green

Wheetsin, I find your story fascinating. Thanks for sharing it.

Argon, I know that you can do it. Just keep that little crock pot cooking interesting and healthy meals, stay away from the starches and the sugars, and you will be cool, girl.

The TLBC booked three appointments for fills before they sent me home from the hospital after the operation. Each of these appointments is roughly 2-3 weeks apart. The last one is mid-November. The weird thing is that I am starving right now. I have never been this hungry since the operation. I could eat my cat.:paranoid I am smoking far too many cigarettes because I am that hungry! This is really bad!:help:

You are always welcome to visit Canada in real time. As for Doritos and salsa, Canadians love them as well and salsa is the least fattening dip! Tex-Mex cuisine is well liked in the city where I live. You will find a few items on a lot of menus and 30 years ago there used to be some restaurants entirely devoted to the food. I love it! And the hotter the better! Oh yah, we've got lots of Taco Bells, eh.

Thanx for your kind words. That missing 13 lbs sure does feel good! I kinda wish I hadn't got my fill today, though. We have a French guy staying with us and I am gonna be on liquids for the next 24 hours. I don't want to get into explanations for this. He is here for a conference and I am hoping that he won't be home for dinner tonight. Then I will be able to drink my soup in peace. He is, like all the French people I know, extremely slender and can eat like a wolf. I want one of those metabolisms when I grow up! Oh, well....

I love vinegar chips. I love Miss Vickie's vinegar chips. I just got filled, it's raining, and I would kill for some right now!

Well, I have just returned from having my first fill. I did take one of their Demerol because I am a sissy. This turned out to be a blonde move on my part because I didn't need it, but then I am a blonde! I was given 5cc and told to drink four paper cups of water from their water cooler. I began to salivate half-way through the first cup. The water felt like it was sitting in my esophagus and it simply wasn't going to move. I wanted to sick it up but couldn't and I wanted to burp. I finally did this and felt much better. After all this personal drama I came out of the washroom and asked that the nice lady remove one cc of the fill. I was able to drink after that. I also discovered that I lost 13 lbs over the past 6 weeks. Yippee!!!!!! Green is very happy about that. I hope that I can keep this up. While I was there I met some nice women and found out that some of them are still tender in their port sites, too. My next fill appointment is on October 31st.

Well, Green smokes and she isn't very clean.... *not exactly a joke

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I think that all citizens should pay for the educational system. We all profit from having a citizenry that is well-educated and prosperous. Lack of education, poverty, criminal activities, and, well, just generally dysfunctional neighbourhoods all seem to go together. I don't have kids but I am not resentful of paying taxes that go towards the education system. Better the kiddies are in school and learning than loitering in the streets looking for someone to mug, eh.

Our property taxes support much of the infrastructure of the city that I live in. The property tax covers pretty much everything including our school system and the welfare safety net: the safety net would include public housing and welfare payments. Our income tax, provincial and federal, is collected by the feds who in turn give the provinces their share. The poor provinces receive transfer payments from the wealthy provinces. This is in the nature of welfare at the provincial level. The provinces are responsible for maintaining the universal health care programme inside each province and for the school system in rural areas and small villages. They are also responsible for welfare in these areas. And of course they are responsible for the provincial police and for the provincial roads and highways. We also have federal and provincial sales taxes. These amount to fourteen percent in my province. This is our tax system simplified. We pay much more tax than you do. You might be interested to know that I pay union dues and that these are tax deductible.

I have to admit that I am deeply in love with the Swiffer Duster thingy and I like their floor washing gadget - the WetJet - a lot. Sometimes I think I live at the bottom of a dust bowl. Hooray for Swiffer!

Wow, so what do the feds control? Other than foreign policy, copy rights, and trading practices and to whom do you pay your taxes? I am a Canadian and thus am ignorant.

Thanx for the support, eh. I'll fill you in on all the gruesome details.

Oh yah, the electroshock experiments. I remember those. They were done at Harvard and the Professor's name was Milgram....

No, I haven't heard anything about the 12 Level experiment but now I am curious so you can fill me in. I should mention that though I am generally cynical I always fall for those ads which advertise products that will help me clean my house, especially the Swiffer products. I live with the middle class woman's dirt guilt and so I am a sucker for these products though buying them doesn't always translate into using 'em. In just such a fashion many of us fall for herbal (and the subtext reads natural) weight loss products. If they really worked, our doctors would be the first to be telling us to use them. I almost got myself thrown out of a focus group because of my objections to the concept of natural/herbal as being something that automatically equalled goodness. I pointed out that there were a lot of toxins to be found in nature and that modern chemistry has helped humanity immeasurably. I almost got myself thrown out because I got all the other participants scratching their heads and thinking. This interfered with the "feel" that they were after. As for my reading on the situation on Iraq, I almost got myself thrown off another board for airing this. I don't believe that anyone from this side of the Atlantic Ocean should be in Iraq at this time. The Blix report stated that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Nor were there any explicit connections between Iraq and al Qaeda. (There are, however, connections between al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia, an ally of the United States.) So why are the cowboys over there? Why invade this country? Though the BuShies state that they are there in order to liberate the Iraqi people, there are many other countries, notably North Korea and a whole mother load of African states, where the citizens are very badly treated (to say the least). A cynical girl is inclined to think that this cowboy diplomacy does involve oil and the concerns of big business.

