Tag: anniversary

Two Year Anniversary Weigh In

I can’t believe it has been two years. It simultaneously feels like yesterday and a thousand years ago.

Saturday (two days ago) was the two year anniversary of my weight loss surgery. The full gastric bypass procedure that my guts and I went through on May 4, 2022 has changed my life, health wise.

When I list off the best decisions I have made in my life, Marrying Jen is first by a landslide. It is first by a tidal wave. Not just marrying her, but going on that first date, moving in together, meeting the kids, all of it. That’s number one and nothing else even comes close.

It’s a close call for the second most important decision in my life. It might be going back to school in 1997 and everything that came with it over the following seven years or so that lead to my Bachelors degree. If it’s not that, then it’s getting the gastric bypass surgery. From a health care stand point, the surgery is definitely number one. Even after all of this time I still cannot believe how different I feel. It’s starting to become less impactful as I am more and more removed from my former self, but I’m still close enough to the changes that when I stop and think of it I still can’t believe it.

I weighed 452 pounds when I started the process. I weighed about 431 pounds when I actually went under the knife. On Saturday I celebrated the second anniversary by stepping on the scale. I weighed 211.2 pounds. One decimal point placement away from a Rush reference. Ah, hells. I am down 220.2 pounds since surgery and 240.8 pounds since deciding to have the surgery. My brain can’t wrap itself around the idea that I have lost more weight than I currently weigh. I lost the equivalent of a mildly overweight adult male.

It hasn’t been easy. It will never be easy. I am always at the mercy of my newly redesigned stomach. Every now and then it’s going to rebel and show me who’s boss. It happened last Friday and it destroyed me for about 18 hours. Here we are three days later and I am still not quite right. I had a plan for lunch today and I scrapped it because my stomach was feeling weird. It was a little pain, a little gassy discomfort, and a little bit just a sense of being wrong. I’m on edge right now for all things stomach so I errored on the side of caution and went with something very light and simple and small for lunch. We’ll see how I feel in a few hours when it comes to dinner time.

Would I recommend this surgery to everyone? I don’t know. I don’t think so. The variables involved are a combination of how bad is your situation and how difficult is the post-processing. I almost went through with this thing a few years before I did, but the idea of all of the restrictions post-op scared me away. Never eating sugar again? Never drinking soda again? No, I wasn’t up for that at the time. Then in 2022 I was in such a terrible state with my weight that suddenly those brutal restrictions (not to mention the changes to how you eat and when you eat and how you chew and how you swallow your food and all of that) seemed like a small price to pay.

It worked out for me. I don’t want to be the kind of guy who encourages people to go through this sort of thing. You need to come to that conclusion on your own. For me though… I would do it all again in a heartbeat. No question. No hesitation. It is the best decision I’ve ever made for my health. Apart from being with my wife and my family, it’s probably the best decision I’ve ever made, period.

Wish me and my new digestive system a happy 2nd anniversary. Many happy returns, you wild and crazy, temperamental stomach.

Flickr Turning 20?

Flickr, the photography site that I have been an avid user of since 2009, even though it’s been sort of overlooked and forgotten by most of the social media and photography universe, is going to celebrate it’s 20th birthday next month. The big day is a few days after my wife’s birthday, and a week-ish after my step son’s birthday, which is also my nephew’s birthday.

https://www.threads.net/@flickr/post/C2f3EUUyu8R

I guess Threads embeds still don’t work with wordpress.com. Hmmm…

This might work better… friggin’ zuckerberg…

Anyway, they have a bunch of things planned including some photowalks. I don’t see anything scheduled for Boston and even if they do schedule something it’s 99.9999% guaranteed that I would not join in, even from a social distance. Still… it would be nice, right? Granted, not nice enough for me to try to get something started. No way in hell would Mr Introvert do something crazy like that. No thank you.

Anyway, Flickr’s birthday is February 10th. Take some pictures to celebrate.

Sad Day

Today should be a good day. It’s Geddy Lee’s 70th birthday.

It’s also the anniversary of the day that Neil Peart joined Rush, so for Rush fans it’s a two-for-one deal.

Unfortunately it is a sad day for my family. Today should have been my parents’ 56th wedding anniversary. Instead, it’s the first wedding anniversary without my mother. The first one since she passed away. My father is having a tough time today, but he’ll make it through all right. I hope he’s all right at least. He’s sad and he misses her and he just wants to be alone.

I miss my mother. We all do. We always will. Happy anniversary, mom and dad.

Oh, and to make matters worse as I was finishing up the last sentence I started having a migraine. Oh good.

Work Anniversary

I almost forgot about this one. Fortunately I am a nerd and added it as a recurring date on my Google calendar many years ago. Today is a noteworthy day, but this date next year will be a much more important occasion.

On this date, July 12, in the year 2004 I started a new job. 19 years later, I’m still here. 19 years, one promotion, countless reorganizations, one wedding, one house purchase, two high school graduations, one college graduation (and counting), one ridiculously invasive stomach surgery, and one continuing global pandemic later, and I am still here.

