Cheap Thrills More Crochet and More Digestive Issues

Digestive issues. Just part of getting old I guess. As mysteriously as my...whisper...diarrhea issues started up last year they have just as mysteriously gone and now I am back to the daily challenge of trying to get enough fiber and water in the hopes of everything that goes in comes back out again. I had just gotten used to not straying too far from a bathroom and actually liking the part about losing weight because the fats in my foods were not getting digested when okay, enough of that, now you are not going to be able to go at all! So...metamucil is once again my friend and how many times a day can you drink that stuff anyway? I keep a bottle of magnesium citrate saline solution on hand for emergencies but be careful with that stuff and definitely don't drink too much of it! It's cheap though and doesn't taste too bad nor does it give you cramps like some laxative pills can.

I try to get fiber in my foods but my appetite is just so bad these days, food does not sound good but I still get very hungry and have to eat something, anything! Unfortunately my taste for sweet stuff looks like it will never go away, but my taste for anything healthy like chicken or a salad is just non existent. And lets not even get into cooking anything, it's too hot to cook and I just plain old don't like doing it, especially when I just can't face eating the end result because it just doesn't look or sound good. I do mix up and drink a lot of Trutein protein shakes (which come in wonderful flavors like peanut butter marshmallow!) but as far as real food goes, ugh.

We did go out to lunch with Joe last week and went to a cafe down the road that we hadn't been to in years. They had expanded both the cafe and the menu since we were last there. I seem to remember it only being open for breakfast and lunch but it's now open for dinner too and they also have a full bar, not that either one of us can drink any liquor anymore. I opted for the hamburger patty diet plate and it was really good, the hamburger was really tasty and tender and the sliced tomatoes and fruit that came with it did whet my appetite and tasted really good. Keith had pork chops and eggs and Joe had bacon and eggs which came with home fried potatoes and a biscuit and gravy (yum!). The service was really good and the heavily tattooed waitress very cafe/truck stop friendly so I'm pretty sure that we will go back next time we are looking for a good meal. However I don't think I'll be trying the tongue sandwich that is on their menu any time soon.

We went to the movies last week to see Jason Bourne which was good, but I have an incredibly hard time sitting through a movie in a movie theatre these days. I get very uncomfortable and always have to go to the bathroom halfway through and am looking around for the remote control so that I can put the movie on pause. It's also really expensive to go to the movies, $10.00 each to get in and then Keith spent another $14.00 or so on a small popcorn, coke and a bottle of water.

Yesterday Keith created his 'poor man's water park' in the back yard by propping up the hose so that it would shower down on him. Millie does not like water spraying on her so she watched from the sidelines looking quite confused as to what Papa was doing.

He sat out there for about 30 minutes under the water and said it was very relaxing. Plus it cooled him off after we had worked in the front yard getting things cleaned up that morning.

More crochet. I've gotten a lot of patterns off of Etsy and am really enjoying trying them all out. I did this mandala coaster pattern yesterday.

I have so many different colors of the 'I Love This Cotton Yarn' brand from Hobby Lobby that I could probably make hundreds of these in all different color combinations. I went a little overboard last time I was at Hobby Lobby and now have boxes full of yarn!

Saturday Odds and Ends

I don't get sick very often, but this year is not starting out all that well. Keith brought the Barstow crud home from work and we were both sick with colds that didn't want to quit, the cough from the cold seemed to hang on for weeks and we had stuffed up noses and lots of snot. We started feeling better and then he had an attack of what we thought was allergies but must have been the Barstow crud again, with him having a miserable trip over the desert, runny nose, sneezing and coughing the entire way. Enough to where the engineer was having second thoughts about being cooped up in a cab with him and worried about his own health. It was the second coming of THE COLD not allergies, because I'm going through my second coming right now. It started a few days ago with that something more than allergy type feeling and has become a full blown nasty nasty cold. My head is full of cotton and I can't breathe through my nose very well. Two colds in as many months is very unusual for me, I don't think I've had a cold in 2 or 3 years. Thanks, nasty Barstow!

Now that we've been dog parents for a few months, I've come to the conclusion that cats are much much much easier. Dogs certainly do need a whole lot of attention and don't let you forget that they need that attention unless they are asleep. I do enjoy having an animal that is actually excited to see you when you walk in the door, whether you've just been outside to take trash out or have been gone a few hours, it's like OH MY GOD YOU'RE BACK AND YOU ARE THE BEST PERSON EVER! Kind of good for the old ego there.

