green

I always go for the eggs. And maybe a bit of bacon if it is crisp and doesn't have much fat. Tomato juice and a gallon of coffee.

Why do you have to order the dress so soon if the wedding is in October?

I suspect that this Scientology infomercial must have been a Tom Cruise initiative; no expert in the art of spin would have written a script quite this stunningly dumb. It is entirely devoid of anything in the way of factual information.

Hi, ash. Once again I find myself delighting in the joys of the internet. As you may already know, it is thanks to the internet that Gadget and myself, two individuals who hold opposing views on this issue, are able to meet and to talk with each other, and, dare I say, have both a certain degree of respect and fondness for each other even though we occupy positions in what may be considered to be enemy camps. And now you are truly part of the internet world, I figure. You see, you have chosen to engage in this complicated debate, and by doing so you are finding that you are experiencing an array of arguments both in favour and against freedom of choice. You will find this interesting, I am sure. Welcome to the discussion, grrl, sez Grrrn.

Doddie, my approach to this project was quite different. I stopped weighing myself when I was 25 years old which was a long, long time ago. I knew that I was getting fat only by the fact that I was needing to buy bigger and bigger clothes and by looking at myself in the mirror. The first time I weighed myself after all these years was the morning of my band operation. I discovered that I weighed 200lbs. After I was banded I never did bother to buy a scale. I was still kinda phobic about the notion of weighing myself. But everytime I went in for a fill I did request an official weigh-in on TLBC's high-tech scale and I found that I was losing weight. At home I relied on NSVs and I had many positive NSVs throughout this journey. Dropping clothes sizes was a gas and having my mate telling me that I was losing weight in my face or on my stomach sure was nice. After awhile my weight loss became sufficiently noticeable that folks in the neighbourhood began to comment and that, too, was kind of cool. I am inclined to think that we should all understand that the healthiest weight loss is that which comes slowly; a weight loss of this nature permits our bodies to gradually readjust to lower setpoints. But the truth is that miracle weight loss is what we all want, do we not? For close to a year before I had myself banded I would find myself still awake at 3 AM, unable to fall asleep, grabbing up great handfuls of my belly flesh, and feeling choked by a dreadful sense of self-loathing and powerlessness to do anything about controlling the continuing creep of lard. In brief, I was very, very f/messed up about this biz of fattiness. It is always terrifying for us, is it not, for we are like everyone else - except that our bodies have gone spinning out of our control. The band has definitely saved my arse and it has shaved a bunch of inches of it, too. It occurs to me that too much weighing might be a bad thing. I have heard that many folks have experienced significant loss of inches during their plateau periods. This is an indication that the body is readjusting itself, I figure. And as for those of us who are hitting the gym biz in a big way, it is important to remember that muscle weighs much more than fat and yet it takes up way less space in your body. Of interest is the fact that muscles, even when they are at rest, burn up more energy (calories) than does anything else. This is why men tend to gain weight less easily than women and lose it with less trouble. And thus my advice: don't allow yourself to get overly hung up on the results of your scale; this may be counter productive. There are a raft of NSVs to which you might wish pay more attention, attach more significance.

Well, I have good news and bad news. I mentioned earlier on this thread that my band hasn't slipped and the hiatus hernia seems to have dropped back into place but my voice still sounds lousy, eh. This has been going on for months now and I can hardly talk. I saw my doc the other day and she is gonna refer me to another specialist. I also have bronchial problems which never did clear up and so I am now back on a raft of inhalers. Ugh! Of course I am now worrying that I have cancer. The good news is that even though I have been unfilled since last August I haven't gained any weight. In fact, I have lost about 7 lbs since my defill. I weighed myself while at the doctor's office and I weighed 143; this was dressed, with boots on and a very full bladder!

I am definitely not as smart as I used to be. I don't remember new words the way I used to. This really freaks me out.

[quote name=Jack;689911 whatever you do' date=' DON'T give a gift of a case of the varieties of 'an entire set of Rice-a-roni'...don't ask how I know this...[/quote] :rose::prrr: I really want to ask, ya know.........

