My poor baby had a bad, bad morning. Go give him some love.
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Your burning questions, answered!
From my comments:
Will there be a house remodeling journal? Good thing Fred got all that practice painting in your current house. What are your plans for the kitties being able to go outdoors? Whatever you come up with I am sure it will be uber perfecto. I am so happy and excited for all of you. You are going to have so much fun!
One more thing… you mean they do not have open enrollment at Spud’s school?
There probably won’t be a separate house remodeling journal – we’ll just write about it in our journals as we go, though we might designate a “house remodeling” category. We plan to let the cats outdoors, because one of the many things we want to do is put up a privacy fence to fence off a good part of the yard right behind the fence. We’ll probably also put a cat door in the back door (we were talking about using the laundry room as a foster cat room, but decided to use the laundry room to put the litter box in, and to put a cat door in the back door) so they can get in and out during the day.
Considering that we’re moving to the country, I shudder to think of what they’ll be bringing inside the house. Field mice, I’m sure, and lots of them!
And no, apparently they don’t have open enrollment at her school. I think the superintendent was thrown for a loop when Fred talked to him yesterday, because he acted like he’d just never ever heard of such a thing.
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Why not turn the room above the garage into your workout room or a young adult room for spud??
Because we’ve been talking, and I think we’re going to wall off part of it and use half for storage and half for a foster cat room. We’ll need to put an air conditioning unit in there, and some kind of heating unit, but I think putting the foster cats up there would be a perfect solution!
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As for that concrete pad, you could get one of those canvas or vinyl or whatever tent-top things, or hey, how about you put a HOT TUB out there?
We’re actually talking about putting a gazebo out there – but I kind of like the idea of a hot tub, too! I’m sure we’ll talk it to death before we ever get close to doing anything!
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Also – I noticed the way you slipped in that the laundry room may also be the foster cat room in the picture descriptions. You’re going to foster again???
Yes indeed! In fact, once I find out I don’t have some exotic liver disease or they take out my gallbladder or whatever, once that’s all in the past, I’m going to be fostering while we live here, since the boys are over a year old and Fred said it was okay with him.
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How ever will you keep the kitties in rein in that “yard”???
A privacy fence should do it, although Fred jokingly (I think!) suggested that he could put an electric fence around the entire property and put collars on all the cats.
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I guess you will be renovating it before you move in?
Where are you going to put the workout room??
What will the neighborhood be like for your walking?
It’ll mostly be repainting and maybe some sheetrocking on the inside of the house. We do plan to replace the tubs in the bathrooms and stuff like that, but not right away. We just want to get everything painted and looking the way we want it, and then we can work on the other stuff.
The workout room is going to be in one side of the garage, I think. Fred’s going to park in the other side of the garage. We thought about putting the workout stuff in the bonus room on the second floor of the garage, but some of that equipment is really heavy and like I mentioned above, we want to build a foster cat room up there and use the rest for storage.
The road the house is on is a kind of sleepy country road (although around 5 pm the traffic picks up a bit). I think as long as I walk facing traffic so I know when to step off to the side and wear some kind of reflective gear (god, I just got an image of myself in a reflective vest. I’m going to look like a complete DORK, aren’t I? Better dork than dead, though!), I should be okay. I need to use
Gmaps pedometer to map out a route!
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Just make sure the inspector looks for termites. Lots of wood happening in that old house.
Fred already asked; there’s a termite bond on the house.
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You always eat so well (something I struggle with some days) and I was wondering if you still weigh/measure your foods? Approximately how much are you eating nowadays?
Ever since I got back from Maine, I haven’t done much weighing or measuring of food, because I’ve been crazy busy (which is a BAD excuse). I mostly eat the three meals a day, along with the occasional snack. I can eat more than you’d expect, but still way less than I could before the surgery. An example of my eating yesterday would be:
Breakfast: Onion and cheese omelet (1 whole egg, three whites), mini container of yogurt (I buy the 40-calorie containers of Dannon Light & Fit), 1/2 peach (without the skin. I hate that fuzz.).
Lunch: 4 oz boiled shrimp with homemade cocktail sauce (low-carb ketchup, a bit of horseradish), small salad with a drizzle of ranch dressing, and a melted string cheese.
Midafternoon: I piece of ham with rolled up with a slice of 2% sharp cheddar.
Dinner: Hamburger patty with mushrooms and onions on top (VERY GOOD), 1/2 a corn on the cob and a couple of slices of tomato.