I do sort of feel like a zookeeper though, what with feeding and poop cleaning up and feeding some more and more poop cleaning up, but we are enjoying our yappy needy little dog quite a bit. Except for the barking part of it all.

Speaking of poop, as we get older or don't eat the right things, we do tend to have problems in the going to the bathroom area on occasion. Or every day in my case. I've been drinking my Metamucil 3 times a day for a lot of years now, the extra fiber certainly can't hurt and it's supposed to help keep your arteries cleared out too, but even with all that Metamucil I've had a lot of problems in the bathroom going ever since I turned 50 it seems like, with each day being a challenge as to whether I will or won't be able to go today. It's not fun dealing with constipation, not a topic we usually like to discuss but something that can make you very cranky and irritable. It's also not something you want to wake  up thinking about every single day.

I had tried probiotic pills once before but the brand that I bought gave me stomach cramps, so gave those up very quickly. I decided to give them another try and got a once daily delayed release probiotic and hey! no more problems! The brand that I got is made by Renew Life and is called Ultimate Flora and boy, do they work well with no stomach cramps. I still drink my Metamucil for those digestive benefits and I feel a lot less cranky these days.

And, speaking of constipation, we've all dealt with hemorrhoids, or piles as they called them in the olden days, and those aren't much fun either. I used to use the standard Preparation H but found a homeopathic cream that works so much better, almost instantaneously. It's called Nupercainal Bio-Active cream nad it's made with herbs and is cooling and soothing and works really really well. It feels a little odd at first since it is definitely COOLING! Strange feeling to have your hind end kind of tingly cold but it works so very well.

Okay, what else can we talk about that doesn't involve butts and bathrooms?

The weather? It was supposed to start raining overnight but I woke up to sunny skies. Rain is promised for later today so we will see if that ever happens. I do like me a rainy Saturday, especially when I can just stay home and watch it all from the comfort of my couch. Which is where I will probably be most of the day since I really don't feel all that well.

Good Thing We Had A Movie To Watch

Last night.

I did watch some of the election coverage because that WAS ALL THAT WAS ON and while I do care somewhat who is elected, how they can make an entire evening out of it I don't know. BORING! But I am glad that Obama won and we don't all have to become Mormons and stop drinking coffee now.

I had not been feeling well lately (more on that later) and we had watched the Most Wondrous Marigold Hotel or whatever it's called movie on Monday night (great movie and I thoroughly enjoyed it by the way) and so had to take the movie back to the Red Box and decided to get a few more and spend the afternoon on the couch. So, we watched The Iron Lady, which was excellent, then watched some election coverage, then put on the newest Sherlock Holmes movie, which we also enjoyed except that I was getting sleepy towards the end because it was getting late (9:30 pm!) and I'm old and have to go to bed with the chickens these days, and Keith actually fell asleep. Good movie, though. The $1.29 per movie was well worth it. Then after that a little more election coverage and now we were both even sleepier so it was bedtime at 10pm.

Anyway, I haven't been feeling all that well for the past 5 days because something went all wrong in my digestive area again and I absolutely could not go to the bathroom and my stomach was hurting. Bad. I've been drinking Metamucil 3 times a day for years now, to keep things going and to also help with my cholesterol, so I don't know if it's because we haven't been eating quite as healthily lately or if it was the large amounts of candy corn I had consumed. Actually, it wasn't candy corn but Indian Corn, a bag of which I had gotten at walmart in the sale pile for 50c. Indian corn is a little different than the regular candy corn, the tail end of the corn is chocolate. I do wonder how they can still call it Indian Corn in these days of political correctedness, you'd think they would have renamed it Native American Corn a long time ago. But, it is delicious regardless even if it might be constipating.

I had forgotten that I used to drink Plum Smart juice, a lighter more tasty prune juice type product, being made from the plums before they are turned into prunes, and quite good for the old digestive tract. Keith reminded me about it so I got a big bottle of the less sugar version of Plum Smart, a box of probiotic pills to start taking on a regular basis (and those things are EXPENSIVE!) and some Miralax, and something worked because after 5 days of misery I feel SO MUCH BETTER NOW! As the little Charmin Bear might say, everything came out okay in the end.


Today Keith is going to remember that he needs to be at the Career Services Center at 9:30 and see what they have to offer and hopefully the paperwork that he needs to file for unemployment will come in today's mail. It is strange having him here all day but it's also nice not to have to fix him his work lunches each night. A little vacation for me, too.

