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This Huffington Post article by George Lazoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics, is very long and a hard read, but worth it. Although he is focusing on a scathing critique of, and offering a cogent alternative to, the way the Obama administration has failed to sell health care reform, along the way he makes some really razor-sharp points about what is wrong with the current system. I think everyone in favour of health care reform (or insurance reform if you prefer) should read this article as a guide in how to discuss it, not just with those who agree, but especially with those who disagree.
I have started my diet, health and fitness sporadic journal over on Deborama's Kitchen with a post about my workout and my music. More on that later . . .
I haven't posted for a while here. Some personal changes are happening in the Deborama household. DH and I just got back from Manchester yesterday where DH had a gastric band operation. This was the first time he had ever had surgery of any kind, so it was rather fraught for me leading up to it (and probably for him too, but since he's British, there is no way to tell.) But he came through it just fine. He was a little grey in the face for the first hour I saw him, as he was waking up fully. (This was a good two or three hours after his operation, but they kept him in recovery and then put him into an ICU due to his sleep apnoea. I arrived at the hospital as he was just waking up, but they stuck me in a private room saying they would wait and give him a chance to "settle" before I could see him. The same nurse said this to me, along with "just 10 more minutes" about four times, and I was just about to explode with a very American "Settle, schmettle!" before she finally sensed my mounting anxiety and escorted me to his bedside.)
DH spent the night in the ICU (although he was very well, and hardly merited the extra care, but it was apparently hospital policy) and I spent the night in a Travelodge near Manchester airport. But now we're home. DH had lost an amazing five stones (70 pounds) in the six months preceding his operation. He is now expecting to lose perhaps another 100 pounds or so with the help of the gastric band.
Meanwhile, Deborama has been attending clandestine (it's a long story) Slimming World meetings and I have lost a stone since joining, having lost about 10 pounds before, for a total of about 25 pounds since I was at my heaviest. I joined a small local gym last May and I have been attending quite faithfully, an average of three or more days per week. I was very frustrated to not lose any weight in the first five months of this regimen, as I was not really regulating my diet at all, but hoping that building some muscle would cause metabolic changes that would "kick-start" a weight loss and give me some incentive to give up my beloved breakfast of an unsweetened latte and a croissant, my frequent cereal bar snacks and my occasional (but probably more frequent than I cared to admit) late night scoop of ice cream. I think it was around November of last year that I all but gave up the croissants and very slowly and painfully lost the 10 pounds, and when the Slimming World invitation came in January I decided I must bite the bullet and face the fact that at my age I need to do both diet-control and regular exercise; the days of "effortless" weight-loss are now well and truly past.
Now this is the last personal or diet-related post you will see in the main Deborama blog. I am doing a mini-relaunch, and I am going to confine the Deborama posts to serious news, comments on the world at large, religion, philosophy and ethics, sexual politics, the environment, humour and culture. The one exception will be photos and news of our birds. I will post these on Facebook or Flickr, with a link from here.
Simultaneously, I am going to relaunch my other two Deborama sub-logs. Deborama's Kitchen will become my new Diet Blog (keeping the name, though) and any personal journalling will be there, along with its usual fare (although it has been nothing at all for a year or more) of recipes, food politics and food-related news.
Deborama's Books is going to get the third relaunch/make-over. I plan for it to be more joined up with another of my recently neglected passions, Bookcrossing. I am hoping to get back into attending the Bookcrossing meetups, and now that I have a study (I was using the dining room table, in an open plan room with lounge with its almost always-on telly, another excuse or reason for the lack of blogging going on) I have huge backlog of books to register on Bookcrossing. Also, I have been planning to add some movie and television reviews to the books blog, as well as reviewing the books I have read but failed to mention over the past three years.
I know myself, so I don't expect this will happen overnight, or even all that quickly. If I achieve the three goals set out above within six weeks I will be satisfied (and if I fail to do it in that time, chances are it won't happen, so I had better get cracking.)
