green

Mrspruett, I cannot understand why the companies in your state who were hiring the illegals to work on the factory floor were not severely penalized for this. The owners should have been slapped with crushing fines/jail time. It is this which would do more to help to stop the illegal problem than merely rounding up the illegals, firing 'em, and then reporting 'em to immigration. It seems to me that as long as Americans can hire cheaper illegal workers and get away with this, they will do so. And as long as the work is available the illegals will come. You cannot blame them for wanting a better life and for wishing to pursue the American dream. You can, however, blame the system in place for not so severely punishing those employers who hire illegals that other employers will be deterred from this practice. That gonad-talking dude of yours is right; there is some testicular lack, it seems.

Pete is good if you're in heat.

I don't mind telling people if they seem genuinely amazed by and interested in my weight loss. I figure that they may have a friend or relative who could benefit by hearing about the band and who would be left feeling lousy about their struggles with weight loss upon hearing that Green is only "half a woman." And my decision as to who to tell is made much easier by the fact that I took early retirement and so I don't have to deal with work colleagues. I don't know what I would do if I was still working. People can be real mean about other people's good fortune.

Yep, my ma-in-law is pretty talented at finding the clouds around the silver lining. haha Sometimes I am entertained by this and sometimes this drives me nuts. It all depends upon my own frame of mind and how much exposure I am receiving from the in-laws. I always require a lot of downtime and they are labour intensive. This means that spending time at the cottage with them can spell trouble for me. Though she can be truly kind she is also very vain and entirely self-absorbed, a narcissistic personality type. She was a great beauty and a gifted athlete when she was younger. She was used to being the centre of attention for most of her life and she also places great value on physical perfection. I have never, ever been remotely athletic; I was an artsy, klutzy kid. And as for my looks, although I have had tons of fun, my looks are more in the way of an acquired taste, eh. On the other hand I am much brighter than she is and she is in the way of being a brains groupie, and so she is awfully fond of me for that. In fact she went through a period of being most anxious that I provide her with a brainy grandchild! This strange attitude results in all our contacts containing a weird mixture of love and poison. Her comments concerning my weight loss are characteristic of her way of relating to me. She can be quite nasty at times. Of course the fact that I am 9 years older than my husband doesn't help. Nor does the fact that I am a divorcee and that we are living common-law. But to give her credit she is inclined to treat everyone the same.

And, BJean, you are right. And here I am thinking about your comments regarding your sister. Such handicaps as extreme homeliness, obesity, poverty, being a member of an unwanted minority, chronic pain, emotional disease, and physical handicaps rarely have an ennobling effect upon our natures but instead can often tend to turn us into sour, jealous, depressed, cranky, and bitter people. This is because these people have a harder time with living their lives. And of course we avoid their company because they are, well, unpleasant to be around.:phanvan

So much of what we are is due to the luck of the genetic deck. I have always felt that was true but now I am reading a book on genetics and it is even more apparent that nature really does trump nurture. This is why I for one am quite happy to avail myself of anything modern medicine can hand out: anti-depressants to treat the depression which runs in my family; prescription glasses to correct my lousy ageing vision; a lap-band to fix the post-menopausal weight gain which mirrors that of my mum; and plastic surgery to repair some of the damage done by ageing. Green is a practical grrl.

The couple who live in the cottage next to my in-laws' cottage saw me this past weekend for the first time in a year. They came rushing over to examine the "half-woman" as they put it. As they were so amazed by my weight loss I told them about the lapband and then the wife said that she knew of someone who had had the operation and had regained all the weight within 2 years. Ugh! Exactly the kind of negative comment that no bandster wants to hear.:eek: You have really got to watch out for people. They can so quickly begin raining on your little parade.:phanvan

Yah, some of those single malts really taste of smoke and peat.

I liked your post, Eva. I thought that it was much more nuanced than that other one by that guy who kept talking about his gonads. By the way, have a wonderful weekend enjoying Champagne and smokes, BJean.

Ghost, maybe you could write your mum a letter, one similar to the one which you have just posted, explaining everything to her in much the same way that you have explained everything to us. Just a thought....