Yep, nothing says luv to a man like a slab of red meat and some carbs! followed by some hot whoopee!! I know that I have always been able to eat a rare filet with my band provided that I chew, chew, chew! And that's okay by me since the only way I like my beef is when it looks like it has just been slaughtered! It sure is a nice way to get your protein.

Family dynamics are always complicated and dysfunctional family dynamics even more so. My father's mother died when he was an infant and my mother's father died when she was 6. They grew up in families without opposite sex role models. In the case of my father, he grew up poor in an anti-Semitic country, Poland. He was looked after by the older kids in the family. The family was grindingly poor and he was often beaten by his family and bullied by the Gentile schoolkids. My grandmother much preferred my mother's younger sister. She grew to be very competitive with my mother as my mum began to grow up. It is interesting to note that I was exiled to boarding school as soon as I began showing signs of puberty. As for my father, he could be a real charmer when he was in a good mood, and he was both generous and very intelligent. Both my parents were extremely charming individuals and very intelligent. But he was often psychologically abusive, and a real emotional bully. We all lived in fear of his moods. I guess the sins of the fathers really are visited on the children, eh. I am quite certain that I would have made a poor parent myself.

A rare steak. Cook the dude a high quality piece of meat and cook it rare. Close to hemmorhaging on the plate. Serve it with whatever he likes to drink although the ideal booze would be a really good red wine, a bordeaux or a burgundy. Men like red meat and high quality rare meat is kinda wet and thus is band friendly as long as you chew, chew, chew. He will eat most of the meat, you know. The vegies you serve along with this must be not be canned or frozen. You could, for instance, serve fresh green beans slightly blanched and then sauteed in butter/olive oil with garlic plus mashed potatoes but mash them spuds with yogurt or low fat sour creme and lots of garlic. This makes them taste especially rich and yummy. If the two of you eat garlic together you will be able to make successful whoopee. Trust me. I used to live with a Frenchman. Ply him with garlic, red meat, and his favourite alcohol and all will be just fine.......... Green knows about these things.

I love your post. Thanks, eh. To tell you the truth, I don't actually watch Oprah. I don't like daytime TV and I hate talk shows but I do read about her and everything that I have read about her - and bear in mind that we all know just how bitchy media journalism can be! - has portrayed her as being a very caring, generous, and moral individual. She also happens to be a wonderful actress, a savvy media person, and a fine business woman. She is a very, very impressive individual. I don't see any of the other women who have managed to obtain anything near her standing - Ellen deGeneris, Martha Stewart, Rosie O'Donell, etc - putting as much back into the community; and she has, as we well know, chosen to make it her special point to address those issues which concern all women and those issues which concern black people.

I don't know why Oprah spent so much money on that one project when so many people are in need. I am also curious as to why. I do, however, have some ideas. It is likely - she seems to have made it her mission to help people, hasn't she? - that she does quietly give to many other charities but wanted to this particular project to receive lots of publicity in order to encourage other similar projects in this part of the world. While there certainly is poverty in this continent it does not match the misery found in Africa. In theory most if not all people here who work hard and have dreams can receive some kind of education, get a job, have a roof over their head, hot and cold running Water, a television, sufficient food in order to thrive, and even some kind of health care in the case of an emergency. This is not the case in Africa. This continent really is the poorest and most dysfunctional place on earth. Oprah may feel that by giving these black girls an education she is making a tiny but significant difference. She may be hoping that these girls will go on to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses and will work within their communities. Building a school is a great idea; you are teaching people to help themselves, not to rely on hand-outs. As for the give-aways which she does to those in her audience, well, she undoubtedly derives a lot of personal pleasure doing surprising folks with gifts but these stunts are really all part of show business. I don't see that these hand-outs are fundamentally any different than the big prizes in those contestant shows; they are all gimmicks designed to get you to watch the show, aren't they? And as such they are corporate tax write-offs. To complain, therefore, that these gifts are stealing from America's poor is both illogical and unfair.

I used to look very young for my age but the thinner I got the older I looked. This is why I had a face lift after I got to goal weight. The first week or so after the face lift was the most hideous experience of my life but now that everything is settling down I am really glad that I have had it done. Now I am beginning to fantasize about having a tummy tuck.

In my town our local humane society is always looking for people to foster animals. You might want to start by phoning your local humane society or animal shelter.