So what we are now talking about, TOM, (and by the way, I love how these threads wander - why, it's just like a good dinner conversation!) is the deliberation obfuscation of language when it falls into the hands of professionals, and those would be people who have something to sell: politicians, advertisers, and, as often as not, the media. (Fox is notable for giving biased news coverage.) I am an atheist and a cynic and so I am leery of the opiate groups, particularly fundamentalists of any stripe, be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, Lefties, Right wing-nuts or whatever. Groups that have an agenda practise sloganeering. Any group that wishes to sell you on something has an agenda. I was kinda lucky in that my father was an immigrant whose first language was not English. He was intelligent and he had survived a time in Europe when there was a lot of sloganeering. He taught me when I was very young how to look behind a statement in order to find the intent and thus to take apart official language. This approach works equally well whether one is listening to an ad on T.V. or President BuSh. These folks want to sell us something. It is up to us to look carefully at what they are saying.

Thank you for the proposal, my darling, but unfortunately my cooking skills are limited to those dishes and a curry. Apart from that I used to live on pasta dishes that involved a lot of cheese and garlic. Very, very fattening! The only good thing I do is keep to using fresh vegies except for canned tomato products. My love for cheese and carbs and big portions is a real killer.

It's nice to see Carlene visiting Canada. How are you enjoying the weather up here? Some of us have already been hit with the first blizzard of the season. I have taken in my tropical plants, stowed the patio furniture, harvested the herbs, but the geraniums are still outside and doing well. :biggrin1: As for chips, we also have sour cream and chive chips. I don't know whether these are available in the U.S. They used to be my favourite. They are hyper-fattening.

Ah, Cloe, you are a lucky woman. Your husband is not only good lookin, he is also sweet. If I didn't have a good one of my own I would be quite green with envy. Your hair troubles worry me. I have thick, coarse, wavy hair. It helps me to look years younger than I really am. I am afraid of saying good-bye to it even though it is hell in the summer - kinda like wearing a duvet on my head! And I have a head that is shaped like a cinder block, four corners and all. I don't think I am going to look all that cute as a hairless grrl....

By the way, I expect that I shall be thinking a lot about language over the next few days. I've got a French doctor, a friend of a friend, staying with me for the week and my fluency in the language has long since departed. It's been about 25 years since I lived in France. Trying to speak French to someone whom I like a great deal but who is not a close friend is unbelievably taxing. I feel like I have had a hundred IQ points shaved off the top of my head. And my dh doesn't speak a word of French!

Language is our primary tool for communication, this is obvious; see us here on LBT, all with our different backgrounds and our various interests, and we are doing a fine job of communicating with each other. I note that members will ask questions if they are unclear about the content of a post and I have also noted that other members have taken it upon themselves to introduce information-filled sticky threads. I believe that these activities, which are carried on within the framework of language of course, are evidence that language is a tool that people generally want to make work. This requires collusion on our part and so we do collude. Now, there are times when language is used in a less friendly fashion. Governments and businesses sometimes use spin; this is language employed to put a positive spin on news that is largely negative. We as individuals do this, too. It is often difficult to sort out what is spin and what is an actual lie. Sometimes language is used to shut someone out of the in-group. The outsider is made to feel less educated, knowledgeable, or hip. This is language used as a psychological weapon. But though these exceptions often occur, they are still exceptions. We all want to understand each other and will work to make that happen.

Try chicken stew. I make mine with deboned chicken breasts, potatoes, carrots, onions, green beans and mushrooms. At this time of year the local fruit and vegetables guy sells big, leathery green beans that need a lot of cooking and I use full-sized carrots, not the tiny tender ones. I often use dried mushrooms since they have the time to plump up. Then I add in cream of chicken soup, salt and pepper. Tough, second-rate vegies are the best; the tender ones tend to turn to mush with all that cooking. You can add cauliflower. That's a tough vegetable. And you can substitute cream of cheddar soup. Sometimes I add celery/toasted almond slivers. I really like the taste of almonds and meat. You might also try cooking chili. I use extra lean ground beef, a can of drained and washed kidney beans and a can of chick peas in mine. (The chick peas give the chili a slightly nutty flavour.) I also add in sauteed slivered almonds, lots of garlic, some celery, one carrot finely diced (the sweetness of the carrot makes the tomatoes taste less acid) and black olives. (If you don't like olives, then add salt to taste.) Chili powder and fresh hot peppers to taste, bay leaves and a can of crushed tomatoes as well as a can of stewed tomatoes. It is not yer conventional chili but it tastes very, very good. Oh yah, I sautee the meat, almonds, garlic, hot peppers before adding the other stuff and letting it cook for a very long time. Re almonds: I am not sure whether almonds are going to work with the band. ??

Hey, that's when I'm having mine. What time are you having yours? My appointment is for 10:30 for a seminar and my first fill. I think I am going to take a Demerol (left over from the operation, eh) before going. I really, really hate needles.

The review of the book, Tempting Faith, sounds interesting. Religion should be kept separate from the state.