LOL Devana, that is some kind of bizarre accident! As for me, I bathed in scotch on the eve of my 58th birthday in order to leave myself feeling numb for the day. The day of my birthday I saw my psychotherapist. She had suggested changing the appt in order to leave the day free but I said that I couldn't think of a more appropriate day to spend complaining about my childhood, yadda, yadda.... She wished me Happy B'day and I told her I was going to go shopping and drown my sorrows in fabric. And this is what I did. Shopping these days is quite a strange experience for me. I am officially normoloid size, thinnish even, but I still feel like a big grrl. This means I have a very hard time figuring out what to try on and I often freak out the saleshelp with my requests for very large sizes. And I still do like baggy clothes; they are more comfortable, eh. As for looking my age, I don't have any loose skin, a good thing, but what has happened is that I now look kinda stringy and tendony,...you know, like one those skinny old gals. Ugh! One last comment concerning my weight loss: everyone has been giving me huge compliments on it except my ma-in-law who told me that I could stand to lose another 10 to 15 lbs. Jeez! If I lose much more I will be looking like an old crack whore. Double ugh! The ma-in-law also told me that I should be wearing much tighter clothes in order to show off my new figure. Whatever....

This is a very sad post for me to think about, Boo. My heart goes out to you. You see, I think everyone of us deserves much, much better than many of us who post on this thread are currently getting. We all merit love, affection, daily expressions of kindness, good humour, and respect from those around us. Of course to get them we have got to give them but when we do and we get nothing in return this makes for a terribly bleak emotional environment. There is no way a person can feel contentment, joy, or have the ability to grow when they are living inside such an environment. I am a person who tends to take drastic steps when things really aren't working. I figure that there is no use in beating a dead horse and then I leave. There are a lot of very nice and loving individuals out there. And being alone can be very, very relaxing.

During my life I have been in a number of relationships and I have lived alone and I can say that I would rather live alone than live in an unsatisfying relationship. I have always found living alone to be a very positive experience whereas living in an unhappy relationship is very destructive to your sense of self. It erodes your sense of self-esteem, causes you to view yourself in a negative light, tires you out, and leaves you feeling joyless and depressed. It is like living in a room without sunlight and oxygen. Sometimes the best way to fix something bad is to leave it....even if it is only on a trial basis.

I lost 41 lbs since last Sept and now fit into size 10 pants (down from size 18W) and my BMI is now normal but my face now looks like that of a woman getting close to 60. It used to be that when I mentioned my age people would utter little noises of surprise and then tell me that I look ten years younger; now they just nod and don't say anything. I don't know if this will happen to other older women, though.

There is a downside to losing a lot of weight which I have been recently discovering. Now I look my age, not years younger. blehhh! This really hurts. It seems what the French say about the older woman is true: it is either your ass or your face. :help: I've kinda got my ass back but I've lost my youthful face, eh.:phanvan I figure that this means that whether we get to goal or get stuck in a plateau, either way we are winners. :cool:

I tend to discriminate against heavily made up women and, like BJean, against very thin, very fit women. I tend to figure that they must be shallow and sometimes I am wrong.

Thanks to both of you for the kind b-day wishes. And by the way, I took quite a bath in scotch last night in order to render myself stupid against the dawning of my birthday. Definitely excessive behaviour but how's a grrl gonna exceed without excess? And I think it may have worked! :cool: I feel fairly numb at the moment.:rolleyes

I had a strange experience happen to me this weekend. I went up north in order to spend time with my in-laws at their cottage this past holiday - Canada Day, eh - weekend. As it happens, the folks who live next door to my in-laws spotted me loitering on the family compound. It seems that the husband commented to his wife that she should view the new Green, a half a woman, he claimed.... And so he and his wife eventually came scrambling over in order to examine the newly reduced Green.

