Delicious

What’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten?

Daily Writing Prompt

Okay, so that’s the writing prompt… here’s my response from last year.

Now how can you answer this question? This is completely subjective. The most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten? That probably changes every time I eat anything. I mean, how many magical chocolate cakes have there been? How many magnificent premium steaks at the Capital Grill or Ruths Chris have there been? How many trips to Kimball’s for ice cream?

I mean, how can a guy reasonably narrow down a lifetime of delicious food, especially when he doesn’t really have a stomach anymore and can’t eat many of the things he used to love?

And here is a really pointless comment from Google’s A.I…. because why not?

This text expresses a delightful frustration with the subjectivity of the question “most delicious thing ever eaten.” The author playfully highlights the vast amount of delicious food they’ve encountered, from fancy steaks to ice cream trips, making it nearly impossible to choose just one.

The comment also hints at a bittersweet undertone. The mention of a missing stomach and the inability to enjoy food in the same way suggests the author may be looking back on these experiences with fondness.

And finally, here’s an image generated by Google’s A.I. based on last year’s text. What fun.

Yes, Virginia, Robert is extremely bored with this crap. Time to find another way to play along. This is dumb.

In the Office

The rules for our hybrid working environment are simple. We have to be in the office for 40% of the work days each month. That works out to approximately two days each week. Usually. Some months require an extra day to hit 40%. This month is not one of those months. This month just needs two days each week.

Last week I messed up my routine. I was feeling under the weather. Not bad enough to miss work, but bad enough to not want to go into the office and risk getting anyone else sick. I worked from home all five days last week. No office visits for me.

Because of that minor illness and my desire in the post Covid world to go out of my way to not get anyone else sick, I have two days to make up in order to get back onto the two days in the office pace.

I had two ideas for that. Idea number one was to work three days in the office this week, and three days next week. Not bad. Not good. Doable. Idea number two was to just bite the bullet and work four days in the office this week. Suck Suckity Suck Suck Suck for one week, then back to normal for the rest of the month.

I went into the office on Monday (traffic was mild). I went into the office on Tuesday (traffic was horrible). I am in the office today, Wednesday (traffic was bad but not as bad as Tuesday). Tomorrow I will have to make a tough decision. If I work from home tomorrow, I will need to come in three days next week (because I am sure as hell not coming into the office on Friday). If I work from the office tomorrow I will be back on track and not have to worry about any of this for the rest of June… but it will suck suck suckity suck to be in the office four days in a row (again, no way in hell I am coming in on Friday this week).

So what am I going to do?

I feel a little sick even thinking this… but I think I am going to work in the office. Four days in and one day at home… that was how our schedule worked pre-pandemic. The thought of that just blows chunks. It blows great big chunky chunks.

I think I am going to do it though. Oh help me please, I think I am going to do it.

Bones

Daily writing prompt
Have you ever broken a bone?

I’ve broken a bunch of bones in my time. Only one as an adult. Let’s see if I can remember them all.

  • When I was in first grade I broke my first bone. We were sledding on Munster’s Hill in Tewksbury, MA. Don’t look for it, it doesn’t exist anymore. I was on a circular sled thing and bombing down the epic slope. I hit a bump and grabbed some air. The sled spun off to one side (I think it turned left, but it was 1977 or so, so who knows) and I kept going straight. I landed on my right shoulder and broke my collarbone. I had to wear a brace for three weeks.
  • The second broken bone incident happened when I was in seventh grade. This will put us in or around 1983 or so. I was in the driveway in front of the Tewksbury Junior High School, which is now called the Griffin Middle School, I think. If the weather was nice we could step outside in front of the school for the last few minutes of our lunch period. There were a few of us killing time together. As were we being herded back inside a girl in our group whose name escapes me at the moment was walking in front of me. For some reason she stopped short and elbowed backwards. Someone must have said something stupid or something. It might even have been me, but I doubt it because I would have been utterly terrified to talk to a girl, even if she was a friend. I put up my right hand to block her elbow and she caught it just right. A bone in my right pinky finger’s knuckle broke. The doctor said it was on the growth plate, whatever that means, so there was some question whether or not my finger would have trouble growing as puberty took over, but it all worked out fine. I had to wear a splint for a few weeks.
  • Fast forward to eighth grade and we’re in gym class. We were outside behind the Junior High School and the class was playing football. I was tossing a ball back and forth with someone else, I don’t remember who, and because I suck so badly at all things football I caught the ball funny and broke a bone in my left ring finger. After the previous year’s experience I knew exactly what happened the instant it happened. I walked over to the gym teacher and told him I needed to go to the nurse because my finger was broken. This one also required a few weeks in a splint.
  • This is the last one and it’s embarrassing because I am a stupid idiot. It was 1997 or 1998 or so. I was an adult which is part of why this is so embarrassing. I was in the kitchen at my parents’ house in Tewksbury. I was going to make a tuna fish sandwich for lunch. I don’t remember what else was going on, but I was definitely having a bad day and was super stressed out over something. I was back in college by then and was probably worked up over a test or something. I opened up the can of tuna and stood over the sink to drain the water. I pushed down on the cover to squeeze out the water and some of it splashed up onto my shirt. It was the idiotic straw that broke the camel’s idiotic back. I threw a very brief temper tantrum. I turned around and punched the wall. What a douchebag. I broke a bone in my right hand just above the wrist. Moron. I didn’t have health insurance at the time so I went to a walk in clinic where the doctor laughed at my stupidity and put me into a cast. Like I said, moron.

