Tag: gas

What’s the Verdict?

Here’s my third post about my lunch-in-the-office food experiment. What’s the verdict? Are peanuts at lunch time causing me to have moderately annoying gas pains by dinner time? Did skipping the peanut course of today’s lunch allow me to be gas free after work?

Nope.

I’m feeling about the same tonight as I usually feel after a day in the office. Gassy to the point of uncomfortable.

Well… shit.

No, not really. This is good. This implies that I can still have peanuts without worrying about my stomach acting badly afterwards. The bad news is that I still don’t have an answer to why I feel different on days I work in the office compared to days I work at home.

I will figure this out eventually. I’ll crack the code.

Food Experiment

This is one of those he-had-gastric-bypass-surgery posts. You’ve been warned.

I am doing a small food experiment today. I am hoping I do not get the results that I expect I will get.

I work in the office twice a week. Over the last couple of months I have noticed a trend. When I leave work I am dealing with some major gas pain. I thought it had to do with me having something to eat on the drive home and then being too stuffed for dinner, but the last couple of office days I have cut way down on the food I eat in the afternoon before dinner, and the gas pain has still been a thing.

I had a (very minor) epiphany on Monday. I think I know what’s going on. I bring the same lunch every time I go to the office. One serving of Purdue Chicken Bites (12 little mini chicken nuggets) that I heat up in the microwave, and then one serving (either 2.0 oz or 2.6 oz, depending on the brand) of peanuts. Combined it works out to 22 grams of protein, which is pretty good for that small a meal. Sometimes I’ll have some crackers or some sugar free candy with my lunch as well.

I have Purdue chicken, in various shapes and sizes, all the time. I have the sugar free candy and crackers all the time too. Peanuts though… in the early days of post-surgery solid foods I had peanuts all the time. Over the last year or so I have sort of lost interest in them and have only been eating them with lunch in the office. My question to myself then is this: Why didn’t that set off a red flag sooner?

Are the peanuts causing the afternoon/evening gas issues? It seems likely, doesn’t it? Today’s experiment then is to not have peanuts with lunch and then see what happens. I like peanuts. They are a good source of protein and they are tasty and while it’s true I have grown a little tired of eating them lately, I don’t want to have to stop. If peanuts turn out to be a problem… well that just sucks. I haven’t thought of an alternative yet. I will. Today I’ll just have a small protein bar with lunch to make up the difference, but going forward I’ll find something else.

We’ll see how today’s experiment goes, and then one day next week we’ll do it again and see if we get the same results. Then I’ll decide what to do going forward.

Until then… here’s an airplane for today’s photo a day challenge pic.

307/365

Tuesday Morning

Wednesdays are my commute to the office days, but this week I have an in-person meeting on Tuesday as well. Here I sit, in the office.

The commute was okay, but a little exciting. My car told me my gas tank had about 97 miles worth of gas left in it. My GPS told me the office was 73 miles away (today’s meeting is not in my regular building, it’s much farther away). I did the complex math in my head and decided not to stop for gas.

All through the drive I kept updating that very complicated mathematical equation to make sure I was still going to get to the building without running out of gas, and hopefully also have enough gas left over to get me to a gas station when I leave. Everything worked out. My car was yelling at me to fill-‘er-up by the time I parked, but outside of that… success.

The only downside of the trip is that I gave myself a couple of errands to run before I left the house, and I got them all done… but I forgot it’s Tuesday and not Wednesday and I forgot to put the trash barrel out on the street. Ugh. It’s okay, there wasn’t much in it this week, but who knows how it will look next week. Wish me luck, folks.

Prep

I mentioned in yesterday’s daily writing prompt post… I think it was yesterday’s at least… that I’ve been writing pointless blog posts for about 17 years. I did something today that I have never, in all that time, done before. It has to do with my dumb haikus for you’s thing.

I have a new note on my iPhone where I have already written tomorrow’s haiku for you.

I did prep work. Really. I feel so gross. Like, this page is supposed to be spontaneous brain droppings, right? Where do I get off doing prep work?

Whatever. Anyway…

I have a couple of tasks for work that I wanted to crank out this weekend. It’s 7:11pm on the final day of this glorious three day weekend and I haven’t even started them yet. What the hell is wrong with me?

