Just running errands and doing chores today. Keeping busy over all. I really wanted to take the cameras out for a walk this morning, but the weather was awful. The light was the worst ever. So disheartening. Oh well.
After a couple of days of weirdness, my stomach has been a team player today. No issues at all. I’m proud of the little surgically altered guy. It did not wake me up last night, which was nice of it. My legs are another story though. Twice overnight I woke up with bad leg cramps. It’s always something when you’re an old fart like me. All I want is to sleep and my own body is stopping me from doing it. What a jerk I am to myself.
Before I get back to the housework, I think I am going to finally put in a vacation request at work for our staycation in September and our next trip back to Disney World in January. I think it’s time, don’t you? There. I just did it. Hopefully my boss doesn’t have a heart attack when he sees two week long vacation requests at once. They are spread out. It’s okay. I’ll wait a while before I put in for the second planned Disney trip. That’s a full year away.
The Red Sox winning streak ended last night. They played Cincinnati, who are pretty terrible this year, and lost. It made me sad. Here’s hoping for vengeance in today’s game. I want to win by 90, at least.
The Oilers have a 1-0 lead over the Panthers after one period. They are dick teasing me. We all know that, right? Ugh.
My stomach played nicely today. Good job, surgically redesigned stomach pouch. Everything was very predictable. My hunger pains hit me right on schedule. Also, I didn’t over eat at the end of the work day and ruin dinner. Good job, Robbie’s little pouch thing.
Want to know what did ruin dinner? Just before 8:00 I had a bite of potato. The roasted potatoes we had tonight tasted AMAZING, but that last bite got stuck. Trigger the foamies. Trigger a little nausea. It’s been an hour and fifteen minutes and it doesn’t seem to have cleared yet. I still feel like that last bite of potato is stuck. I was able to cough some of it up, but clearly not all of it.
Damn it.
Okay. It’s after 9:00. I should be clear to watch the season finale of Doctor Who now. I have a little spit-up cup next to me (TMI), I have a gamecast of the hockey game from NHL.com open, and I need to do something to distract myself from my stomach pouch whatever it is. Doctor Who should do the trick.
Further updates will be provided. Come on, Oilers. Hold that lead, you sick little monkeys.
I have made it through lunch. I think I am mostly okay.
As expected, at about 11:00am today I started feeling uncomfortable. I had a snack of a protein bar and felt better. I then had a second snack and felt a lot better. I finished that by 11:37, which seemed a little too close to lunch for comfort, but I was feeling okay so I thought it was worth the risk of spoiling lunch. I started eating lunch at 1:09. I wasn’t feeling all that hungry, but I wanted to power through to stay on something like a schedule, and to put off another empty stomach ache issue for a little while longer. I had some microwaved chicken and some peanuts. I finished at 2:01, feeling a little stuffed. That was half an hour ago and I still feel a little uncomfortably full. I’m okay though.
The bigger concern right now is that something like five of the last six nights, including last night, I failed to get six hours of sleep. I’m tired. I feel really tired. I need to find a project for the second half of the work day that I can really dig into and be too enthralled to worry about being sleepy. I think I know just the thing to work on.
I expect to start feeling hunger pains at a little after 5:00. That’s normal. I just have to make sure I don’t over do it if I need to have a snack. I don’t want to ruin dinner again. I probably will, just out of nerves about the way the last couple of days have gone, but hopefully I can keep things under control until I get home. I miss my wife a lot today, and I want to have a nice dinner with her.
Hello folks, here comes another gastric bypass post. Another my-digestive-system-is-no-longer-quite-human sort of post. Sorry. Just bare with me. There will be a cat photo or two as well. Your patience will be rewarded with little four legged fur balls.
Okay…
I’ve mentioned at least 100 times over the past two years that being hungry hurts now. I eat breakfast. All is well. Three hours later I start having a stomach ache. I eat a snack and the stomach ache goes away. I eat lunch, then three hours later I have a stomach ache. &etc, &etc, &etc*. I told my doctor about it. She smiled at me as if to say, “duh!” without actually saying, “duh” and said, “right… you’re hungry.”