And there you have it, folks. My personal broken bones history. Normally I wouldn’t share my personal medical history, but given how often I write about my weight loss surgery I would say that no one is getting anything out of this crap that is any worse for sharing than any of that stuff, right?

The moral of the story is… keep your temper under control and don’t be stupid and punch walls. Don’t be an idiot, like me.

Stop Procrastinating

Daily writing prompt
What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?

There is irony here. Big time. I just got to work. Thanks to insane traffic I was a couple of minutes late. I’m caught up now though. I have a lot of stuff I want to plow through this morning, but here I am writing a blog post. Foreshadowing? Oh yeah. Big time.

One small improvement. Hmmm. Just one? I can think of a few. How about doing something to tweak the ol’ work ethic? How about we try to cut down on the procrastination. Work now, flake later, rather than the normal vice versa. I feel like that would go a long way toward making me feel like a better human, in the purely professional sense. I haven’t been missing any deadlines lately or anything that demands changes, but I also feel like there have been times when the nose should have been squarely on the grindstone and it hasn’t. Case in point… I am writing this now while I should be doing some paperwork. Ugh.

I should be more attentive to my wife’s needs. I should be quicker to help out with anything my kids need. I should be more attentive to my father and really just be there for him more than I am. That’s a big source of guilt for me. Anything related to my father is a source of guilt. Ugh, again. I’m trying. I am failing often, but I am trying. I should initiate talk with the kids more than I do too. Just send them each a text saying little things like you rule and I hope you’re kicking ass today. You know, little things.

Okay, stop procrastinating. Get back to work, Mr. Red Head. Get some stuff done.

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.

Yesterday was the Worst Day

Yesterday was weird from the get go, stomach wise. I felt a little off, but not too bad.

Then I had lunch. I was off enough that I should have avoided lunch, or at least the normal lunch that I ended up having. I took my last bite, according to my food tracking spreadsheet, at 1:54pm. 10 minutes later it started. The “off” stomach turned into real stomach pain. I tried to ride it out, but by a little before 4:00pm I had left work sick.

The drive home was a nightmare. The stomach pain kept getting worse. I had to pull over once for a surprise foamies, then again for a foamie false alarm, then again to actually puke into a cup. It was a little paper coffee cup and my aim was spot on. I was impressed with myself.

When I finally got home I ran to the bathroom, puked again, cleaned up the mess, and went to bed. I’d sleep for 20-30 minutes then have to move to a new position. Always on my side curled up in a ball. If I straightened out the stomach pain was too much.

Fast forward to this morning. So far I’ve had a few ounces of water, the first anything I’ve had since 1:54 yesterday. It is 9:21am now and I am feeling okay. A little like a wrung out dishrag, but okay. I have a ton of errands to run this morning and I’ve already given way too much information so I am going to wrap this post up now. I might have more thoughts on this mess later. We’ll see.

The moral of the story is this: When I see my doctor in two weeks for my two year check in she is going to ask me if I have had any Dumping Syndrome. This time I think I have to answer yes. Shit.

Oh yeah, and today is the actual two year surgery anniversary so I am glad I got that crap out of the way yesterday so I can celebrate today. Yippee, babie! Happy Surgery-aversary to me!

Quote

Daily writing prompt
Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?

I like to borrow my quote-to-live-by from the keyboard player for Spinal Tap. He said, “have a good time, all the time.”

No… sorry, I can’t back that up. I’m full of it. I don’t live my life that way. I more live my life by a quote from the drummer from Spinal Tap. He said, “the law of averages says you will survive.” Actually, Marty DiBergi said that, not the drummer. He said it to the drummer and the drummer agreed… and then shortly after the drummer exploded on stage.

So that might not be a good quote to live by either.

Google used to have a good quote and I would like to say I try to live my life by it, even if Google does not. Google said, “don’t be evil.” I would expect most of us could live by that pretty successfully without much effort, but if that is the case how does one explain the maga cult and the rise of fascism worldwide? That’s the exact opposite of don’t be evil. That’s a bunch of psychotics embracing evil and being as evil as humanly possible all day long.

