green

I am glad that I started this. I love shopping but I have many shopping issues especially to do with my size!!! I figured that maybe other people would too.

If my pants' crotches drop much lower I am gonna have to buy a skate board.

Aw shucks, thank you.

There is a mean-spiritness that seems to underpin this so-called "moral majority" which concerns many of us who are on the outside looking in at your country. The moral right are certainly not a tolerant group of individuals. They are, indeed, unable to admit to ethical behaviour at all unless it comes packaged under their own tight set of rules. You must be ready to accept a personal God and Jesus Christ. This excludes all other nice, kind, well-behaved folk who follow other paths, including the atheist. Now I am under the impression that some of your founding fathers were atheists or pantheists. Certainly they were specific about a separation between personal belief and state. Now we get these same moral people who will edit out all individuals, however decent they may be, who believe in a woman's freedom to choose. In fact they play dirty tricks with the language. They say that they are pro-life and all others are pro-abortion. No one is pro-abortion. No one likes to see this option casually used as a method of birth control. The issue is whose rights are more important: does an adult woman's body take precedence and when does life truly begin? It also seems to me that the moral majority would support this President's activities in Iraq without debate and might call anyone who does wish to question the wisdom of this war "unpatriotic." This same group of individuals would like to control freedom of artistic and intellectual expression. We know that they are not happy with many of the ground-breaking shows that we get to see on cable television. This is a group of individuals who are all about passion, not reason, it seems to me, and therefore they are to be feared for they are moral bullies. It seems that they have found a little buddy in BuSh, a limited man who has publically announced that his God helps him rule his country. Of course this all would be kind of folkloric if we were talking about a small African country but we are not. We are talking about the most important country in the world and one where at the most senior level all intellectual activity has ceased for the duration of this presidency.

Why not do it the Canadian way? It is low-tech but it works. Up here we have paper ballots and sealed ballot boxes. The ballots are counted at the end of the polling day with several people present - and in order to prevent collusion these individuals must represent different parties. Because the ballots exist in hard copy they can be recounted at any time the count is challenged. Each polling station only takes in a couple of thousand individuals so even if there were corruption, the numbers affected would be too small to make a difference. When each polling station has completed its count it phones this in to the riding. The outcome of the vote in the ridings is critical to final outcome as to who will be elected Prime Minister of Canada. As you can see, tallying the vote for the entire country is done on something like a pyramid scheme. Nevertheless, the voting system is uniform throughout the country and everything exists in hardcopy. You may be interested to know that recounts are asked for and performed.

Some Winner's are better than others. I believe they do a reading of the local demographics. In general the ones in Toronto are much better than the suburban stores. I was once in a suburban store and everything there was made of synthetic materials. The designer Winner's near Yorkville has no fat grrl section which drives me nuts. On the other hand they usually have fabulous bags and their jewellery section is great. I almost always buy my bedsheets at Winner's because I like high thread count and low prices. I can walk to the one in my local mall - it's where my gym and Walmart's is - so I can kill a bunch of my needs all at once. I once phoned Winner's headquarters to complain when I thought that the quality of the stuff in my local store was declining. I told them that a lot of Yuppies were moving into the area. :heh: There is a Cotton Ginny in the mall and that is another store that is kind to the bigger woman. I do a lot of shopping there, too. Excercise can cost me a lot of money, eh.:phanvan

You gotta look at a chicken's ass. I know you are going to take one look and say "ohmigawd, it's the Donald!" But a chicken's ass ain't as ugly or as rich. But one thing is true, they are both *ssholes...........

Waah! Now that's really frustrating.....

Yah, Green loves Winners but she was beginning to feel mighty p*ssed off about the selection available in la zone big grrl. In fact this zone was impossible to find in the designer Winner's in the la-di-dah area of Bloor Street. And Green was kinda screwed when it came to finding giant grrl shoes for her giant grrl feet, too. Hmmph! Snort! (She did buy a really nice designer bag there.) As for Zeller's transforming itself into Target (Targay, en francais), I am excited. This is a great store from everything that I have heard.

Green wants the film rights.

Oh, I am experiencing some NSVs at the moment which have to do with some of my favourite pants. They are linen, cut to be loose, and were kinda elegant. Now it is a matter of crotch management when I wear 'em for they are much baggier than they were before. I love the pants but I love losing weight.