My response was, “Huh… duh.”
The downside, of course, is that I can no longer tell if I am having stomach pain because I am hungry, or if I am having stomach pain because something is wrong. I have to have something to eat to know for sure. If I have a snack and the pain vanishes then it means I was just hungry. If I have a snack and the pain stays the same or (more likely) gets worse, then something is wrong. It’s simple and all, but it does up my stress level a little when it happens.
On the days when I work from the office, I usually finish lunch at around 2:00pm. The hunger pain hits at around 5:00pm. It’s not always three hours. Sometimes it’s a little more, sometimes it’s a little less. Every so often it’s a lot less and I am feeling it at two hours. I guess it depends on what the last thing I ate was. So at work, I eat until 2:00, then around 5:00 I’m hungry enough to feel discomfort so I have something to eat. Usually I wait until I am in the car heading home. Everything is fine at that point except…
On those drives home, I often find that I eat a little too much. By the time I get home I am plenty full and I have ruined my dinner. I usually have a little to eat for dinner with Jen, but not a lot. Two days ago, when I got home I was really stuffed. I cooked dinner for Jen but I didn’t have anything for myself. I managed to have a snack an hour or so later and then fell asleep really early. I ended up going a long time without any food. I mentioned in a post yesterday that I woke up around 2:30am with a stomach ache and I had to have a snack before I could go back to sleep.
Did skipping dinner on Wednesday night mess me up? That’s my question now.
Yesterday I could not get ahead of things. I ate breakfast and was feeling empty stomach pain about an hour and a half later. That felt WAY too soon. I had a snack and then felt it again an hour later. That went on all day. I just couldn’t get out ahead of it. I think I had four or five instances of empty stomach pain throughout the day. I had a pretty substantial snack before I went to sleep. That was at 10:00pm. I was asleep a little before 11:00pm and I was feeling fine.
Until I woke up with a stomach ache at 2:00am. That lead to the usual question: Am I hungry or is there something wrong? I had a snack. I was just hungry. That’s two days in a row where I needed food in the two o’clock hour. Let us hope that this is not the start of a trend here. I don’t want to do this again. Clearly I will if I have to, but I really do not want to.
We’ll see how it goes today. I had a pretty big breakfast (for me) in the car on the way to work today. I finished it at 8:11am. Let’s see how I feel around 11:00am today. Hopefully I won’t be hurting until well after that. Fingers crossed.
Now, as promised… when I got up at 2:00am, Robin Sparkles the Cat was sitting on the cat tree in the living room, right near the pantry closet where I keep my snacks. It was like she was waiting for me. Good kitty.
295/365
And just for completeness sake, before I left the house at 7:30am today, I opened some windows. Lily Pad the Kitty took the opportunity to pose for me, so here’s a picture of her as well. Good kitty.
*That is the correct, deprecated way to abbreviate the word “etcetera” isn’t it? Was it &etc or was it &ct? I tried googling but didn’t see anything. I know it’s been hundreds of years since that abbreviation was considered proper English grammar, but I’m old and stuffy so I want to bring it back.
I am running late this morning and should not take the time to write this post until later when I am caught up with life. I have an answer for this one though. Not a sarcastic bird flip of an answer, an actual honest answer and I want to get it down before I do anything else.
I am huge. I used to be super tall and incredibly fat. Then I had my stomach ripped to shreds by a professional and now I am super tall and a less death defying weight. I’m still huge though. I have always been huge. Even when I was a tiny person. I was always taller than almost all of the kids my age (though I was never the tallest in my class) and I was always wider than almost all of the kids my age. It was noticeable by all, and many a person commented on it, thinking they were being clever and conversational when they were in fact being complete fucking assholes.
But I digress.
My mother was often asked by strangers what she fed me to make me so big. Hey strangers… fuck you. My mother had a standard answer: Peanut Butter. Let’s face it, dear readers, I loved me some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Like… I loved them. I was such a big fan that you could probably make an argument that peanut butter was literally (and by literally I clearly mean figuratively) my first love, but that would be incredibly gross so let’s not go there.
