green

Laurend, I have missed you and I am pleased that you have come home wearing your band new hardware. :biggrin1::biggrin1::biggrin1::biggrin1::biggrin1:

Yep, I actually have met a few who claim to think that way. I personally like to think that they are exaggerating in order to watch Green blow up like a balloon. :phanvan LOL :car: As for those individuals who do exploit the welfare system...how are they any different from those large corporations that also exploit the system for their own profit? In both cases the honest citizen is the one who suffers a blow to the wallet. :car:

It would depend in part on the kids. I did live with a man who had 3 boys and we did intend to get married. His children were really nice kids and they were at interesting ages by the time I knew them. He was also a very hands-on kind of parent and so I wasn't expected to be anything much other than a caring adult friend to them. This arrangement suited them and it suited me because I am not at all maternal. I would certainly not date or live with a man who was raising a baby or very tiny children.

I am built much like your husband, nume130. I have a horror of being touched by anyone other than my sexual partner.

I think Lee4 wants to discuss ideas with the rest of us. His literary style is unconventional and is often difficult to understand.

It is human nature to ignore what doesn't affect us directly. When we lived in small villages it was natural for the community to come together in order to assist a neighbour family who was in trouble. Misery had a face and of course we were anxious to help. This reaction is still seen when one family's troubles are profiled on the local news; people want to send money to the family in order to help them out. It is when the families in trouble become statistics that we begin to stop caring and that is why we do need government programmes to do what we are no longer capable of doing as individuals. Let's face it; few of us live in tiny villages anymore. We don't know our neighbours in that old-fashioned way. And as for welfare bums, well, nobody approves of this behaviour. The difference in philosophy is that some of us believe that not everyone who is on welfare is a bum. And there are many folks who are members of the working poor. These people are going to need access to government assistance programmes, too.

Well, I was presented with enough meat, meat that came in scary forms like hotdogs and pork sausages, that it would have constipated a lesser woman than moi. There was a noticeable lack of fresh vegetables except for those which had been overcooked before reaching my plate. (And I had brought with me some drop dead gorgeous field tomatoes! *bitter sigh*) Fortunately the ma-in-law serves meager portions of this stuff. I ended up dosing my nosh with soya sauce/hot sauce in order to provoke some excitement. And there was an utter absence of eggs. I like eggs and believe that they are much healthier than a skinny pink weiner in a white bun or a clutch of sausages of dubious content. An egg or two with a couple of slices of tomato would have been nice, I found myself thinking from time to time while I was clawing at my mosquito bites. This is how I made my second discovery: it might actually be impossible to eat a good meal once you leave the city. Certainly out of town restaurant dining is risky business. The second morning that I was there I murmured to the mate that we should go out for breakfast. We did go to a place which used to be good but now it has new owners. They offered Eggs Benedict on the menu and it was written that the Hollandaise was home-made. :hungry: I was awful excited for I love eggs Benny! :whoo: What I got was a couple of eggs that had been poached until they were hard sitting on slabs of meat that were so thick they masked the taste of the egg. And an enormous mound of fries which were merely shaped like home fries. Those spuds had come directly out of the deep fryer and onto my plate. There was a light spattering of raw cooking onion bits here and there. Oh, ugh! :car: During our long and boring drive home we stopped off at a restaurant. I ordered a caesar salad. This arrived with commercially made croutons and the leaves were clotted with some sort of off-white goo. Dead f***ing nasty, it was! :car: I haven't eaten well for days now. I believe that after I have a bath we are going out to the local Mexican restaurant for huevos rancheros. :biggrin1:

Urgh! Green has got the blues. She has just come home from spending a number of days in the Canadian wilderness at her in-law's cottage. Bad food, many, many bug bites, some weight gain, and, oh yah, really bad food! Apart from the trillion goddam bugs not too many animals, eh. haha :heh:

Haha. Thanks, kiddo, from Charlie green. I gotta confess I always feel talking with you, grrl.:kiss2:

So sorry, Gadget, for much as I respect you and enjoy many of our communications I must insist that the glory of your great country was that it was created as a haven from religious specificity. The folks who framed your Constitution were careful. They wanted to make this document both an open and a closed one; that is to say that they were anxious to ensure that all Americans would find themselves welcome in their home and at the same time they wished to ensure that their Constitution - and thus the freedom of all American citizens - would remain impregnable from any attack. To hinge the health of your citizens upon such private and religiously based charities as those which you list in your post isn't right. Universal is universal and this is the profound, indeed revolutionary power of your American Constitution. Your Constitution is the first state document ever which formally guarantees the same protection for all citizens residing in its territory. I am fully aware that America did undergo a war in order to obtain its independence. Indeed I share your birthdate, 4th of July. What I guess I wish to emphasize is that your birth was, apart from the war of Independence, extremely interesting. Those who framed your Constitution were very anxious to make sure that everyone who chose to come to America would be made welcome and would be regarded as being of equal value and as having equal voice. This is why I find myself getting antsy over the notion of health care being made available to those who are in distress under a religious or partisan banner. Inclusive is better, I think.

I am truly horrified by some of the notions which I have been reading about universal/socialised health care in the past few pages of this thread. As you all know I live in Canada, one of those countries where we have universal health care. We still do have the right to choose our doctors. I have tried out and rejected a number of individuals before choosing my doc. We do have clean sheets in our hospitals. We do have modern medical techniques. We do have medical accountability. We do have a booming economy. We are an affluent country. Our economy is globally connected and is based on the capitalist model. Oh, and as to the weirdest objection to universal medicare, the one about lawsuits - this lawsuit culture is one which is specific to the United States. It is simply impossible in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and inside industrialised Europe to levy dollar damages of an American scale. In fact my brother's one hesitation about moving stateside in order to practice medicine was the enormous insurance malpractice liability payments which each and every American doctor must pay in order to cover his/her arse. While medical lawsuits do happen in Canada, these depend on the tragic results of specific misbehaviour. An individual who has suffered a heart attack in a Walmart's parking lot after having ignored a lot of general good advice cannot expect to sue and win anything in most countries. And indeed why should they?

It is important to recognise those feelings to which you have a right. You should not feel that you must mask these because they are not kind, nurturing, forgiving, Christian, or lady-like. At the same time it is important that none of us indulge in victimology. This is a fine line indeed as such fellow members as Monk will tell us.

I am very much with BJean on this issue. I have suffered from feelings of anger and bouts of major depression throughout my life and it is difficult, especially difficult for us women, to sort through these emotions and 'own' those which are rightfully ours. Strong emotions are difficult for the civilized human creature to deal with and such emotions are particularly difficult for women to deal with because they are considered to be crude, brutish, irrational, uncivilized, and unfeminine. On my initial visit with my psychologist, a woman to whom I had been referred by my doc during a recent and the most crippling bout of depression I have ever experienced, she wanted to know what was wrong. I said I was so depressed I could hardly move and I also mentioned that I had major anger management issues. I answered that I was prone to either aggressive responses or to hostile fantasies towards those who irritated me. She listened to all of this, a list of my personal wounds and failures, and then told me that I was a step ahead of most women. She said that women were kind of nervous about owning up to the really savage emotions, rage being the biggy. And what a surprise for me! I thought that I was such a poor woman because I was so animal like, because I was and still am such an angry grrl. Go figure, eh......

<p>Oooh, Green is currently preening her kinda sorta thinnish and rather prune-like self. <img src="http://www.LapBandTalk.com/images/smilies/kiss2.gif" border="0" alt="" title="Kiss2" smilieid="154" class="inlineimg" /><img src="http://www.LapBandTalk.com/images/smilies/kiss2.gif" border="0" alt="" title="Kiss2" smilieid="154" class="inlineimg" /><img src="http://www.LapBandTalk.com/images/smilies/kiss2.gif" border="0" alt="" title="Kiss2" smilieid="154" class="inlineimg" /><img src="http://www.LapBandTalk.com/images/smilies/kiss2.gif" border="0" alt="" title="Kiss2" smilieid="154" class="inlineimg" /></p>

I believe that everyone has the right to comment on any topic regarding children. Those of us who do not have children are still members of the human race and though we have not met the second half of the equation - we have not become parents - we certainly were children. Indeed it might be argued that it is because of the damage we sustained during round one that we have opted out of entering into round two. We all should be allowed a voice, I think.

The above post was horribly long winded and I wish to give my appologies.