My 19th workaversary is a big deal, but my 20th next year… that will be a big deal. We’ll see what happens in the meantime. For now at least, go have a piece of cake or something to celebrate for me. You know, have the kind of sugary thing that I can’t eat anymore in honor of me not getting sacked at all over the last 19 years.

Patch Rabbit

One year ago today, my beloved wife Jennifer without whom I never would have been able to get through any of the challenges of the past year brought me a cute little stuffed bunny to keep me company on my overnight in the hospital. It was the same color as our cat Patches, and she named it Patch Rabbit.

Patch Rabbit sat with me through the entire month of recovery that followed the surgery, and since then she has been sitting on the window sill next to my desk in the cellar office. I just thought I should include my bunny friend in the anniversary celebration by using her for today’s photo-a-day challenge.

246/365
246/365

Before and After

Before (May 4, 2022):

After (May 4, 2023):

I still have the pair of jeans you see in the before photo. I might put them on and take a bonus mirror selfie, just for laughs. I mean, that is literally the reason I never got rid of those pants.

These pics are screen shots from one of two selfie-a-day apps I have been using. The plan was to take a selfie a day for the first year, then upgrade the apps to the paid versions and save off a video of all of the pictures. I will do that today and upload the videos here. I failed to take a shot a day. Failed miserably in fact. I think I have around 300 pics in both apps. We’ll see how they look.

In closing, when I typed the title of this post the song of the same name from the very first Rush album, released 49 years ago, popped into my head and I am hoping it will stay there for a while.

One Year

I can’t believe it’s been a year since I went under the knife.

My head is spinning a little today. In most fitting fashion, I woke up with a bit of a queasy stomach. Hopefully breakfast will clear that up. It’s just fitting, that’s all.

I weighed myself. I’ll share that later. It was really good. I’m also planning on a before and after selfie because why not, right? It’s been a year and I haven’t died of any weird complications. That’s worth celebrating, right?

May the 4th be with you, friends and neighbors. Maybe I’ll watch Empire Strikes Back while I exercise today. No, I’ll just continue the epic X Files binge. Maybe I’ll watch an episode of a Disney+ show. Andor maybe?

What a crazy day in this completely crazy new world.

May Music

I’m super tired tonight but I hit all of my food and exercise goals without any stomach issues and I managed to find a little time to start working on a song idea. The May music goal is 10 songs. Think of it as a music project to honor my birthday, my surgery anniversary, my and Jen’s wedding anniversary, our first Mother’s Day without my mother, and Bellana’s graduation.

There’s a lot to celebrate this month. There is a ton to be thankful for. There’s one thing to be sad about, but I can also be thankful for that day too if I look at it as celebrating my step kids’ mother instead of focusing the loss of my mother.

It’s all worth some new music. I just wish I had talent so I could come up with something worthy of it all.

ADDENDUM: I knew I was forgetting an event. May is also my step daughter, Bellana’s birthday month! Add her turning 22 to the list of things to celebrate this month.

Three Years Today

Three years. Bullshit.

Today is March 13, 2023. On March 13, 2020 we left the office in Waltham at 5:30pm and the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown started. I mean we all had our own individual experience as we did not have a functioning Federal government at the time, we just had a nazi cunt in the White House pretending to run a Federal government. We were all sort of left on our own while more civilized societies worked together. Yeah, I ‘member.

So Jen’s company sent everyone home after work on Wednesday and my company sent us home after work on Friday. The kids both came home around the same time. Bellana was on Spring Break and they just had everyone stay home. Harry was still in high school so his experience was more closely similar to mine. Just one day he was told to stay home and telecommute.

So that’s how it all started. Today? Today the pandemic is still a thing, but our society is more or less ignoring it. Very few of us are still wearing masks. Most of us in the Tech industry are still working from home for the most part, but we’re being pulled back into the office more and more often. My company has us coming in once a week. My fingers are crossed that at some point soon we’ll eliminate that requirement, but that hope is not based on any actual evidence. Jen’s company closed their buildings, but they are still pulling people in to temporary work sites now and then. I don’t know anyone who is still 100% working from home.

In my family, we’re all vaccinated up the wazoo, and every time a booster is made available we jump on it. It hasn’t stopped anyone from contracting Covid-19 but it has drastically reduced the severity for most of us. Jen and I haven’t caught it at all. Three years of precautions have been successful for us. Sure, we’ve over done it and we continue to over do it to some extent, but we’re still Covid-Free.

And that, folks is the long and the short of it. They told us to expect to be working from home for a couple of weeks and it’s turned into three years. It’s not even unusual anymore. It’s not even “the new normal” anymore. It’s just normal now. As Bruce Hornsby and the Range once said, that’s just the way it is.

Happy third quaren-versary, folks. Do something fun at home by yourself to celebrate.