I still love peanut butter. I really do. I have not had it since the gastric bypass surgery. It’s not something that I cannot eat. It doesn’t have any of the things that mess me up when I eat them. I’m still a little scared of how I would react to it though. I am afraid the sticky nature of peanut butter would cause it to get hung up getting into my new stomach pouch thing and it would trigger a bad case of The Foamies. One of these days I will try and and see how it goes, but I am a little gun shy about it so I won’t be trying it today.
The result of all of this though, is that when I do eat peanut butter it definitely makes me feel like a kid. It makes me feel like a kid who is ashamed of himself to the point of self loathing because some random fucking stranger in some random department store thinks I am so fat and disgusting that they have to comment on it. Hey strangers in the random department stores… Fuck You.
Bellana is back in Vermont. She left last night and stayed over one of her friends’ house in order to cut down on her morning commute today. At our house she was three hours away from work, and today is a work day for her. I get it. It makes me sad to see her go, but I am also really happy we had her for a few days. Even more so as we had Harry for a few days before that, and their visits overlapped so we had them both for a day. That made me really happy. That was an extra good night.
Jen is working from the office today. I am working from home. That means I am here by my lonesome, just me and the cats. I have a podcast playing on my MacBook and it’s streaming to Home Pods scattered all over the house. I don’t have to pause the podcast if I need to get up and leave the room. Heh heh. Technology is cool. When Jen comes home I’ll shut off any streams that are anywhere other than Harry’s room/my office space.
The Great Heatwave of 2024 is going to become official today. The forecast calls for the temperature in my little city to hit 99 degrees. That will be three days over 90. Heatwave: Confirmed. It is 9:10am right now and it’s already 83 degrees. It’s going to be fun.
The forecast for the rest of the week? Rain and clouds and awful. Back to normal, I guess.
After complaining about crappy sleep for the last week or so, I finally topped six hours last night. In fact, I topped 7.5 hours. It was broken though. I fell asleep at 9:30pm. Not by choice. I just couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore and zonked out. Normally I try to eat something before I go to sleep out of fear that my stomach will get so empty over night that it will hurt. A snack at bedtime avoids that problem, but I didn’t have one last night. My last bite to eat last night was at 7:49pm. I woke up with a bit of a stomach ache at 2:30am. I had a little snack and felt better, but I couldn’t fall back to sleep until well after 3:00. Oh well. I felt really tired when I woke up today (almost an hour later than I had planned) but I feel okay now. Here’s hoping I won’t be totally exhausted today.
It’s Wednesday. I’m back in the office. You don’t care, but I want to write about something… anything… so here we are.
Today is Juneteenth. I completely forgot. When the state first established today as a holiday we got it off. Less than a year later our company turned most of the non-national holidays into floating holidays so now we don’t get today off. It was just another day for me except that there was no traffic on the highways this morning. From my house to my office, 43 miles, took 46 minutes. Why couldn’t every commute be this easy? While having the day off would have been great, I will take this as the next best thing… sort of.
I failed to get six hours of sleep again last night. My watch tells me I got 5:45 but my heart rate numbers were pretty spectacular. Hopefully that means I won’t be too completely exhausted again today. Just mildly completely exhausted. I still haven’t hooked up my CPAP machine since coming back from Florida a few weeks ago. I think my sleep numbers (assuming my watch pulls accurate data) are implying that using the machine won’t make much of a difference. I should probably use it anyway. Maybe there will be a placebo effect or something and I won’t be quite as tired after a short night’s sleep. I don’t know.
The Oilers won last night. Yippee. Well… that’s being mean. I am glad they won. Not because I expect them to dig out of a three games to none series hole, but because it literally extended the NHL season. If they are going to lose on me and prove that I suck at picking the outcome of NHL playoff series’, then the least they can do is lose in seven games so we get our money’s worth, right?