Crap.

I guess I don’t really have a quote to live my life by. I love my wife and I love my kids and I love my family and I love my friends and I try to be a good employee and a good supervisor and I try to play the guitar as much as possible and I try to embrace the chaos that is the occasional run-on sentence.

Other than that… I guess… have a good time all the time.

Holidaze

Daily writing prompt
What is your favorite holiday? Why is it your favorite?

Like most American kids my youth was spent living for Christmas. You know, presents and shite. As I got older my opinions changed. Xmas changed from a joyous celebration to a months long stress-fest followed by one happy, wonderful day. It dropped way down on the list of favorite holidays.

Thanksgiving ceremoniously took over the top spot on that list. Meeting Jen and having a couple of kids in my life brought new life to Xmas, a new perspective and all, but I still saw Thanksgiving as my fav. Quality family time, good food, a happy celebration. All of those things make it my favorite.

Weight loss surgery has changed the perspective again. I can’t really partake in the Thanksgiving feast the way I used to. A tiny bit of turkey, a tiny bit of stuffing, a bite of mashed potatoes and I am stuffed like you’ve heard about. It doesn’t actually change anything, I just feel oddly self conscious.

So does that change what I see as my favorite holiday? Not really. A little? Does that move Halloween into the top spot? If the kids were still trick or treating it might. I really enjoy being the guy who hands out the treats at our house, but I enjoyed bringing the kids out more. So Thanksgiving still tops Halloween. Memorial Day is a contender, but only by association. We got married near Memorial Day so to me the holiday is more representative of our anniversary. 15 years, this year. We’re going to celebrate with a little trip.

So I think the answer to the question of the day is the same one it has been since I was a teenager and Santa Claus stopped being a thing. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It is the best of them all. At least for a middle aged red head living in the United States.

Doing the Right Thing Can Suck

I am scheduled for Jury Duty a week from Monday. May 6th, to be exact. I booked time off from work for the day like a good citizen of The Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Good boy.

Today I came as close to hitting the lottery as I’ll ever come. I got a letter from the state. You always get a letter from the state about a week before Jury Duty. It usually says that you need to call the courthouse you were assigned to the business day before you are schedule to appear and they will tell you if you have to show up or not. That’s not what I got this time. This time the letter just said that they don’t need me and I don’t have to go. Sweet! It’s like a get out of jail free card… or just a get out of jury duty free card. Let’s not mix the metaphorical side of the courtroom bar I would have been sitting on… or whatever. You know what I mean, right? Right.

So I have the day off of work on Monday and I don’t have to do anything to earn it! WOOHOO!

That’s when the guilt started hitting me. Stupid guilt. Two days after my scheduled civic duty is my birthday (53 years old, you geriatric fart) and I took a vacation day that day just because. It’s my special day, or some crap like that. So I… I let the guilt take over. I logged into work and canceled my Jury Duty time off request. Ugh. Why did I do that? Because it was the right thing to do? Ugh… you putz. Just take the free day off. No… I’ll work that day. I might even drive into the office.

Idiot.

Topics?

Daily writing prompt
What topics do you like to discuss?

Translating today’s prompt from Jetpack to Robert-speak it is asking me to write about what I like to write about in my personal blog/journal/brain dropping target. I thought I had an About Me page around here somewhere that served that purpose for me. Whatever, I feel a bullet list coming on…

What topics do I like to discuss?

  • My wife, Jen
  • My step kids, Bellana and Harry
  • All things family
  • Music
    • Playing music
    • Writing music
    • All things related to playing in a band
    • Listening to music
    • Arguing about music (I am a grade A music snob and I am always right)
    • Recording music
    • All things related to musical instruments and gear
    • Leaving the house to go and listen to live music (which doesn’t happen often anymore because I am old and go to bed early)
  • Sports
    • Hockey, both NHL and minor leagues and sometimes even NCAA
    • Baseball, both major and minor leagues
  • Travel
  • Stressing about money and how we don’t have enough for what we want to do with our lives but still try to find a way if we can
  • Weight loss surgery recovery and all the gross stomach issues that go along with it that are 100% worth the struggle
  • Working as a programmer for a software company that develops systems for hospitals
  • Photography
    • Digital photography
    • Film photography
    • Cell phone photography
  • Bad haiku that are likely viscously insulting to the actual artists who write real haiku
  • Technology
  • Being a total Apple fanboy
  • Social media and how it is both an obsession and infuriatingly awful
  • Politics
    • How the maga cult is the new nazi party and how that fascist pile of orange goo is literally evil
  • Cats

Yeah, that seems like a good, short list of topics I like to talk about on this cute little bloggie page. Hopefully you, dear readers, are into reading weird, middle aged people from New England who like to write insipid crap about some of these topics, and hopefully I don’t make you wait too long before hitting something you are particularly interested in.