family. By the morning before the wedding the groom, his mother, his sisters and his grandmother on his mother's side are all in a physical knock-down brawl. His father, who is my brother, his second wife, my husband, and myself were secreted in a cottage on the coast of Nova Scotia. There was no telephone except for my brother's cell and that was long distance because he lives in Virginia. It was heat wave humid hot and I had to go outside for a smoke and there was a gazillion flesh eating bugs outside. My brother ended up feeling pissed off because we were living in a bug infested shack and he was the one who had helped the couple buy their property in the first place. I was cranky because I was covered, really covered in bug bites and because I am allergic to them I was itching all over. My husband was much worse off. He had eaten bad shellfish. He was trapped in this shack and he was spewing from both ends and he was running a temperature. In fact he ended up being dragged to various events, stuffed full of dope in order to stop him from vomitting and pooping, and was stuck being warehoused on beds in homes of people whom he had never met. He missed the wedding of course. And as for the groom, my nephew ended up brawling with his mother. As a result one of his sisters refused to do her reading. My brother got hurt because he has underwritten so much of my nephew's life and then during the inevitable this is your life episode of the wedding event he was edited out. Yep, my brother never did appear in any of those slides and the guy found himself hurting. And yah, my nephew did spend his later teenage years living with his father. As for me, I was happy to see my nephew married to a woman whom he loved and I was happy to see that he had married into a family who obviously adored him. I also respected the fact that there had been loads of local social events planned for all of us who had taken the trouble, time, and expence to make our way out to the east coast of Canada. But, nevertheless, the family psychodrama was very bluddy hard. It might be kinda interesting to note that we had a Scottish relative in tow. He ended up with me, my husband, my brother, and his second wife. I say "ended up" with because he had been promised better and then abandoned. The dude was good fun and I proposed to him that he could write something about this experience: I said that he could call it My Big Fat Canadian Wedding. He thought that this was pretty funny and we spent some fine hours together smacking bugs, smoking cigarettes, and drinking coffee and scotch.

Hey, this thread is an interesting one, isn't it? Wavy, the 120 grand looks extra big to my eyes because I am a Canadian and our dollars are mini-dollars. And even in Can bucks a 120 grand is nothing to sneeze about. It won't buy you a house in my city but it will give you a down payment and that is, as Martha says, "a good thing." And your wedding, pierced, sounds great. Good food, a laid back environment, and a laid back bride and groom - what more can any guest want, eh? Even though I didn't want to get married, I just wanted to live with my man, my one official wedding was pretty good. We had a buffet so that everyone, even the vegetarians, could find food that they would enjoy. My (then) husband was a musician and a number of his friends played at the wedding. They were talented guys and they played a lot of jug band music along with the standard rock stuff. The bar was open and that is always a hit. It seems that my father was approached a number of times by the staff; they wanted to know if he wished to close down the free bar but he said no. As for me - the bride - I wore a tobacco brown velvet suit with hip high suede boots. I wanted something that I could wear again and the wedding took place in February. I also threatened to carry a cauliflower up the aisle in my bouquet. I said that I could cook it later. I was a practical kid! I wore the boots and the velvet jacket, they both looked great with jeans by the way, until they rotted, and then I threw them out. Shortly after this I threw the husband out. :phanvan I got married when I was 22 and the marriage collapsed when I was 27. Oh, and by the way, the reason we got married was because it meant the world to my then husband's family. My family were atheists and would have been entirely comfortable to see us live together. His family were Catholics and our marriage meant a lot to them and so we were married in the Catholic church. And at this point I will mention, as I always do, that I was treated with great respect by the Church.

Great! I still have mine. Where do you live? I am going to visit you and I am going to bring my Docs with me.:biggrin1: I also have workboots.

Holy mackeral! That's a lot of bucks!! That's a fine down payment on a piece of property or some pretty sweet cash to put into an investment portfolio! A grrl could also buy very some fine household furnishings for that kinda cash or some terribly respectable jewellery. I am very curious and have a question for anyone who can answer it. Do these bridezillas actually settle down and enjoy the "magic" day once it comes or are they still so charged up over this issue of perfection that they don't? I would love it if someone could supply me with an answer.

This post made me laugh out loud. I think that the only reason I don't make that mistake is because I am a depressive and the best I can ever say is that I am doing okay....:phanvan

I am entirely with you, TOM, on this one. Why should the bride behave like a bitch? What gives her the right, objectively speaking? Viewed through the lens of social anthropology, weddings, like funerals, are communal events; that is to say that the intent of these rituals is to bring the immediate community together in order to assist a family who is a member of that community in celebrating or mourning a change in their status. At one time this community would be the tribe or the village. Today this community usually consists of family, friends, and, possibly, business associates. The irony for me is that those performances which these bridezillas generate on their special days are all so boringly uniform, all so very much the same. The memories of these weddings will for most of us all blend into each other but the memories of the brides' bitcheries will last forever. And of course most of 'em will be divorcing later on because the marriage didn't live up to the wedding!

Yah, I have what I call Lesbian feet - though I would never say that in front of my friends who are Lesbians! I call 'em that because I can only wear sensible shoes; no Jimmy Choos nor Manolo Blahnicks for this grrl. My paws hover between size 10 and size 11 and are both boney and wide. I can only wear flat shoes with a wide toe box. I used to wear Doc Martens when they were in fashion.