I have a good friend who is black and who was born in St. Lucia. She immigrated to Canada as a young woman. She initially gained access to this country on a foreign worker's visa, she was working as a nanny and a domestic, and after she had served her time she was allowed, as is permissable under Canadian immigration law, to obtain Landed Immigrant status. This is equivalent, for you American readers, to obtaining a Green Card. Now, this lovely black woman will not ever, ever date a black man. She claims that the ones whom she meets are quite crude in the way that they approach her, that they have no courtship skills, and that they are not ambitious in the way that white men are ambitious. This is a serious woman, she ain't laid back, and so she is left unamused by such courtship behaviour which might include calls of yo! Yo, mama, mama, mama...... She also wants to see major evidence of ambition in a man; she wants to see that he has finished school, that he values education, that he has been working on making himself financially sound, has a house, isn't an alchoholic or a drug abuser, has no debts, that he lives a clean and tidy life. Green's friend is a very, very conservative woman and who can blame her. She wants to have children and she is aware that that she must find a solid mate in order that she and her family flourish. At the same time I suspect that my friend has become a wee bit of a racist. A handful of a years ago I was at a party where I met and spent considerable amount of time in the company of a fabulous guy. He was a lawyer and he had lived for some number of years in Japan earning his way by teaching English. I myself was quasi in love even though I am happily lodged in a long term relationship. The fascinating cat happened to be black and my black grrlfriend was also at the party. Now I am not one of those individuals who believe that people should or must be attracted to each other solely on the basis of race, nationality, creed, or colour - far from it! - but what interested me was that my grrlfriend felt something in the way of an active antipathy towards this individual. I am inclined to wonder whether this was a kind of thoughtless racism. As for my grrlfriend's disinclination to consider men of her own race as serious contenders in the mate race, she is younger than I am, she is also much more serious about her immediate life plans, she is ambitious, hardworking, and she wants a family, a stable, healthy and secure family. Within the framework of these requirements I do not know whether I would feel comfortable saddling her with the racist label. And I can understand her not being interested in the guy whom I found so fascinating. One man's fish is another man's poison. I guess I am just confused. I guess I merely introduce this story because I believe that it has some relevance to the discussion. Different cultural groups do have different reputations and though much of this will lead to stereotyping we should be prepared to acknowledge that there is no smoke where there is no fire. The question is how much fire? and how relevant is this to us? Is my friend being practical or is she being a racist? Or were her initial assessments practical? and is she now in danger of being a racist towards all black men? By the way I want to assure you that my St. Lucian girlfriend is real and that some of her plainspoken attitudes surprise and often shock a few of our other whitebread politically correct Canadian friends. Now that I have worked hard to try to explain as I see it the interplay of the individual as against the stereotype, I find myself acknowledging that we cannot ignore the information provided by the stereotype. Um, let me be more precise, not the old-fashioned ignorant stereotypes....the one which figures in so many of our prejudices, eh. We are, however, different in ever so many ways and there are social scientists which collect the data on all of this and quantify it. Nevertheless, much of these differences are so obvious that it is not necessary for a cadre of researchers to move in, examine us, and then list to us our own awful and incomprehensible differences. We are all different on an individual and personal basis; this is true. It is also true that that we all fall into larger categories and that these larger categories share similarities between themselves and have differences with other categories. Take me for instance: I am a white kinda left-wingish university-educated Canadian female and I am an atheist. This indicates that I am going to be a lousy mate for most Americans, and almost all Hispanics, Filipinos, Orientals, Africans, Muslims, members of third world/developing countries, the Vatican, countries which value machismo, etc. If I was going to hunt for a mate my best shot would be to trawl in the Scandinavian countries (countries which are largely atheist, have socialised medicine - as do all the countries of western Europe - and where a significant proportion of the population have post secondary education.) Failing that my second best would be to spend my time looking for a mate in Great Briton, Germany, France or to come on home to my own native land. All of these locales are environments which are comfortable and indeed prize the kind of individual which I am. This is perhaps why I find myself less offended by the specificity of lee4's question that many of you do. I have been also under the impression - but I might be awfully blonde on this issue - that lee4 has been carrying on a cybernet relationship with his sweetie for some considerable period now and that he only submitted his question about Filipinas and love after the fact. Of course I might be wrong and if you, lee4, are involved in doing wife shopping on line through some sort of grrl selling business, well, then I don't know what to say. There is a big part of me that is inclined to say that this is your business and caveat emptor which is the fancy Latin way of saying buyer beware, eh. The truth is that I cannot fault you for wanting a lovely and loving wife for yourself and for your kids. And the truth is that I cannot fault a lovely Filipina lady for wanting a fine life for herself and for her family. What we are looking at here is a business of emotional as well as practical economics. It is customary in most of the world that marriages are arranged; marriage comes first and love will follow. It is also true that women who fall within Green's demographic are going to run into trouble. It is equally true that a black Canadian woman can opt to dismiss all black men and can be so hard arsed about this that she can shock her milky-skinned friends with what they see as being racism.

