Tag: Peanuts

Random Thoughts

I am wrapping up my lunch break on this random Wednesday in March and I thought I’d jot down a couple of thoughts for posterity. Ready? Okay, let’s roll….

  • Want to know something that sucks? I brought two ounces of Planters Salted Peanuts with me for lunch today (14 grams of protein). I took a small handful (my gastric bypassed body can’t handle more than a small handful at a time without getting sick) and popped it into my maw. I chewed it up a little (again, part of the post-gastric bypass world means chewing the holy hell out of everything, which sounds silly and obvious [like, didn’t you chew the holy hell out of everything before surgery? I thought I did, but apparently not] but until you fail to chew something down enough you can’t really understand) and suddenly and without warning I had to sneeze. Know what’s gross? Sneezing with a mouthful of partially chewed up peanuts… that’s what’s gross. Worse? 20 seconds after you sneeze, when you think you’ve recovered and cleaned up the mess… you sneeze again. Ugh.
  • Elon Musk posted to his nazi social media site that he didn’t understand why people are out to get him. He said he sells things that are good and that he’s never hurt anyone. Never hurt anyone? Are you fucking kidding me, you fucking moron? This nazi fucker’s end can’t come soon enough. Deport his moronic ass to mars and be done with it.
  • We have a contractor coming tomorrow. We have two contractors coming Friday. March 2025 will go down in family history as the month of the contractors. We just can’t get away from them. Please please please let this be the end of it for a while.
  • We are one week and one day away from the start of the Boston Red Sox 2025 season. No matter what happens, they can’t be any more painful to watch than the Bruins were this year. Even if they come in dead last again it still won’t suck as badly as the B’s. I’m thinking about signing up for an online subscription to NESN (the New England Sports Network. The TV network that carries both the Red Sox and the Bruins). I think my days of being a radio-only Red Sox fan might be coming to an end. I haven’t decided one way or the other yet, but I think it’s going to happen… we’ll see.
  • I don’t want to buy a tenor saxophone. I don’t want to buy a tenor saxophone. Did I mention I don’t want to buy a tenor saxophone? Who am I kidding. I want to buy a tenor saxophone. Only if it’s a good one though. Aw, hell.

Okay. I have to get back to work now. This is all I have time for right now. I’ll probably write up some more brain droppings later. It’s one of those days, if you know what I mean.

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

Peanuts

I had this grand plan to grow peanuts in the back yard. I researched how to do it and made a list of all of the things I would need to make it happen.

Now that it’s Spring, it’s time to do it…

And I think I have decided not to bother.

There is no way the rodents living in the woods behind our house would let a plant like a peanut plant slip past their stomachs. Anything I try to grow out there is going to get eaten by one critter or another.

Yeah… I think the peanut plan is kaput.

The home made sugar free ice cream plan though… that mofo is still on. Just you watch.

Mother Nature’s Revenge

If you live in New England like I do, you may want to not look at the weather forecast.

Wendesday… snow.

Thursday… snow.

We’re going to get a Nor’easter… in April.

Damn it, Mother Nature. Why must you be such an insufferable asshole? Really. What a jerk!

It’s still a couple of days away at least, so maybe the forecast will change or turn out to be completely wrong. Maybe we won’t get snow after all. I’m not betting on it. If winter is going to give spring one last kick in the nards, it’ll be like this.

Good thing I didn’t already plant my peanuts!*

*I haven’t written a post about it for months, but I am still planning on trying to grow some peanuts this year. I am an idiot and this is the proof.

Home Grown Peanuts

I so want to do this next Spring. I’m pretty sure I won’t, but as of right now I really want to. I just need to learn how to protect against the rodent wild kingdom in my yard.

I really want to grow my own peanuts next year. I do, I do.

Future Project

Driving North on route 95 in North Carolina I saw a sign for locally grown peanuts. It made me think of how Jimmy Carter made his fortune growing peanuts. That made me wonder if you can grow peanuts in New England’s climate.

I asked Jen to as Google and now I have a project for next summer.

I am going to grow myself some mutha-truckin’ peanuts boys and girls! Get ready!

I’m going to spend hours upon hours on YouTube learning all there is to know about home-grown peanuts and how to keep them safe from those asshole squirrels!

And then probably forget about the whole thing once next summer arrives.