I had a bad case of what my mother used to call “the hungry horrors” after lunch today. I feel like I had a full days worth of between meal snacks in the space of about 30 minutes. It turned me into a giant gas bomb that’s ready to burst at any moment. It wasn’t bad enough to ruin dinner (I didn’t eat anything for four hours prior to dinner) but it’s left me uncomfortable and distracted. Blah. I have to push through and get that work done before I go to sleep tonight. Moron.

Okay, time for Robert to buckle down.

No Road Trip

We were going to drive to Vermont and visit the kids but my stomach is off a little today and a 3-4 hour drive while in this state is not a good idea. We’ll try again another day.

As I sit and wait for my stomach to calm down after my lunch’s french fries I have been watching Doctor Who like it’s going out of style. I finished season seven of the original show and I am down to the last couple of episodes of season 12 of the new show. Right now I am taking a pause from the Doc to deal with some gear acquisition syndrome.

I mentioned my little Nikon point and shoot camera (Coolpix S7000) is on the fritz. I want to replace it with another pocket sized point and shoot but the research I’ve done online is staggeringly depressing. The one camera that I keep looking at, to the point of almost drooling over, is a Ricoch GRIII. It looks like the pocket sized point and shoot of the gods. Feature wise it looks as good as my Nikon Z5 mirrorless, outside of the ability to swap lenses though.

Unfortunately this little bugger costs almost as much as my Z5. It costs a friggin’ fortune at nearly a grand in US dollars. WAY too expensive for what I am looking for. Way too expensive by light years. Every other manufacturers competitor is even more expensive too, and also a little bigger which defeats the purpose.

There is no way I would spend this much money on a pocket point and shoot, but holy shit snacks kids do I want one of these suckers. Woah is me, right?

Not Bad, Just Weird

So last night. It wasn’t bad, it was just weird. Weird in that I haven’t experienced anything quite like it before, but also in the way that it mirrored the bad time from the night before without actually being all that bad.

I went to bed at around 10:30 and dropped off to sleep pretty much instantly. After the mess that was Wednesday night, that was all I had hoped for. I woke up around 1:00am feeling a bit nauseous. I actually spit up into my CPAP mask, just a little bit. I guess my fears about wearing it the night before we justified? I got to the bathroom, spit up a little more, and felt better. I never vomited and the nausea passed quickly. In it’s wake was some gas pain. That scared me. Any pain in the stomach would, after all of the crap from Wednesday. Unlike Wednesday though I was able to lay back down without getting worse and I actually went back to sleep for half an hour or so.

I woke up again and the pain in my stomach was worse, but still not like the night before. It felt like gas still, but it also felt like hunger. I got up for a tiny little snack and brought it back to the bedroom and had it. When I did that on Wednesday I immediately knew that it wasn’t going to help. Last night I didn’t have that feeling. It may have helped a little, but really burping helped more.

I sat up in bed for a little while, then went back to the bathroom, which I also did on Wednesday night, but that didn’t help. The pain was there, but it was never even remotely as bad as the night before. Wednesday was probably a 6-7 on the pain scale from 1-10. Thursday was maybe a 3-4. I was still burping and farting a lot and I was afraid I was going to wake Jen with all the racket so, like Wednesday, I went out to the living room.

This was the point where things went out of control on Wednesday. I was a little afraid of a repeat, but pretty sure it wasn’t going to happen. I was able to lay down on the couch, which I couldn’t do the night before, and I actually fell asleep again. I didn’t have my CPAP machine so I would sleep for a little while then wake up then repeat. At 4:30 or so Jen came out looking for me and I reassured her that apart from some gas I was fine. She asked if I could go back to bed and I did. I changed my alarm from 5:00am (for yogging purposes) to 7:00am to help with the exhaustion a little. I didn’t put my CPAP machine on because of the drool factor. I need to clean that sucker tonight. I slept until about 6:00 and then just drifted between dozing and awake until 7:00.

So all in all it wasn’t a bad night, just weird. I could have stayed in bed the whole time but I was afraid I would make too much noise and wake up my dearest. I really wanted her to have a good night’s sleep. I messed her sleep up the night before and I absolutely did not want to do that again.

Tonight? I guess we’ll have to see. I am thinking about sunrise photos at Salisbury Beach tomorrow so hopefully I’ll get a good sleep before waking up stupidly early in the morning. We’ll see how it goes, I guess. I am sure it will be fine.

