Author: robertjames1971

I'm wicked tall.

Charity

Daily writing prompt
If you had a million dollars to give away, who would you give it to?
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Jen and I were just discussing this the other day. Was the daily prompt eaves dropping? I wonder…

With the recent Powerball lottery coming close to two billion dollars, we had a little bit of fantasizing about what we would do with the winnings. Giving to charity was high on the list of things to do with the money but it followed spreading the wealth to our families and friends. First we take care of the kids and set them up for the future. Then we take care of our parents, my siblings, and their kids. Then we take care of some of our friends and their kids. I don’t think we would give enough to set anyone up for life, but colleges and mortgages and things like that would never be worried about again. Then we would set up a trust for ourselves in an attempt to allow us to just live off the interest earned. Sort of like a salary for ourselves that would hopefully keep us at a stable point for our future.

After all of that gets taken care of, then we start giving to charity. Our day dream didn’t include an actual dollar amount to play with, but let us just say it was a cool million dollars, which sounds like a fortune, but once you get down to it wouldn’t be enough to enact any real change for any charity. It’s the thought that counts though.

I think we would focus on medical research. My step son has type one diabetes. Finding a reputable diabetic research group would be my primary goal. I would want to give the bulk of the mil’ to them. Anything that might have a chance to make his life easier in the future.

Another research direction to give to would be finding a research group working on dementia. After what my mother went through in her final few years… I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. If we could be even the tiniest bit of help with unlocking the mystery of memory then that would be money very well spent.

One more obvious point of focus would be cancer research. My mother’s problems started with a brain tumor. One of my friends lost his seven year old son to a brain tumor. We know a few people who are dealing with prostate cancer and different forms of leukemia. Research into any of those would be worthwhile research topics to focus on.

So there you go. If I had a million dollars worth of charitable donations burning a hole in my wallet, and assuming we had already taken steps to make sure our family and friends are taken care of, then those would be a few primary targets. Chances are I would give it all to diabetes research as that would do the most good for my step son, but any of these would be worthy of my money.

Stomach Fun

It’s been an eventful day in terms of gastric bypass life today. My stomach has not really been a team player. I think if I am being honest with myself I cannot blame today’s fun on my stomach. I have to put all of the blame on myself. Which is really the same thing, isn’t it?

Twice today I have had stomach pain caused by my poor little redesigned stomach pouch being too empty. Three hours after breakfast and three hours after lunch I had stomach pain bad enough that I had to eat something to make it go away. As my doctor said when I told her about the occasional hour-three-pains, duh you’re hungry. I thought about adding something to my lunch in the hopes that it would keep me full for longer, but I felt pretty stuffed when I finished lunch and I didn’t want to risk overdoing it. Looking back, I wonder if I should have pushed things a little more. Probably not.

The next fun came during dinner. I had a couple of ounces of chicken on my plate along with a scoop of instant mashed potatoes. I had finished the chicken without issue but I really wanted to get into those potatoes, babie. Just call me a red haired Irish stereotype. I had what I thought were a couple of small bites but either they were bigger than they should have been or I just ate too fast because my stomach felt a little blocked. Something was keeping the last bite or so from getting into the tiny little redesigned stomach pouch and that leads to some real discomfort. Worse than that, it lead to those few bites of instant mashed potatoes coming back up for an encore. Yikes! Sorry about the gross TMI here folks, but I need to document this stuff for posterity… or something like that. It wasn’t bad, just a couple of blasts and it was over. This happens with mashed potatoes once in a while (not very often, but enough to spot patterns) and as usual I felt better almost immediately. I still paused on eating for about half an hour and then I finished my dinner without further issue.

The last bit of stomach excitement is happening as I type this and it really is a non-issue. I don’t like going to bed without having eaten something. It probably makes my sleep less than ideal, but it is WAY better than waking up in the middle of the night with those empty stomach pains. I try to be full when I turn in for the night and tonight I think I may have over done it a little. I was a little behind on the old protein goal so I had a small protein bar to get over the hump. Then 20 minutes later I had some crackers. The two things combined were a little too much and now I feel SUPER full. Not painfully full but a little uncomfortable. I am going to try and stay awake for another hour or so to make sure I feel better before I lay down, but hindsight tells me I should have skipped the crackers. Oh well. It’s hard to gauge what my stomach will need at night so I may actually have to eat something else before I sleep, but I doubt it. I think food and I are done with each other for the night.

So four instances of stomach issues over the course of a single day. That is a lot more than usual for difficult days and given that most days are issue free it’s WAY more than normal for the average day. None of it was really too bad. I mean the vomiting was unpleasant but only for a couple of minutes and as soon as it was over I felt fine. All in all it wasn’t bad. I’d rather a full on easy day, sans-problems, but as problematic days go this one was pretty good.

In closing, I will quote the band Traffic, whose legendary self-titled second album was released 55 years ago this month, and say who knows what tomorrow may bring?

Failure-Free

Daily writing prompt
What’s something you would attempt if you were guaranteed not to fail.
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This is a loaded question. I had to think about it for a while and I can’t decide on one single answer.

What would I try to do if I was guaranteed not to fail. My first thought was a career change. I would become a professional musician, which was my plan when I was 18 years old. Sure, there really isn’t a functioning music biz anymore, but if I was guaranteed success I would go for it.

After that thought I took a step back and tried thinking bigger. I mean, I could do anything with a guarantee of success, why think so small? I could be an astronaut. That would be sweet. Why stop there? I could be a physicist and an engineer and design and build a faster than light engine and then be the first astronaut to visit another solar system. Yeah, now we’re talking!

How about this one. I could become a tech entrepreneur, buy twitter back from that musk nazi putz, remove all of the nazis from the user base, remove all of the disinformation and make the content guaranteed to be factually accurate so that the fascists can’t spread their idiotic lies, and on top of it all I could make a Musk/Bezos level salary and then spread great big gobs of money around to huge numbers of people who could benefit from it. Yeah, that would be fun. Screw you, fascists!

After that I started thinking that I was outside of the spirit of this particular writing prompt. Maybe it’s more looking for one time events. A single thing that I would normally be afraid to try that if I were guaranteed to succeed I would give a shot. Skydiving. That was the first thing that came to mind. I would never in a billion years want to jump out of a plane, but if I were guaranteed not to end up squashed like a bug against the very unforgiving ground, would I do it? Probably not, but maybe.

No… the more I think of it, the more I would go with the successful career in whatever passes for a music business today. That’s where I would put my guaranteed-not-to-fail energies.