Yep, I would smack him, too.

LOL Me, too! I'm good unless they start looking for an old fart with landing lights on her ass!

Transformer, I am looking forward to hearing more about your platform.

Yah, I've often wondered how Snopes got to be such an authority, too.

Lemon does marry up real nice with cruciferous vegies and parmesan and butter. Blanche brussel sprouts, then saute them in butter with a little onion. Put them on a plate with real parmesan, not the stuff in a box, grate a little black pepper, and squeeze a little lemon juice. Toss and eat. Verrrry yummy.

I believe that most if not all university educated individuals of my age or younger have had at least one youthful experience with the softer illegal drugs. This is just a question of demographics, not morality. To tell you the truth, I believe that those individuals who deny this are either lying and who wants to elect a liar or are telling the truth and this only indicates that the individual is a rule-bound and unadventurous sissy, and who needs who needs a pussy like this as the president of their country? Obama does have working class roots, he is also an intellectual, and it seems that he is skilled at building concensus. Building consensus was something at which he was very skilled when he was involved in community work amongst the poor, disenfranchised, and angry folk; as we are all aware, it is a challenge to build consensus among people who have feelings of rage. I guess I didn't bother to mention that Obama is a Baptist because the mindset concerning this bizness of religion is so completely different up here in Canada. The truth is that most Canadians really do consider that religion has no place in affairs of state and this is why we often have no idea as to what religious affiliations our politicos may have, if any, when they run for office. Our politicians usually opt to keep their religious biz private and our media complies with this. Truth is, religion is a non-issue and we generally don't find ourselves thinking about it when we are assessing the possible worth of our elected representatives. There were a couple of individuals, however, who did become leaders of our fractured conservative party over the past couple of decades, individuals who hailed from our own little Bible Belt and who did make clear that they were also closely affiliated with fundamentalist churches. It was as much for this reason as any other that the right wing up here in Canada was kept wandering in the wilderness for almost two decades. Though many Canadians would like to see a fiscal shift to the right, few of us are comfortable with the socio-religious right wing movement. This interest in belief is very much an American thang. This is why it simply did not occur to me to list Obama's religious street cred amongst his many charms, BJean. Such info is at best completely invisible to Canadians. But yah, for what is worth, Obama is also a Baptist. I have read that he always carries a Bible with him. I will also mention that there has been an ugly and libellous email which has been making its rounds on the internet concerning Obama and his middle name. This email draws inferences on his belief system which are untrue. In brief, the email is part of a smear campaign. Of course, there are many stupid allegations made on the internet about many things. This is why all internet fans should bookmark and regularly refer to Snopes.com. This is the site which will tell you which tales are true, which are not, and give you the history. I believe I provided you all with the exact site address earlier on in this thread. Go there, snoop around, learn, and enjoy. It is a fun site.:cool:

Bwahahaha! :eek: I am sure that we have all got our own lists of folks we want to see sacrificed. I wonder how many of them are family, in-laws, and co-workers, eh? :cool: I would like to offer up my loony next door neighbour. And yep, the Mayans did apparently had some kind of weird sport where the loser did end up being sacrificed. It did involve a ball. Maybe it was some kind of proto-Soccer? I saw a couple of the playing fields when I was on a trip in Mexico. The losers were healthy young males by the way. In other cultures the chosen sacrificial lamb was a beautiful young virgin. Chosing to burn a bunch of babies in one fell swoop would be an act of tribal suicide. It simply does not make sense on any level, neither on the psychological plane nor in terms of tribal survival.

Yes, I must admit that I found myself dealing with the outrageous shock of self-recognition while reading the news coverage of this research. You see, I had been kind of neglectful of both parents when they became mouldies, especially when compared to many of my friends and I sure had been feeling kind of lousy about this lack of loving filial behaviour although I was certainly powerless to mend my ways no matter however much I tried at the time. But my parents had been quite careless of me when I was a child. Indeed they went so far as to ship me off to a boarding school against my will when I was 10 and they gave my bedroom to one of the two younger brothers. I was left with a kind of a provisional crib during my visits home for a number of years until they finally felt too, too guilty about the fact that their only daughter didn't have her own bedroom. To put this in perspective you must understand that my aunt, who was living with us, had her own bedroom and my dad had his office/cigar room at this time. In light of this study you might want to look again at your sibling's treatment of her parent. This does not mean that you need like her nor even forgive her but only that you may find it an interesting exercise to examine her behaviour within the framework of the child-parent dynamic.