:rolleyes I saw a cat whom I adored recently die of kidney failure and I have been wondering whether I may have fed him tainted cat food. His death was a slow and sad one. In Canada all products are identified with their country of origin even if they are packaged here. This is the law and I have only recently, since the pet food scandal actually, been paying attention to food products. I have, however, been paying attention to certain other types of products which are produced in China for over a year now; this has been ever since I read a lengthy article on how they routinely slaughter dogs and cats, and then process their fur in order to pass it off as fur which we in the West find more acceptable. Now I avoid buying anything which has fur trim and which is made in China. Up here it is easy to find fur scarves, and boots and slippers which have fur trim and which are made in China. Sometimes the fur is identified as rabbit but since reading the newspaper report I am no longer sure. I also have an interesting anecdote. One of the two physiotherapists whom I see married into a Chinese family. He recently told me that his parents-in-law will not buy soya sauce which is made in China. They don't believe that it is safe. I don't know how it is south of the border but up here we have a thriving trade in Chinese counterfeit products and this has been an on-going problem for many, many years. Of course the ports of entry are strung out along the Pacific coast and we are told that the RCMP doesn't have sufficient manpower to monitor every shipment. And so every so often they try issuing warnings to us, the citizens, that buying cheap counterfeit goods is an ethically bad and also possibly a dangerous thing. The big concern at the moment in my province is that a counterfeit version of Colgate toothpaste is being sold in the discount stores and that this product contains toxic material. It seems that the products which they are choosing to counterfeit are not high-end designer goods but the items which we consume a lot of - Duracell batteries, computer peripherals, toothpaste! - stuff for which we would be happy to pay a little less. Of course this tragedy with the animal food provided by China had nothing to do with counterfeit products. This, sadly, was on the level. And of course all those dried or canned ethnic products which come from China are now likely on the products to avoid list for cooks who routinely use them. I myself am thinking of tossing my own collection of cans of water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, baby corn, black bean sauce, my array of canned and dried mushrooms, etc. All of these items have entered the country legally but as China's manufacturing system still consists of a multitude of micro-factories with out of date technology it is understandable that many of the modern requirements which we take for granted will be unreliable. The standards of production will not be uniform and there will not be sufficient qualified personnel available to inspect and to insist upon a correct standard of quality. This is because China is a very, very large country and she is still an emerging economy. Perhaps it may help you to understand China if you were to remember your own history a hundred years ago. In China there is still no big agriculture nor many big factories. China is still an aggregate of small farmers and tiny factories. The production of these small farmers and those tiny factories are then harvested by larger - usually state - business concerns which then market these products to the West. There are many Chinese folks living in my city and I have many Chinese friends. I have always had high regards for both my friends and for the Chinese culture though I know little about it but I find that I have mixed feelings about the rise of the new China. I am concerned about the environmental and cultural damage that I see as being a very real possibility in the new emerging China. I see the new China as possibly on the cusp of experiencing the same extraordinary economic, social, and cultural success as the American Republic began to experience in the late 1880s, a success which allowed America to dominate the 20th century, but, unlike the United States, this is a country which is in no way ethically prepared for this, I think. For though China has made, as we all know, extraordinary strides with respect to her economy, and must be given her props for this, this is a culture which still does not understand, let alone value, the notion of collaborative thinking. Some of us call this notion of collaborative thinking democracy. Domocracy is fine concept which we treasure. :clap2::clap2::clap2::clap2::clap2: And, ooof! It is Independence Day tomorrow and it was Canada Day on July da 1st. And by the way Green is going to be uncelebrating her birthday on Independence Day, eh. :help: Tomorrow is when Green drifts deeper into her rusting years, eh. blehhh, fer green. or whatever. :rolleyes

Yah! I am no longer being mistaken for being a decade younger either and this is quite a shock. :phanvan Good thing I am getting my face renovated/restored this fall. The downside is that it is gonna hurt a lot more than the band installation did. :omg:

If they behave like some of the other species of monkeys I've read about they have a tendency to throw their poop! :omg:

Green had lots and lots of fun with her man. :eyebrows: But I don't think he noticed the legs. He had been away for a month. I could have been covered in fur.... I could have been an orangutang and still got lucky. heh heh :heh: He is still talking about my weight loss, though. :D It's good to know that there is a plumber in the house.

Yep, I read about this study. Interesting.

My mother had been taking coumadin for some years when she had knee replacement surgery at the age of 82. She survived the operation and went on to live a further 5 years. Surgery is certainly much more complicated when you are taking an anti-coagulent and I would imagine that you will have to be off coumadin for at least a week before your surgery. Your surgeon may also want access to more machines and trained personnel if something arises during your operation. You must remember that no doctor wants anything to go wrong on his watch and so if you are approved you need not worry. I would suggest that you PM your questions concerning your medical condition and the operation to Was A Bubble Butt. She is a member of this site and she is also someone who is very knowledgable on medical procedures. She is, you see, a very experienced and knowlegable nurse as well as being a fellow lapbander. She does not post in this thread but she posts in many other threads and I cannot think of anyone more capable of answering your questions. Of course I am sending you all my wishes for your success with respect to getting yourself banded.

I had just finished my bath and some extensive shaving (drain clogging) activities when my husband arrived home from a month of working in Mexico. Sadly for me, he did not bring home any duty-free scotch, jewellery, or perfume *sob* but he did bring home himself and a great NSV. He said: Omigawd, have you ever lost weight! As for my hairy legs, I figure that they are a family curse which comes from my Scottish side, an environmental adaptation caused by centuries of wearing kilts in a cold climate. Wow! :mad: I wonder just how thick the fur on a Scotsman's sporran is; they don't wear underwear under those skirts, you know. Haha Ooooh,....Green's legs feel, oh, so smooth.....! :faint: