green

Cool! He should be living with his sister.

Don't do potluck. Skip on stuff like limos, and expensive flowers. People will continue to remember the food they ate at your wedding long after they have forgotten about the flowers and the dresses (unlike they are really, really ugly - then they will remember!) and all of that other stuff. I went to my nephew's wedding about a year and a half ago and I don't remember much about it except the food which wasn't very good and the company which was. Go cheap on the clothing - you are only going to wear it once - and make sure the food is good. People will love you for it. A buffet is nicer than plates of rubber chicken, mashed potatoes, and steamed veg.

I took your quiz and it seems that my candidate would be Obama if I were allowed to vote.

Jon Stewart has a pretty intelligent show, I think. And unlike the pundits on the serious shows, he is not a gasbag. :tired I also believe that when you are examining politics you need a little humour; it helps stop a grrl from getting angry or crying. :heh:

Yep, WMD exist in Pakistan, a Muslim nation ruled by a warlord which has not been invaded?? Iraq, a WMD-free Muslim nation ruled by a warlord which has been invaded!! And which of these two nations has been friendly to the Taliban who are supporters of al Qaeda, the ostensible reason why there is military engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan???? Ah, but Iraq has oil.

It would be a much more fitting punishment to toss him into the general prison population. From all that I have read the men hate kiddy rapers and will treat him so cruelly that he will wish he were dead.

The guy and his sister sound like a pair of a$$h!!!s Dump him, go home to your parents, and let him and his sister deal with the rent issues. Make it their problem, not yours! There are lots of nice men around, ones who do respect their wives, and do make it a point to have the money to pay their bills. You can do better, grrl.

Of course, now I still have the mysterious throat thing to worry about! blehhhh

Thanks for your kind words. It turns out that my band has not slipped and Dr. Yau couldn't see any sign of the hiatus hernia that was visible in the set of X-rays taken last summer. He figures that the hernia must dropped back into place once the band had been loosened. He suggests that I see an Ears, Nose and Throat Doc about my croaking voice. He also doesn't thinK I should be filled until my voice-thing gets sorted out. He was looking especially attractive in his radiation outfit. :eyebrows:

Nina has made excellent points. Most of sub-Saharan Africa is pretty much a write-off. Since the European colonial powers have left these countries they have descended into misery, blind cruelty, and chaos. These nations are now either under the control of brutal strongmen such as Mugabe and the late, great, and utterly infamous Idi Amin, or they are torn apart by brutal tribal warfare. In the case of Rwanda, the country erupted into a slaughter-fest when the two dominant tribes, the Hutus and the Tutsis, decided to take turns exterminating each other. (I suggest that you research this tragedy; google it.) In countries such as Liberia and Sierra Leone civilization has long ago entirely broken down; these are countries where there are child soldiers and where the common practice of those who raid villages for new conscripts is to slice off the hands of those folks who don't make the grade. (Again, this is worth looking into.) And there is that on-going miserable mess in Darfur.... I do not believe that Bush's claim that America is in Iraq in order to bring democracy to a beleaguered people. This is simply spin and only the simple-minded are going to swallow this particular line of bu!!Sh!T. Nor did Iraq pose, after they received that successful smack-down following their ill-judged attempt to annex Kuwait, any kind of threat to the west. The country was being closely monitored by the U.N. with respect to weapons of mass destruction. There was a trained and experienced multi-national team under the guidance of Hans Blix. Moreover, the Iraqis were being subjected to international blockades; these people no longer had access to any foreign products, items which they really needed, including medicines. Sadam Hussein certainly was a cruel and morally repulsive man. He was also a modernist and as such did not favour fundamentalist movements such as the Taliban or al Qaeda. And when Bush first proposed to Congress his intention to attack Iraq, Hans Blix did state that his team had discovered zero signs of WMDs on Iraqi territory. The al Qaeda certainly were/are hiding out in Afghanistan and in Pakistan as is the case with the Taliban. This is the place where all those fun fundamentalists do find a home and the border between these two countries is porous. Why attack Iraq, a country which was ruled by a despot who was not a religious fanatic? And a country which had learned its lesson after the first Gulf War? Personally, I suspect that much of this was about oil, and this is what folks call Realpolitik, and I think much of this had to do with the fact that Bush was too busy reading his Bible instead of reading more contemporary information on these issues. As I have mentioned in an earlier post, Iraq and Iran have traditionally been enemies. Now that Iraq has been rendered harmless by the American invasion - and of course no weapons of mass destructions were ever found, eh - Iran no longer has to worry about any countervailing force in the region. The local ecology has been buggered up, I figure. But don't lets none of us talk white hats against the forces of evil, eh. Not while the West chooses to leave Africa, that sink hole of humanity, to rot. The truth is that whatever we choose to do is always an amalgam of kindness and self-interest. Let us not fool ourselves.

Man, so far 2008 is not proving to be yer best year.... Chinese New Year kicks in sometime in February; maybe then your luck will change.

That is a bummer and as another atheist I won't be praying but my thoughts are certainly with you. Doing the job-hunting thang is always stressful. :think And congratulations on your weight loss, grrl! I have been keeping an eye on your ticker, eh.

I was one of those women who was unable to use the IUD. This is because I suffered badly from terrible cramps during the first day and a half with my period. I also turned into a raving hysteric for a couple of days before the onset and all my men knew by my lunatic behaviour when I was due. Until I was 30 I was on the Pill but later on I shifted to using a diaphragm and spermicide. This was because I was and still am a smoker and the Pill was counter-indicated. I would have liked to have have had my tubes tied but no doctor would do this for me because I was too young and had never had children! Actually, because of my dreadful problems with cramps, what I really wanted was to have the equipment removed altogether. After all I had no interest in using it except for recreation. It was only when a doctor pointed out that I might lose my ability to have orgasms that I dropped my request to be spayed. I became unwillingly pregnant when I was 33, while using the diaphragm and spermicide method. I arranged to have an abortion ASAP. Now, Gadget, I can easily understand that there are women who do bitterly regret their abortions and certainly it is these women who will seek a caring individual like yourself out in order to talk about their grief. It is unlikely that they would gravitate to someone like myself in order to talk about such things just as it would be unlikely that you would meet someone like me, a person who has no regrets, within the context of your daily life. It is the miracle of the internet which has brought all of us, folks who are so very different, together. Your friend's story is compelling but then so, arguably, is mine; however, in the final analysis the only thing these stories display is that different women have had different experiences with abortion, some of 'em positive and some of 'em negative. Nina, re paying for IUDs, etc: Americans don't have government-sponsored health care. They pay for a lot of things which are covered under the British health care system. So do Canadians. While we do have national health care, it is less comprehensive than yours.

Cavechick, I am pleased you like the name, I agree with you that educating the women may well be part of the answer though this will be a tricky business. You see, this will mean that the men will feel threatened and resentful. They will not wish to concede their control. You must understand that Islam is primarily a third world religion; it is popular in poor, underdeveloped, largely agrarian, not industrialised, countries. It is what those people have got and its teachings have been seized upon by many of these people and used in order to set them apart from the rest of mankind, to make them feel special, and to make them feel better, more spiritual than the affluent, powerful, and corrupt west. You must also understand that in most of these countries the primary targets are not in fact the much-hated west but each other. There are powerful tribe and clan loyalties and much blood is constantly being shed between these warring factions. There are also a number of internal divisions of belief systems within dar al Islam, the Sunnis and the Sh'ias being the two most notable. They hate each other and once again, much blood has and continues to be shed. The majority of Iraqis are Sunnis and most Iranians are Shi'ites, by the way. They were engaged in a lengthy and very bloody border war during the 1980s. It is alleged that Iran, not wanting to waste its trained soldiers, used children on the front lines at the time. And within the Middle East, the primary focus of the various militant political parties seems to be killing each other and Israelis. The events of 9/11 were truly horrific for all of us who live inside North America, but once again, I must contend that it would be impossible for this disorganised rabble to overrun this large, heavily populated, high-tech, and extremely affluent continent and have us all reluctantly facing Mecca. To posit such a notion does, quite frankly sound, either idiotic or hate-filled. And as for those Muslim cabbies who are unhappy about dogs and booze, well let 'em miss out on making money, I say. These are people who are only acting in accordance with what they believe is a religious precept. You, as a Baptist, undoubtedly turn your back on many of the more salacious activities with which other Americans are comfortable.

My acid reflux is still not clearing up even though I was defilled last August and I have been taking prescription meds for the reflux problem for many months now. I finally got around to seeing Dr. Yau and he thinks that I might have a band slip. I am getting X-rayed very, very, very early this Monday morning at Scarborough Grace Hospital and I guess that this is when I will find out the news. Nancy from TLBC will be there which will be nice. I have mixed emotions about all of this. On one hand I am hoping that the source of all my current problems is a slipped band. On the other hand, I am aware that this means that I will have to undergo another operation, another 5 weeks of post-op diet, and will have to live with a certain queasy feeling that my band might slip again. I will be awful paranoid, eh.... I must emphasize that my choice to opt for the lapband is a move which I certainly do not regret. I was fortunate enough to be able to reach goal within 10 months. Indeed, I lost a further 5 lbs after being defilled. The lapband is a fine tool, I have found, one which certainly allowed me to liberate myself from being trapped inside this socially humiliating carapace of gigantic amounts of flesh. I guess I am taking this opportunity to praise the band and to say that I am kind of freaked out by my current problems. I am venting, is all. Green is a grrl who is under stress, eh.

I followed it to the letter, lost weight, reached goal in under a year, got defilled last summer thanx to acid reflux which won't respond to treatment and now my surgeon thinks that I might have a slippage. I will find out on Monday after I get X-rayed.

Whoa, Wheetsin, that is a serious amount of unused and unwanted fabric cluttering up your own personal landscape! You can and probably should get rid of it, certainly before it becomes casa to a nest of mice or, worse yet, a pack of rats. This is said without prejudice: we are aware that rats can be charming and intelligent. :confused: I know from previous posts that you haven't been well received by your husband's family. If you are feeling in a passive-agressive sort of mood you could gather up your unused closets' full of clothing and ship it all over to them. You could tell 'em that you are doing this in the name of caritas. :heh: Or you could do something else, like, say, offer them up to those of your local bandsters who are not as far along in the process of losing weight as you are. I guess I find myself talking this way as a packrat who found herself inundated with a flood of stuff following the deaths of her aunt and her mother. Much stuff ended up getting junked and there were squabbles between the few survivors; but these were of the nature of "you take it. No, you take it! No, you!" None of us, you see, were able to deal with the leftovers from these lives. It wasn't easy to off-load this stuff but nobody had room for it, either. My husband and I are packrats. We started living together later on when we were both a bit older, after we had both acquired all our own household poop, you know, pots and pans and dishes and the like. We like to travel and we like to bring home poop. This means that we have a lot of rugs and carvings and other ethnic stuff. And we take photos and I paint and I read and I buy a lot of books.... After the heart-breaking experience of mopping up following my mother's and my childless aunt's deaths I came to look at my own lifestyle in quite a different way. My husband and I live in a house which is visually rich, which is dense with objects that are deeply significant to us. Some of them may even be valuable but most of them are not, except to us of course. When we die all this material will be both touching and stressful for our survivors. This is one of the reasons why I now make a serious effort to give away old clothes and shoes. I am now trying to extend this practice to my library, a very big problem, and to my huge collection of CDs. Our shack is still packed but we are making a point of giving away or sharing out what we have and no longer use. It is much cheaper than paying for storage facilities. And I am dreading the day when my mate's parents end up buying the family farm, erm, croaking, eh. He is going to want to absorb into this household certain objects which hold powerful childhood memories for him, a normal reaction for sure. And right now we are totally jammed up. If you ain't using it, then do consider giving it to someone else.

I agree with Bert. People who are suffering from psychiatric difficulties cannot just simply get a grip; for those individuals who are experiencing a true depression this is completely beyond them. Their behaviour will be erratic and they will self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. Often they will have eating disorders. I know all of this because I have read up on the subject and because I am a clinical depressive. In my case it is genetic and runs in our family. I have had problems, sometimes severe, with depression all my life. Many women, however, suffer from post-natal depression. Some will suffer fairly badly and there are the rare cases of women who experience psychotic breaks with reality. We had two in my large city over the past 7 years who made the news. These were women who killed their babies and themselves. One of these women was a psychiatrist! She jumped under a subway train while holding her baby. Britney has had two children recently. She is constantly in the public eye; she has no privacy. She was laughed at for her choice of husband, for gaining weight, her bizarre behaviour is scrutinized, and she is under pressure to regain her superstar status. This is an awful lot to have to deal with when you experiencing serious psychiatric problems. I have never found her nor her music at all interesting but I do feel sorry for her now.

Well,...I always thought that if I did have children I would have to name 'em Scotch&Water and Reading. This is because these are 2 things that I really, really like and I am not over fond of babies and young children. By giving 'em names of favourite things the little creatures would stand a better chance of surviving and prospering, I figured. :heh: Perhaps you might want to take the same approach vis-a-vis your new name. By the way, I was reserving Scotch&Water for a boy, eh. :bounce:

I started out with 50 lbs to lose and was successful in meeting this goal in under a year. Because I had ruined one rotator cuff and then the other shoulder begin to blow out as well I never did manage to go to the gym during this period of time. I ate small meals and did a lot of walking during this period and that was all I did. I did, however, come back from Mexico with a bowel disorder which lasted about 5-6 weeks. During this period of time it was food in, food very quickly out again. This may have speeded up my weight loss.... I wouldn't advise using this technique, though. I would advise you to keep the faith. Surgeons do say that it usually takes two years to reach goal with the band. Those of us who manage to make it in less time are either lucky, as I was, or are very, very dedicated to the process and thus are really meticulous about counting their calories and exercising.

And I like to wear colourful socks and shoes and carry colourful bags.

Black pants, black cashmere sweaters, black cotton sweaters, black t-shirts, black capris, the same in white, and the same again in grey, plus jeans. Toss in some big white linen shirts, a straight black skirt, a pair of peridot green linen pants, and you have Green's closet. I have a few other things, too, but those are the basics. It makes dressing easy and I always look good.

Yep, I sure did love receiving my Xmas card, too, Laurend. Thank you from Green, eh. But I confess that I deal badly with Xmas. I become unglued emotionally every year even though I always swear that this will be the year when I will not. :think Anyhow, now it is 2008 and I can give my liver a well-needed rest until July da 4th - my birthday - rolls around. :phanvan I have already had one post-holiday debriefing session with my psychologist, and that has been a good thing for me. I blame my Xmas phobia and everything else on my parents. :heh:

Omigawd! I love the Simpsons and I missed this! *sob* I used to identify with Bart but lately I have been having this creepy feeling that I am turning into Homer.......... I am having a lot of d'oh moments lately. Argh! I guess stupidity is gonna havta rule.

Thanks for your feedback, luluc. I have been very interested in your own story and am awful happy that all will end well. On a personal note you may or may not be interested in learning that my religious/cultural background was as follows: my father was a Polish Jew who had managed to survive the Pogroms and my mother was Anglican. Neither of them were, however, particularly devout. In fact my dad was an atheist. As for me, I was sent off to live in an Anglo-Catholic boarding school when I was 10 years old. My first true exposure to religion happened at this point and I did pass through a period where I became quite devout. The truth is that I don't really have the knack for belief and my period of religiosity only lasted 9 months at most. It was more in the way of a fad. I now pride myself, however, that I was able to torment my parents during this time; it was, after all, my parents who chose to exile me to boarding school, eh. :heh: I had my abortion in France in the early 1980s. It is possible that you, Luluc, may have had yours in or around the same period. I had mine done in a local hospital and the medical staff were efficient and non-judgemental. The medical staff were, by the way, all women. The only place where I received attititude was at a local pharmacy when I went there in order to cash in my pre-printed array of prescription drugs. Now, as I have explained before on this thread, the French government does have a pro-birth policy and this was why I was presented with a booklet advising me of the generous array of governmental programmes which were in place for all women who are either pregnant or who have children who are below full-time school age. Any woman could freely opt for an abortion but once the appointment was made the chick was stuck with a mandatory cooling down period and she was sent away with That Booklet. The information presented in the booklet was awfully interesting. Women would have the right to government paid pre and ante natal health care. The government would pay for their maternal leave from work for something in the realm of the first year of absence but should a woman opt to remain off work for a couple of additional years in order to care for her child, her company was legally obliged to protect her job for her return. Parents could place their children in government paid pre-school as soon as their kids were 2.5 years old and toilet trained. Had I chosen to persist with my pregnancy that child would have been deemed a French citizen and would have been able to avail him or herself of an excellent health and education system. I, however, believed that I could not do this. I could not deal with pregnancy. I still have no regrets concerning my choice to abort. But I do believe that a social system which incorporates attractive options for those of us who do find ourselves pregnant is a helluva lot more honest and a helluva lot more reliable than the other option, the bunch of Jebus-driven folk who are yelling and waving signs and promising some kind of luv. So many of you get fussed about saving that foetus, it seems to me, but after the creature is successfully brought to birth? It is then that the little creature is tossed into the crapper. It is likely that raising children takes a society or yer village but it is oh so important that women really are presented with an informed choice. This really is an option which is available in France but ya gotta pay a lot of taxes in order to have this.