Random Thoughts

We were watching TV the other night and Jamie Lee Curtis was talking about irregularity again, and Keith and I got to thinking that you never see any men on these types of commercials, just women, so is irregularity something that men either don't have problems with or wouldn't eat the yogurt anyway or what. Keith said it's because the guys just drink a lot of beer and that keeps them going just fine. Now if they made beer flavored Activia they might have something there.

I was very proud of Keith over the weekend, he actually got something accomplished and the wood that was on the living room floor is gone. It's not quite all on the walls yet, but close. He was replacing the trim around the doors in the kitchen with trim that he cut himself and will match all the other wood work that he's done in the living room and kitchen, and there are only 2 pieces to go. He is a perfectionist when it comes to woodworking so everything takes a long long long time...someday, though, someday, we may have a finished kitchen. Complete with a floor!

Keith got a new debit card in the mail yesterday. I just assumed the old one had expired but there was a letter about how his debit card number had been flagged for possibly being compromised so they were sending him a new card with a new number. Keith called the bank to see what the heck was up but all they could tell him was that they got an alert with a whole string of credit and debit card numbers that were found in a database somewhere and had apparently been stolen. We did have a couple of criminals here in town that were putting little capture machines into gas pumps and stealing debit card and pin numbers from gas pumps so we're thinking that might be what happened. About the only place he uses his debit card is to buy gas or lunch. It does make you a little leery of using your debit card all over the place like we do, though.

And, speaking of calling the bank, our phone has been acting up for quite a while, where it wasn't keeping a charge and you'd be trying to talk on the phone and it would start beeping that the battery was low. Not that we even use the phone that much, days will go by without the phone ringing and when it does ring it's just somebody trying to get us to send them money for tickets to the Police Association Rodeo or something. Anyway, he's been getting more and more frustrated with the phone and last night he was trying to call the bank and both phones were beeping that the batteries were low even though they sit in the chargers unused for days on end and he got so mad that he threw the phones into the trash. I said can't we just get new battery packs for the phone, but it's an old phone and we've never really liked it anyway, so we went and got a new phone at Target. And, dang, but do they have some fancy phones these days.

Now we have to relearn how to use a phone. I'd really like to just get one that just plugs in and sits on its cradle, doesn't have a battery or an answering machine or speaker phone or phone book inside it or buttons and beepers and all that, but I guess they don't make those kinds of phones any more.

Do Not Try This at Home

Do not take a dulcolax (laxative) pill before going to bed, no matter that the package says it will guarantee 'gentle overnight relief'. Gentle my ass.

I've been having some extreme not being able to properly poop issues this week and have not been feeling well because of it. I drink my metamucil at night, eat an apple most days, and try to get some sort of fiber each day, but apparently not enough fiber, hence the issues. Well, yesterday was the worst, and besides not being able to properly poop which makes my stomach hurt, it was making me more cranky than usual and really really uncomfortable. So, against my better judgement and in the hopes of some gentle overnight relief I took a dulcolax pill (left over from when I had my colonoscopy, so that should have made me stop right there) before going to bed last night.

At 3 am I was awakened by EXTREME intestinal cramping. EXTREME! But no gentle relief. I tried to get comfortable and get back to sleep, but it's hard to sleep when your intestines feel like they are being tied up in knots.

I did doze in and out the rest of the night and woke up not so refreshed at 7, fed the cats, clutching at my abdomen, got some coffee, and tried to go poop, but no gentle relief.

Now, here's how you know your husband loves you (or he's just a little twisted). He got the enema bag out (left over from both of our colonoscopies) and helped give me a enema. And it worked.

I still don't feel well, my insides feel a little queasy, which I think is a result of the not so gentle dulcolax pill (like I said, don't try this at home) and I feel tired and still kind of cranky.

So, I did a little googling on the best fibery foods to eat to avoid constipation, discovering that most of the best fibery foods are things that I really don't like, such as brussel sprouts and broccoli (ugh), but apples are up there, cauliflower, which I do like, cabbage, which tastes pretty good when you make coleslaw and drown it in tangy coleslaw dressing, and oatmeal, which we have plenty of since we bought the buy one get one free mega tubs of oatmeal.

And metamucil, which I'm going to start drinking 3 times a day instead of just once a day. The only thing I don't like about metamucil is that you have to constantly stir it so that you don't get the big slimy metamucil wad at the bottom of your glass that you shouldn't drink because it can choke you to death. Seriously, read the label.

Uh-oh, that dulcolax is finally kicking in-gotta go!