Yes, yes, I missed Wednesday again. Now for the excuses. First, my life was disrupted a bit, but in a good way, by the visit last week of my sister, her husband and her son. It's a complicated tale so I won't go all into it, but I took some time off work, I wore myself to a frazzle and I had a good time. It is quite painful to me being thousands of miles from my family, so these brief visits are far more idealized and - well - enjoyable than family visits are to normal people who at least live on the same continent as the rest of their kin. Or so I believe, based on my memories of when I was a normal person. But my sister is partly responsible for excuse number two as well. I took her to my new gym, where I have been struggling to attain a goal of three times a week. She suggested that I would probably not see much fitness change unless I went for five times a week, which makes a bit of sense to me, so I now am on a resolution to strive for that. My job keeps me away from home about 11 hours a day, and then there is still all the little tasks involved in keeping me, the husband and the house up and running - hygiene, laundry, shopping, filling and emptying the dishwasher, doing at least a minimal share of the cooking. There are newspapers and blogs to read, parrots to talk to. Basically what I am saying is that I am running out of time in the day. Anyway, on to excuse number three. Which has two parts. Part 3A - my sister and I were talking about memories and stories, and how she is trying to get our parents to write down some as keepsakes for the future, for our kids. And we had this brilliant idea to set up a website for the family and post short articles of our various memories and stories. A meetup group I am involved with (another big time sucker, if you let it be, as I just spent four hours last night going to a meetup and had to ditch the gym!) has recently moved from our paid sponsor site to a free site called me.com. Now this website is not perfect; its interfaces and applications are chaotic and sometimes unpredictable, and I think it has ideas above its station, if you know what I mean. But it's free, and I mostly find these things are what you choose to make them (and are capable of making them.) So I am spending a bit of my precious "free" time administering this site. Excuse 3B is Facebook. I never planned to get addicted to it, but it is very seductive. Anyway, I am doing something else as the WWW, just after this (although you will see it before this, due to the magic of blogging.) Amongst the many worthy things I meant to blog, and didn't and quite possibly won't, are-
- the bridge collapse in my hometown of Minneapolis, which I have been following obsessively
- the foot and mouth outbreak, and especially a very affecting and poignant piece from a PTSD suffering slaughterman, which I now cannot find a link for
- the latest developments in my chosen focus areas of world news and politics: Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Nicaragua and the US presidential race
- the trapped coal miners in America
- the monsoon floods in South Asia
I am sure my few remaining faithful readers are weary of my apologies for not blogging as often as I used to. Is it age, work, stress, or a combination of the three? I was using my new fitness regimen as an excuse for awhile, but as often happens, I have already slacked off a bit on that. I haven't totally dropped it, and my intentions are to keep it up. I missed yoga for three weeks in a row, while my yoga teacher, Mitch, was in India on a training holiday-cum-retreat. I am going back tonight to yoga. I joined the workout-all-you-want plan at Sketchley Hall, my saviour of fitness place, but so far have only attended one class and blown off three, so not a very good start. But I have been fighting off some kind of exhaustion/illness thing. Saturday night it peaked, whatever it was (probably hormonal) and I went to bed at 5:30 pm, slept till 10 pm, got up and ate a bowl of cereal, back to bed at midnight and slept till 7:30 Sunday morning. I have felt much better ever since.
And it's a good thing, too, because I am finally taking an actual holiday! The last one was 11 months ago, when I went to Atlanta. On Saturday, DH and I set off for a week in Penzance. I am taking my laptop, and there are rumoured to be wi-fi hotspots in a couple of cafes and pubs in the town, so I can possibly blog from there. I am taking my camera, too, so there will be pictures.
This is all about me, my body, my ears and eyes. Specifically about my ears. At the age of merely 49, I had cataract operations on both eyes. As a result, my vision went from cloudy and problematic to excitingly clear and the best visual acuity without glasses I have had since my teenage years. A few weeks ago, at the still relatively young age of 53, I had hearing aids fitted for both ears. This too has been subtly life-changing. But, whereas I was extremely excited the first time I went out with my eye-patch 24 hours after the first cataract operation to see the dramatic differences in colour, light and texture, and I still, four years later, love to gaze at the night sky where I can more or less make out, I would guess, 30 to 40 percent of the stars, I did not immediately get that sense of wonder and awe from the improvement to my hearing. I could tell the difference; I could hear a lot of creaks and rustles, the Muzak at the dreary little shopping centre in Hinckley, cars overtaking me and the nearby conversation of boring strangers, all of which had been silent to me before. But last evening, temporarily back on the trains while my ride-share guy has a brief holiday, I heard the dusk chorus (if that's even a term) of birds in the little strip of wilderness alongside Leicester train station. The birds had always been there, but I had never heard them over the buzz of the busy train station. At last, I have the wonder of near-perfect hearing.
I am halfway through the first week of my functional restoration programme. It is not Army basic training tough, but it is tough nevertheless. We were warned on Monday that our levels of pain may increase at first, that emotions would well up, and that we may have some negative feelings about the treatment. All true! Today we had a lecture about stress and learned that we may be experiencing random floods of adrenalin. Well, that may explain the two almost sleepless nights, despite being bone-tired, and the strange desire to do violence to DH, who has no idea what I am going through. Hormones mostly suck, in my opinion. And I say this despite having experienced pregnancy (thanks, I actually slightly prefer old age!) and having at least the memory of having a great sex life. The problems with hormones is that the good vibes they give you are far more than outweighed by the misery they can cause in other circumstances. YMMV.
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