Take a Step Back

I thought I was doing all right yesterday. I had a bit of a blocked up stomach at lunch time, but there wasn’t any pain. I just needed to be patient while it passed.

Dinner was different. I had a mostly protein bar and snack dinner because we started lunch super late. I over did it. No blocked stomach or any fun like that, I just ate too much. I was super stuffed at first, but then it morphed into one of the worst stomach aches I’ve had since surgery. It was bad, but the pain wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that it just didn’t stop.

The fun started at about quarter after 8:00pm. Around 11:00pm I was sitting up in bed, really wanting to go to sleep, but in too much pain to try. Around midnight I was still a mess but I tried to lay down. It didn’t work. Laying down made things worse. I moved to the living room so I could try to sleep sitting up. I think I nodded off for a few minutes a couple of times. Around 2:00am I went back to bed. I was able to lay down, finally, and I managed to sleep.

When I woke up at around 7:00am today the stomach pain was gone, but I still don’t feel 100%. I have a lot of gas (TMI, sorry) and I feel sort of sensitive, as if one zig in the wrong direction would send me right down into the abyss. I took it easy at breakfast, just a protein bar. I’ve had half of my daily water goal but only my morning pills. I’m about two hours late for the lunch time pills, but I’ll have them soon.

I tried a normal lunch, but I took a big step backward in the post-surgery recovery process. I used a stop watch to force myself to pause between bites. At least 30 seconds, but mostly a full minute. The end result was a very long lunch, about 90 minutes, but I’m down to the last bite and I haven’t had any problems. Just the same gas that was there when I woke up (TMI, sorry).

I’m way behind on reaching my protein goal today, but I’ll get there soon enough. I’m pretty optimistic that I can get through the whole day without any stomach screw ups. I just need to be overly, overly cautious. I can do it.

Tough Day

Yesterday was the first tough day. One tablespoon of applesauce at 1:00pm pretty much screwed me up for hours to come. I had an epic ball of gas in my new stomach that more or less took over my afternoon. I took some Gas X for the first time ever and it helped a lot.

Jen suggested going for a walk outside. I got as far as the door before my stomach suggested I stay in. I spent some quality time in the bathroom before we tried again. It was 80 degrees out and absolutely gorgeous. We just walked down to the street and back and it was glorious. It was only a few minutes before I had to go back in and sit down, but it was so worth it.

In the end we went to bed early. I was still a bit uncomfortable but I was asleep before 10:00pm. I slept for an amazing nine hours. Holy shit! I woke up dehydrated and a little light headed, but after nine hours that seems expected, I think.

Jen made scrambled eggs for dinner last night. I had a table spoon then, and a tablespoon this morning and both times were amazing. I feel better already and I’m so grateful to her for the support she’s given me through all of this. I love her so much.

So one tough day down. There will be many more, I’m sure. Here’s to today being better.

Firebird or Junior

I’m having a guitar shopping fantasy YouTube night tonight. Assuming I can get my two 40+ year old guitars worked on and cleaned up, what would my next Gibson be?

I waffle between a Les Paul Junior and a Firebird. When I bought my SG in 2018, I almost bought a Firebird instead. I think right now if I had to pick one it would be a Junior, for the P90, but it would be a close call.

Videos like this don’t make it easy on me…

Wah Pedals

I search for boutique wah pedals and get link after link telling me I have to get my hands on the wah pedal I dumped into my closet when that frat boy fucker in California went on his idiotic racist rant following the George Floyd protests and implied that people who put more value on a human being’s life than on their neighbor’s windows are both unworthy of his products and incapable of pissing while standing up. Fuck that guy. I’m never using his pedals again, I don’t care how amazing his fucking deluxe wah pedal is.

End rant.

So where do I go? There is Xotic and Jam Pedals. They are both supposed to have excellent wahs. One company that I know nothing about keeps popping up too. Real McCoy Custom, or RMC. they seem to have a ton of models, all with stellar reviews, but only a few are in production. Is that info correct? They are pretty expensive and there aren’t a whole lot of dealers (just one in Massachusetts).

I’m thinking when the time comes, this is probably where I want to go. The RMC10 reviews are all stellar, but I’m only seeing RMC11’s for sale around here.

One of these days.