Evening: Mini container of yogurt
That’s fairly typical, except for the occasional day when I can tempt Fred into going out for dinner – which has happened too often since I got back from Maine, I’m a bad influence – and lately we’ve kind of been on a Mexican kick.
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There is only one thing that I wonder about…Where is MY bedroom??
Over the garage, with the foster cats, of course. You could be their caretaker, and I’ll just show up every once in a while to love on them!
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Oh, and are you guys going to add a pool?
We’ve talked about it, but at this point we’re leaning towards “no.” That could change, though!
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I am wondering how you are feeling emotionally, and psycologically about your weight loss thus far, as opposed to the fears you had in the beginning?
Because I’m a worrywart, I worry a lot. Mostly about things like, what if I can’t get to my goal weight? What if I get to my goal weight and keep losing? What if I start looking like Nicole Richie in a drapey skin suit? I mean, don’t get me wrong – I don’t spend all my time worrying. I’m thrilled I’ve lost so much weight, and sometimes I stare at myself in the mirror in amazement. When Fred and I talk about how much I’m currently weighing (as we did last Thursday, which was my most recent weigh-in day), I said “Yeah, it was 288.5. I guess I should be happy I lost three pounds!” and he said “288.5.” and I said “Yeah, I lost three pounds!” and he said again “288.5.” and I sighed and said “Yes! WHAT?” and he rolled his eyes and said “I think you mean
188.5, Bessie.” And I do that ALL the time. It’s like being in the 100s just hasn’t sunk in yet, like it’s not real.
I have to say, most of the fears I had right after surgery were of the physical sort – because you always hear about people who have complications due to the surgery and end up dying. God knows I haunted the
Complications board at ObesityHelp.com so much I was driving myself crazy and had to stay away for a while.
As far as my attachment to food goes, I’m not going to lie – sometimes I wish I could sit down and eat half a box of Little Debbies the way I could before surgery. I miss the sweet, cakey foods sometimes. But when it comes down to it, I know in my mind, if I haven’t accepted it completely emotionally, that the fact that I could be that attached to a kind of food is exactly the reason I needed to have that surgery. It’s a built-in security system. Could I eat half a box of Little Debbies? Sure I could, given enough time and enough liquid to wash it down with. But I’d end up running to the toilet all afternoon. And who the hell wants that?
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What does the spud think about the WLS. It’s probably easier because she’s older, but I wonder what effects my surgery will have on the kids as they get older. I’m trying to teach them the positive stuff and be simple yet honest about what I went through. I’m also trying to have a positive self image around them. That’s pretty hard at times especially with the extra skin.. blech!
She hasn’t had much to say about it, but I don’t think she’s as weirded out by it as she was before I had the surgery. I’m sure she thought that once I had the surgery I wasn’t going to ever be able to eat more than a tablespoon of food at a time (which is a falsity, in case you were wondering), and would never be able to eat anything “good” again (I have the occasional bite of Fred’s ice cream or Friday junk food). I think she’s got a pretty positive self-image. She’s not freaky about her weight, but she knows (from watching us) how to eat right, and she’ll occasionally weigh herself. She’s been right around her current weight for a few years now, and considering the fact that she weighs about 50 pounds less than I did when I was her age, I’d say she’s doing pretty well!
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Do you like the climate in Alabama better or the climate in Maine better OVERALL?
I think if I HAD to choose one, I’d choose Alabama. Because we can wear shorts up until about Thanksgiving down here, whereas in Maine it’s ALREADY getting down into the 40s at night. And it’s only the middle of August! If I were within a couple of hours of the beach, it’d pretty much be perfect. Except for the poisonous snakes and spiders, that is.
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What was it about your current home that made you decide to buy it, and what is it that makes you want to move out of it?
The fact that we’d sold our previous house (in 9 days, no less!) and couldn’t seem to find a house we agreed on made us pretty desperate. Even back then we were talking about getting a smaller house in the country, but every house we looked at, Fred didn’t like. He’d gotten spoiled with the ten-minute drive to work, and the house I liked the most –
this one – was, according to Fred, too far from Huntsville. It ended up being the same with pretty much every house that was out in the country that we looked at. Too far out in the country. Too old. Too small. Finally, we just started looking at houses in Madison, and I pretty much went along with whatever Fred decided. We made an offer on
a house in the subdivision we’re in now, but someone else made an offer faster (which was okay with me – I didn’t like the house as much as Fred did). We made an offer on a
second house (second picture down) in this subdivision, but then Fred found that the windows were rotting around the outside. We made an offer on a
THIRD house (third picture down) in this subdivision, but Fred really thought the house was too small (I disagreed), and at the first sign of trouble (see
this entry), we pulled out.