I have just finished reading a long article about Obama in one of our Canadian newspapers. This paper is a broadsheet and the article was spread over three pages. His mother was a white woman from a modest mid-western family. His father, a foreign student from Kenya, abandoned his mother and himself when he was a toddler. For some years he lived with his maternal grandparents who had moved to Hawaii. While he was living with them he attended a private school as a scholarship student. It seems that is was there when he began to feel his sense of otherness; there are very few blacks, only 2% of the general population in fact, who live in Hawaii. In his autobiography he is quite frank about the fact that during his teenage years he did go through a period of feeling alienation and anger and did get into drug abuse and boozing. This should not be surprising; most teens do feel rebellious, and this kid had been abandoned by his father, and then sent home to live with his grandparents by his mother who was by then living in Indonesia, an additional act of abandonment when viewed through the eyes of a child. Obama has been upfront about his teenage feelings of anomie and the result of this, a juvenile period in which he did abuse alcohol, and certain drugs. Now, this is the point where I want to ask the following question: what is the big deal about juvenile experience in drug experimentation and alcohol abuse, eh? The simple truth is that most of the boomer generation who went to college smoked a little dope and many tried out the hallucinogenics. It was, after all, the flower power generation, was it not? And the truth was that snorting coke did become kind of a mainstream activity during the 1980s. Why, your mini-Bush himself admits to having had problems with alcohol and coke. Obama acted out while he was a teenager. He then went on to successfuly obtain an undergraduate degree as a scholarship student. He then opted to work for a group of inner city churches, ones who ministered to a troubled and largely black community. Still later he successfully completed Harvard Law, again as a scholarship student, and again opted to work with inner city communities - this, though he had been courted by Big Law. The woman whom he married is another Harvard Law grad, and she, too, comes from a working class background. Obama is certainly not from a filthy rich background, and he has already been walking the walk, I believe. He has been actively engaging in grass roots activities; indeed he had made community work his career, not just his hobby. While I have little* against Hillary Clinton, I suspect that Obama would be a much better choice as candidate. If you want to leave young Americans out of American politics and keep 'em feeling disaffected and out of the polling stations, then by all means let the Republicans and the Democrats choose two old warhorses as their candidates and let those who bother to get up off their arses in order to vote continue to be the middle-aged and elderly. In the eyes of the young the status quo will continue to rule. And the alienation will continue. *As for Hillary, I do have uneasy feelings about her. She did do an about face on the invasion of Iraq, yet it is my understanding that she never did provide an acceptable explanation for this. This leads me to suspect that she may not be sufficiently adroit in understanding the complexities of foreign issues and the role which international diplomacy should and usually does play in global business. As for trashing her with respect to her relationship with her husband, I do believe that this is a cheap and unfair shot. While it is a wide-spread belief in America that self-respecting women (and men) must immediately kick unfaithful mates to the curb this belief is not true of all cultures. Europeans are more comfortable with the notion of physical infidelity, even when this concerns their elected leaders. They understand that marriages can be awfully complicated and that in some cases mates who are profoundly attached to each other will make accomodations for sexual practices which fall outside the one man-one woman rule. Indeed, as some of you are well aware, there are cultures in which a man is permitted to have more than one wife/concubines/mistresses. While it is true that neither you or I may not wish to share our mates, it is certainly unfair to judge an individual's ability to function well in one arena, in this case as President of a world power, by her choice to continue on loving or at least liking her spouse. I would like to remind you that one of your very best presidents ever, the fabulous FDR, had a splendid wife and a mistress throughout his presidency. Girls and boys do lead complicated lives. This is inevitable but most often largely irrelevant. You want to concern yourself with platform, political ability, and statecraft, and leadership - and, uh, that kind of thing - when chosing your country's leader for the next four years.

It is great hearing from you! Looking forward to hearing more and seeing pics. Take care and write lots, eh.