WasaBB is entirely correct. Many "big" businesses are run on the franchise plan and so when you do business at your local Quizno's you are dealing with a local owner and local workers whom he/she has hired. This means that when a local Quizno's has gone belly-up a local family has lost their business and a source for local unskilled labour has disappeared, too. As for tipping in such places as the Olive Garden, well, whether the place is a franchise or a local outlet of a national conglomerate, certainly the waitstaff are local. These individuals are likely to be young people and may even be the kids of friends of yours or your parents. When you tip them you are giving back into your local economy. And although I have already stated that I have mixed feelings about the concept of tipping it has become established as part of the service industry economy. By stiffing someone for his or her tip you are not going to revolutionise the industry. You are, however, going to hurt a specific individual. This is an unkind act. I figure that if you have enough bucks to eat in a restaurant then you have enough backs to tip the waiter for the tip is part of the price of your meal. And by the way, nursekathy, I have got to say that I am oh so charmed by your gorgeous loosey-goosey fun way with some dollars here and there. I've got a hunch that what you are doing is a bunch of fun, mo fun than givin' to charity or payin' taxes in a socialised state. You go, grrl!

To tell you the truth, vallin, I am a politickally correct and sensitive Canadian and thus I find that I cannot bring myself to name the minority group/s who have a tougher time of making a success of life in Canada, specifically urban Canada (for this is where most new immigrants now come) for fear of stigmatising this/these group/s on LBT. I wouldn't want to be responsible for LBT folk thinking dismissive or unkind thoughts about entire groups of individuals. But the fact that some of our new citizens have many more problems becoming successful citizens is an issue in my large and multicultural city. And we Canadians are far too polite and far too sensitive to point this out and ask why. I really am sorry that my answer to your question is so vague but this is the best that I can do. :phanvan

I love having gone from the W for wide size pants to size 12/10 normo pants. I love the compliments. I love having a healthy BMI. I love having leftover food to take home whenever I eat in a restaurant. I love not being hungry all the time.

Hi to Lisa in TO and to everyone else from Green in TO. I was at the TLBC this morning in order to get a small defill and I met a clutch of newbies who were coming in for their first fills. This was kinda fun. They asked me lots of questions and this reminded me of my first fill and all the worries I had at the time. I was banded last September and I am now down around my target weight; I weigh 148 lbs. My BMI is 23.9. I am very, very pleased about all of this. I am, however, finding some of the "shock and awe" reactions which I have been getting kind of strange to deal with. I hadn't realised that people had been noticing that I was fat, you see. In regard to your questions about the operation, Rose S, I was 57 when I was banded and I had very little difficulty recovering from the surgery. The first 3 days I spent reading, napping, and really enjoying the pain meds while staying in bed. The 4th day I got up, had a bath, got dressed and spent the day on the internet. The worst pains I had were from gas. I should have walked around more than I did; that would have helped make them go away faster.

I have known 2 guys, both white, who have married Filipinas and both of them have wonderful marriages. Both of these guys met and courted their wives here in Canada. I also know a Filipino-Canadian who is in his mid-50s who sent home for a young wife. She was in her early 20s. Well, that marriage didn't last long and it cost him a lot of money, too! I have worked with a lot of Filipino men over the years and they have been a great bunch of guys to know and to work along side. Most of them are pretty relaxed, laid-back folks with a great sense of humour. They are also generous about sharing tools and job knowledge. I have also met a lot of Filipinas and they are just as nice. The cuisine is great although there are a couple of delicacies which might cause an American or Canadian to go into culture shock.

That salad sounds good.

Yah, that bit of logic shocked me, too!!!! :faint::faint::faint:

Wow! Your post just reminded me that we had coin-operated toilets in all the department stores, etc in Toronto when I was a kid but everyone would hold the door open for the next person as they exited the cubicle which totally defeated the greedy pee merchants. Now we can all pee for free. Yippee!