And then we saw this house for sale, a house that was more than we wanted to spend, was smaller than the house we were selling, and so we walked through it and liked it well enough and I was SO SICK of the stress of looking that I insisted we just make a fucking offer and get it over with.
Don’t get me wrong – this is a pretty good house, but I think that if we’d had more time to look instead of feeling like we were going to be homeless if we didn’t find a house pronto, we might have found something a little better for us.
As far as what makes us want to move out: the neighbors, the neighbors’ kids (I don’t mind kids, but it annoys the FUCKING SHIT out of me when they tromp across our front lawn three feet from the computer room window), the fact that the neighbor spent an entire summer tromping up and down the property line, sighing and looking annoyed before she spoke to Fred and asked him not to mow over the property line, and… did I mention the neighbors? The neighbors to our left, we like. They’ve got a thousand small boys, but they don’t tromp all over our lawn, and they don’t annoy us. The neighbors to our right, well, I don’t mind telling you, I think they might have
bugs up their asses. I won’t miss them at ALL.
Other than the neighbors, the fact that our back lawn overlooks an extremely busy road, have only about half an acre (could be less, I don’t remember exactly), and have to drive down a street laden with children with the potential to run out into the street at any moment are other reasons we’re happy to sell.
I just hope we’ll be able to get this house sold!
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When you first started walking, how far & how fast did you start at and, by how much in distance did you increase it & by what increments of time?
Right after the surgery, I was walking, about half a mile, I think. After a week or so, I increased it to about 2 miles (there’s a loop that goes out of the neighborhood one way and back in another that comes in a little over 2 miles). Then I think I increased it to 3.something miles (3.2, maybe?) that was basically the 2-mile loop, with a walk into a neighborhood across the street. And then I increased it to 4.17 miles by adding a loop in that neighborhood into some side streets. I will most likely be sticking with 4.17 miles for the time being, because it takes me an hour and 10 minutes to walk, and I think that’s plenty of exercise. I don’t really recall how long the 1/2 mile walk took (possibly about 20 minutes, because I was still moving pretty slow at that point). I’m pretty sure the 2-mile loop was taking me 42ish minutes, and when I first started walking the 4.17 miles, it took me an hour and 20 minutes. Which means I’ve cut 10 minutes off my time!
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What were your thoughts re: gastric bypass vs. gastric banding as you did research during your decision-making process? Would you consider an alternate procedure now that you’ve been thru the one you ultimately chose?
Actually, had my insurance covered it, I would have had lap-band surgery. That’s the one I wanted – it’s a pretty safe surgery, from all I’ve read, because it’s completely reversible, there’s no rearrangement of your insides, and at two years out, the weight loss for lap-band patients is comparable to an RNY patient. If I had to do it over again and this time my insurance would pay for lap-band surgery, I still think that’s the one I’d opt for. Not that I regret having the RNY – the results have been fairly amazing – but things like getting sick and bloated and gassy when I eat rice is something I could live without.
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Okay – I have more questions to answer, but I’m saving them for tomorrow, because it’s after 1, and I have an appointment to take E’gar in for a long-overdue oil change and tire-rotation and balance. If you have any questions, leave ’em in the comments, and I’ll get to them tomorrow. If you already asked in the comments and I didn’t answer you today, look for your answer for tomorrow. AND if you asked a question and I answered it but I didn’t make sense (always a possibility!) or you need clarification, say so in the comments and I’ll get to that tomorrow.
Clear as mud?
See you tomorrow!
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He’s such a WEIRD cat. That’s oatmeal he’s eating.
Check out the flying oatmeal. Heh!
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Previously
2005: No entry.
2004: Oh, by the way? When you tell someone “Don’t worry, I won’t be back to read your journal”? Please. EVERYONE knows that means “I’m going to come back every six seconds to see the reactions to my asshole comment”.
2003: No entry.
2002: CHECK THOSE FEEDBACKS, people!
2001: 16 miles. Yeah, baby!
2000: I swear to god, that cat is half monkey.]]>