Well THAT Was Weird!

Yesterday I was sitting down to eat my lovely diet lunch of an apple, cottage cheese, and an egg on one of those 'thin' bagels. I haven't been eating much bread at all, like maybe 4 pieces in the last 3 weeks, but an egg sandwich sounded really good and the bagel was whole grain and only 100 calories except for the butter that I put on the bagel. Anyway, I'm about halfway through lunch and all of a sudden my face starts tingling and then burning. Burning to where I am in pain and starting to panic because WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON AND WHY IS MY FACE BURNING!?!
I had to go get a wet washcloth to put on my face because it was BURNING! and then it started tingling and burning on the backs of my upper arms and I'm starting to think that maybe I am having an allergic reaction to my lunch or maybe someone has poisoned my apple or my cottage cheese. I googled face burning and tingling but came up with tons of different causes, none of which was a poisoned apple. I was wondering if I should dail 911 or call Keith at work to come and take me to urgent care, and then finally after about 20 minutes of extreme burning it started to go away.

So, I tried calling the doctor and of course they were still on their lunch break and the office was closed but I was advised to dial 911 if it was an emergency which by now I was thinking maybe not so much because if it had been a poisoned apple I'd probably be dead by now instead of starting to feel better.

Anyway, I finally get through to a real person at the doctors and they take a message about my weird symptoms and say that a nurse will get back to me later. Later ended up being about 5 pm when the nurse finally called me back and said that it sounded like flushing and that was a side effect of my new cholesterol meds. A side effect that was not listed in the side effects when I googled my new meds, but that is beside the point, I was just glad that it wasn't poison.

So, I google flushing, which I'd never actually heard of when it doesn't involve a toilet or a city in New York, and what do you know, niacin causes flushing in almost everyone who takes it. Now, Keith was advised to start taking niacin for his cholesterol issues so I though maybe I should start taking it, too, since we both have the same cholesterol and too fat for our own good issues. But, I guess I shouldn't have taken the niacin on top of the new cholesterol meds and all the other vitamins and fish oil pills, etc. that I'm already taking because IT MAKES YOU FEEL LIKE YOUR FACE IS BURNING OFF!

So, problem solved and no, I won't be taking any more niacin any time soon.

And, it looks like my eating cottage cheese instead of a peanut butter sandwich is finally paying off with my not so accurate scale saying that I've lost 6 or 7 pounds. We'll see for sure when I go back to the doctor in a few months for the results of some more expensive blood work to make sure that my new meds aren't screwing up my liver and I get weighed on their fancy digital scale. I was starting to get rather discouraged at being hungry but not seeing any changes on my scale, so seeing a little weight loss is good and does give me incentive not to run to the store and buy a tub of Ben and Jerry's because ice cream is sooooo good.

I think Mother Nature played a cruel joke on us when she made it so very easy to gain weight and so very hard to lose it.

And, speaking of losing weight, we were doing pretty well on taking a little bike ride after dinner the past few weeks, but lately our air quality reports have been telling us that the air quality is not just unhealthy for sensitive people, but UNHEALTHY FOR EVERYONE! So, do you go outside in unhealthy for everyone air and go bike riding or do you skip that bike ride until the air is better? Exercise is good but not when the air will give you black lung while you are exercising.
Plus, Keith is outside in the bad air all day anyway and I still have to ride the bike on my errands in the morning, so...it's probably better to just stay inside after dinner and watch Jeopardy.

Cats and How's the Diet Going, Anyway?

We really are nice neighbors. We mind our own business except when the couple across the street from us provide us with entertainment by screaming at each other in their garage and we can hear them even with the garage door shut, and we say hi to the strange guy who we think is possibly a little Aspergers because he won't make eye contact when we do say hi to him, and we don't mind that our new neighbors right next door have six outdoor cats who like to hang around our yard.

Most neighbors wouldn't be quite so forgiving of cats that use their yard as a freeway and giant litter box.

The neighbors are two women that we think might be 'special friends' if you get my drift, and they have a little boy who is maybe going on two. They don't keep their cats in the house because of the cat litter and the little boy playing in the cat litter or something like that. So, all six cats live in the garage and our yard. They keep the garage door propped open so that they can come and go, and go they do. In our yard.

They started out with five cats, one really really old white cat who is very friendly but is so old that she can't meow anymore, she tries to meow and it just comes out like a gravelly squeak, and one little ginger cat that is not afraid of anything, not even the fireworks on the Fourth of July made her blink, and one gray cat that is curious but very timid, one calico that will let Keith pet her but not me, and one cat that looks just like Lucy and every time I see her I think Lucy has gotten out.