I’m Freezing

It is 44 degrees outside, which almost feels like Spring. It’s 66 degrees at my desk in the cellar. It feels like 22 degrees. I’m freezing. No one warned me that losing 200 pounds would result in me being ice cold 24/7. Brr.

I have nothing really to write about. It’s almost 2:00pm and I am super late for starting lunch. I had to turn off the space heater while I was on a conference call and it feels like the temperature dropped 180 degrees. I’m cold!

I am doing a lunch time experiment. I am air frying some frozen french fries. The plan being to use french fries as a salt-delivery -system. Salt is supposed to help with whatever causes my occasional bouts of light headedness. Over the last few weeks I have honestly felt myself craving french fries. That might be the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me, dietarily speaking. I’m craving salted peanuts too. It’s so weird. Peanuts and fries for lunch, babie.

Change of subject. Did I mention last night’s episode of The Last of Us yet? Season one, episode eight of nine. I’m still pretty screwed up over it. It was good, but it was dark. Like, super dark. Like, disturbingly dark. I almost watched it again this morning during my jogging (yogging) but I couldn’t bring myself to and switched to a Deep Space Nine episode. The one where we meet The Grand Nagus for the first time and thus usher in the annual Ferengi comic relief episode.

Back to the french fries thing, I suck at estimating small amounts of weight. We are supposed to track our food intake by weight, but we are supposed to weigh everything after it’s cooked. I shook what I thought was just a couple of ounces of frozen fries into the air fryer basket only to find that when they came out of the air fryer there were 5.5 ounces. That’s WAY too much for me today. I’ll eat as much as I can handle and see what happens.

Okay, I have to get back to the grindstone now. I really don’t have anything to write about anyway. Consider the bottom of this particular barrel scraped. We did dodge a bullet at work today. I won’t give details, but it made me happy. Okay, that’s good enough for now. Go eat yer lunch, Robert.

Hungry

The last few days have been weird, weight loss surgery wise. I assume it’s stress over the upcoming services for my mother, or something along those lines at least, but I could be wrong. I’ve been hungry. A lot. Like, all the time. I’m not going too far overboard, but I am snacking between meals way more than normal and the meals themselves have been much larger than usual. When I say “much larger” what I really mean is instead of 4-5 ounces at a time I’m like 5-6 ounces. When I say I’m snacking I mean 1-2 ounces of peanuts or two little sugar free pudding cups instead of one. I stepped on the scale this morning out of fear that I was screwing things up and I was down a little since Wednesday. Not much, just a little. So I don’t appear to be ruining previous progress but… what the hell, Robert?

On a weight loss related note, I am finding myself oddly aware of my physical structure. I have bones I didn’t know I had. There’s one in my chest that I first became aware of a few months after the surgery and I thought it was a growth or a tumor or something. I told the doctor. She checked it out. No, nothing to worry about. That’s just your sternum. Duh. Now it’s my rib cage and my shoulders. I can actually feel the space between my ribs. I have no padding on my shoulders anymore so when I played my guitar the other day it actually hurt.

I added a new discovery to the list last night. I haven’t shaved in a couple of weeks. That’s going to change later today, but I was sort of rubbing the stubble on my neck and I felt something. Apparently Robert, your humble narrator, has an adam’s apple. I mean, I always assumed it was there but I never actually found any evidence to support the assumption. Now I can feel it.

Who knew, right?

Now if I could just shake what my mother used to call “the hungry horrors” and start eating better again. That would be aces.

As I type this I am watching season one episode three of The Mandalorian. The tribe of Mandalorians just came out of the covert to help Din Djarin and Grogu (we don’t actually know their names yet) escape the guild. Absolutely epic.

Things From This Afternoon

There was a pretty monumental occurrence this afternoon. For the first time since the surgery…

I ate peanuts.

One ounce of peanuts has seven grams of protein. Sweet!

I kept the bite sizes super small and chewed them until my head was about to fall off, and then I waited a full minute after finishing one bite before taking the next. In other words, I was uber careful.

And it all went fine. I can officially eat peanuts again. What a happy day!

Let’s celebrate with a picture of the cat!

DSC_0011

Also, here are some flowers that I picked up at the grocery store because I am ALL CLASS, BABIE!

DSCN2393

The flowers in the photo were back lit. Did I use exposure compensation again? Oh, you bet your sweet ass I did!

Happy Return to Peanuts Day!