As for the Red Sox, they have won four in a row including two wins against the first place Yankees. Glorious. I saw a post on social media where someone said that this streak proves they will not only make the playoffs, but advance to the American League Championship Series. I laughed out loud. No, let me be more specific… I laughed out loud for a long, long time. They are four games above .500. They are in third place in the division, 11.5 games behind the first place (and thoroughly evil) Yankees. They are two games out of the wild card. Oh yeah, it is June. Yeah… they are better than I thought they would be, but they are still pretty clearly mediocre. They might sneak into the wild card, but I am not holding my breath. If you’re expecting the Red Sox to do anything better than middle of the pack, then you haven’t been paying attention. No. They will not make it to the ALCS. If they do, I will happily eat my words, but I won’t have to because there’s no chance. This is the way. I have spoken.
I watched last night’s new episode of Star Wars: The Acolyte. There has been so much hate spewed at this show. Most of it rooted in sexism and racism rather than the story or anything to do with it. I’ve enjoyed the show so far and I am looking forward to seeing where it goes. I’m on for the ride, as the saying goes. Last night though… episode four… I finally had something that I didn’t like. What was it? The running time was less than 30 minutes. Come on, Star Wars. We need more than that from our weekly episodes. We need more to sink our teeth into. These episodes should be more like 45-60 minutes, right? We need that content, folks. We need it! Star Wars, babie! Give us more!
The heatwave has arrived. It’s 93 degrees outside. Wait, don’t you have to be over 90 for three days to officially rank as a heatwave? So maybe it’s more correct to say that the potential heatwave has arrived. Whatever.
I still have the windows open in my little office space. My Nest app is telling me that it’s 81 degrees in this room and 76 degrees in the living room. It’s definitely warm enough to approach being uncomfortable, but given that since losing weight I find myself really cold all the time… it’s kinda nice right now. For the first time in months I don’t feel cold at all. Not even a little bit.
I just got a public safety alert on my phone. Looks like the 9-1-1 service is down for the entire state of Massachusetts. Here’s hoping none of my neighbors need to call for emergency services any time soon. It would suck to dial 9-1-1 and get a busy signal or some sort of error message.
Similar to yesterday, I am still exhausted. I failed to get six hours of sleep yet again last night, though I only missed it by about five minutes this time. I’m really tired. Really, really tired.
Three hours left in the work day. Fingers crossed I can make it through in one piece. Also, fingers crossed we don’t melt in the heat today, and fingers crossed we don’t need to call for an emergency service. Hang in there, Massachusetts.
Today has been a tough day. I had a hard time getting to sleep last night. I was up until about midnight and then I was out of bed before 5:30am today. I was extremely productive this morning, but round about lunch time the lack of sleep caught up to me and I’ve been struggling ever since.
I think today is my last day working in the cellar. At least for a few weeks. I should be back in my step son’s room tomorrow. that’s good because it is ridiculously cold down here right now. It’s 85 degrees outside, but 66 degrees at my desk and I am freezing. We are supposed to be having a heat wave roll in starting tomorrow (I think). That’s fine with me. I probably won’t wear a sweatshirt if it is 100 degrees out. Maybe. We’ll see how it goes.
I had some trouble with lunch. I made a little piece of chicken and some french fries. I think I went too fast eating the fries and something got stuck. It took about an hour to clear. That made me sad on top of being tired. The fries were really good and I had to stop. Bummer, dude.
I need to take the cameras out and shoot some photos. I can’t seem to dredge up any motivation though. I need to play guitar. I can’t seem to dredge up any motivation though. Bummer, dude.
Two nights ago I got about 5.75 hours of sleep. I felt fine all day long until I finally got home from work. That was about 6:30pm. As soon as I walked in the door it hit me and I just felt completely exhausted.
Last night I got about 6.5 hours of sleep. I have felt completely exhausted all day.
Do you ever wish that things like sleep could actually start making sense? Wouldn’t that be nice?
I haven’t used my CPAP machine since before we went to Florida. I packed it and took it with us, but I never set it up. I had a bad cold when I got home and didn’t want to be inhaling phlegm all night so I didn’t set it up at home either. Maybe I’ll finally get back to it tonight. I’m pretty sure I don’t need it anymore, but maybe there’s some kind of placebo affect I could take advantage of? Probably not, but who knows.
All I know for sure is that I could use a nap right now.
Inside the Red Head's Head 