And it is true vice versa. Women also like to see men and women of like attractiveness yoked up. We all like to see a couple evenly matched when it comes to the beauty department and a disparity is always unsettling to the casual onlooker. This sense of wrongness disappears, of course, when you come to know the couple. The superficial impact of looks always disappears when you come to know the people inside the packages. This is just how it works. My own mate is 9 years younger than myself and while I had been a fairly good looking woman in my day, age and weight gain have certainly damaged my allure. *Please insert irony here, by the way.* As for my mate, well, the body gods have been very kind to him. This has resulted in some occasions where my feelings could have been hurt if I was less comfortable in our relationship. We have, you should know, been together for twenty years. I am also aware that I would have made the same judgement calls had I been on the outside looking in. This is something that we are prone to do is all.

Actually, I had heard it posited that one of the reasons that baby Bush got the country embroiled in this war was because he still had parent-child rivalry issues with his own father and was hoping to best the old Bush with his direction on Gulf War 2. This explanation, one that seems purely psychoanalytical, does not seem entirely off the wall to me. Reports do say that mini-Bush and George the first never did see eye to eye.

I know that a number of you lucky Canuckis come down to Toronto to have the operation and to have your fills done. I also read that you like to shop while you are down here in The Big Smoke. Then there is this business of hitting a NSV and as we all know, a lot of those Non Scale Victories have to do with our clothes falling off our backs (or our bums, more like). And most of us who are posting here are women and most women do like to shop. I was shopping in a Winner's store today and I managed to strike pay dirt. This put Green in a good mood. Now it strikes me that it might be fun to have a thread devoted to the subject of shopping, the good, the bad, and the ugly. There is much that can be said about the bad and the ugly, especially when a grrl is not a size 12 or less. Green has been feeling bitter about the lack of choice in interesting clothes in larger sizes for years now. I also have a bone to pick with shoe sizes since I take size drag queen! This is another ugly issue. But I continue to want to shop, and sometimes I find good stuff. It ain't all tears of frustration, ya know. And this is why I thought that this thread might be both a way for us to vent and to have fun. Alors, voila le thread shopping, eh.

Oooh Yoda, my name looks so good in Green! And you are right but I am blonde inside and out and I still haven't gotten around to it and so I am having to rely on those NSVs. Well, I've been experiencing the good and the bad. The good is that my 2 most favourite pairs of baggy trousers are starting to get a little too baggy. I am now having trouble with crotch management. The bad news is that one of my best friends didn't notice a thing. Finally, after 4 hours he said that he thought that my stomach looked smaller. Initially he had said that he didn't see any difference. My Scottish cousin (who is over for a visit) didn't notice any difference but he tends to march to a different drummer. He did notice the price of the bag I was looking at a Winner's, though! LOL I find myself on a bit of an emotional roller coaster when it comes to dealing with these responses or lack of responses to my perceived weight loss. I was banded on Sept. 7 and when people do remark on my weight loss I think that maybe I might be losing too quickly and that this will mean that I will lose my hair 6 months down the road. On the other hand, when my weight loss is invisible to them I am disappointed too. This is likely how we all feel but I thought that I would mention it.

Angel bear, try sticking on the soup, yogurt, tuna, apple juice part of the post op diet. It really seems to work and it doesn't involve much cooking.

Sounds like a fine stew.

Consider it scratched. Yep, the Donald is one ugly dude. His mouth looks like a chicken's ass. I don't know how his trophies can let him get anywhere near them, especially the face....

The Dondald Trump, eh? I don't think that his hair is a toupee. I don't think that they allow wig makers to make toupees that are that ugly. I think that that is his very own comb-over and that it must be a foot long when it's completely unravelled! I hope I don't lose my hair. It's one of the best assets I've got. It's really thick. If I do lose it maybe I'll tell everybody that I've had chemo and need cheering up, then wait to see what happens. Ooh, what if nothing happens....? Scratch that idea.

Mmmm, could be fun. I've seen that sheep farmer. Go for it, girl.

I had a bit of plastic surgery done when I turned 50. I wanted my jawline tidied up, and the guy did a good job. I paid for it myself just as I paid for the band by myself. OHIP seems to lump all of these types of surgeries under the banner of vanity surgeries - ones that are not medically necessary - and so the patient pays. Hell! now we have to pay for eye check-ups! The good news is that these surgeries are income tax deductible. The bad news is that if you want OHIP to cover your belly work you'd best have it mauled by a pitbull or a sheep first. Then maybe you would stand a chance for OHIP to cover the work.

I like this sign that I read about on the internet: Any toddler caught unattended in this store will get a free double expresso.

Mine is smack dab in the middle immediately below my bra band and I can feel it all the time.

It's ironic. We are all getting bigger, taller and wider, and they are building planes with less and less seat room. A few years back when I was flying in the interior of Mexico I flew in an old plane. The seat room was fabulous!

I was banded at the Toronto Lap Band Centre on Sept 7 of this year. I am losing weight but I can't tell you how much because I don't have a scale.