And then they got two more cats, something about going camping for the weekend and meeting some people who had these cats that they needed to give away so of course these two women brought them home. One solid black and one Siamese, both about 8 months old or so.

Well, about 3 weeks later the black cat got hit by a car right in front of the house, so now they are at 6 cats and I'm really surprised that nobody else has gotten hit yet. Yet.

And here is another instance of our good neighborliness. Keith got the shovel out and helped the neighbors clean up the dead cat. Now that is a good neighbor.

And on the diet front. I'm already bored with it and am having a hard time thinking of what the heck to eat. Yesterday I had soup for lunch and was starving about an hour later because vegetable soup just doesn't quite do it for me when there is no bread involved. Then last night I convinced Keith to make us some omelettes because he is the omelette maker around here, I get impatient and just make scrambled eggs. The omelettes were good, he put some ham, cheese, and bell pepper in there, kind of like a Denver omelette I suppose, and for the first time in a week I actually had bread in the form of an english muffin with my omelette.

I'm getting discouraged, though, because even with watching everything I eat and the no bread, potatoes, rice, or pasta thing, that scale has not moved. So maybe I'm just going to stay fat but still hungry.

My spell check keeps telling me that I am spelling omelette wrong.

So, I just googled it and it's supposed to be omelet. But omelette looks way fancier and kind of French.

Fatty Fatty Two by Four

In my next life I want to come back as a naturally thin person-you know, one of those girls that can eat whatever they want and never gain weight? And I'm not talking about the ones that throw up after eating, just the naturally effortlessly thin and trim ones.
All of my life I have been overweight. I love to eat and really love to eat sweet things and bready things. One of my earliest candy memories is of sneaking into mom's change purse-sorry, mom!-when I was about 4 years old for a penny. We lived in Scotland and there was a candy truck or maybe a bakery truck or some kind of truck that came down the street like the ice cream man does that sold candy. After studying how the bigger kids did it, I learned that with one of the big English pennies-about the size of our half dollars-you could ask for a penny lolly from the truck man and get a big sweet sugary lollipop in return.
I remember having to wear dresses-no pants back in my grade school days for girls-that came from the 'chubby' department. What a horrible name for little girl's clothes! Chubbies-why not just say 'Butterballs' or something? And I remember how uncomfortable those dresses were sometimes. They were the shirtwaist style so popular in the sixties, with the big skirt, sashes, and sometimes puffed sleeves with the little bands that cut into your upper arms. I was forever ripping out the armholes of those sleeves because of my chubby butterball arms.

This picture shows the typical chubby dress that I wore.
I'm not sure when this was taken, sometime in the early
sixties. I'm the fat kid on the left with my dad and my skinny sister Donna in the picture with me. Do I look like a fat kid? Not huge, but I was what people referred to as 'pleasingly plump'. And look at that haircut! After five kids my mom didn't want to have to brush too much hair so we all had short hair. Good thing we wore dresses or people may have mistaken us for little boys!

Anyway, back to the candy and sweets thing. I loved any kind of candy when I was a kid, especially licorice but now my tastes have been refined to where if it's not chocolate candy it's just not worth eating! I also like ice cream a lot, especially if it's chocolate! When I was about 10 I got 50c allowance each week, and before that money got cold, I was on my bike riding to the drugstore that had a soda fountain and a comic book rack. I could get two comic books and a chocolate ice cream soda for that 50c! I still remember how good those sodas tasted and how much fun I had reading those comic books.

So, anyway, back to the fat issue. I did lose weight about 15 years ago with what I called the 'Ethiopia Diet'. Basically, I counted every calorie and was hungry ALL THE TIME! It worked, and I lost a lot of weight, but at a few pounds gained a year times 15 years, it's all come back. It was fun being a sort of thin person for a while and being able to shop at normal sized people's stores for once in my life. I was never smaller than a size 12 which is still considered 'plus size' but it was the only time in my life that I ever saw daylight between my thighs. If you've never had fat thighs, you've never had the pleasure of rashes between them caused by sweaty thighs rubbing together. Or heard that whuff whuff of your pants when you walk.

So, now it's time to try and lose some weight again. I just had to put on my pajamas because my pants are too tight and I just couldn't take it anymore!
I did eat a light dinner but I am STILL HUNGRY!