DAY TWO JUICING

Oh what a day!!!  Bill didn't get up until ten this morning.  I got up quite early but didn't make my juice til he was up.  I read a whole lot about balancing the stomach acids etc...  So....with all that wealth of info in my brain I changed my juice a little.  A couple of carrots, lots of celery, cucumber, spinach, a beet and two inches of ginger.  It was an awesome deep deep red.  I started to drink it and found that the ginger was stronger than I expected, but thats okay.  Its good for your digestion.  But after taking a few mouthfuls I would begin to feel nausea.  Achhhhh!!  It was flipping awful.  So I would wait for the pukies to die down then drink another half cup or so.  I truly thought I was going to hurl and I had made so much.  AND you have to drink it before it oxidizes or some such stupid thing.  So, I sat there and gulped and gagged and gulped and gagged until it was gone.  Jeeeez!! I wonder if bacon and eggs and hash browns juice okay!  Then we went over to swim but Don told me the pool is cold at this time of the year so no swimming for me.  I despise cold water.  So hot tub it was.

We took off this afternoon and went to town for a few things then out to our favourite beach at the end of the airport runway.  I casually walked down to waters edge and a very very strong wind came howling around the corner from down the beach, packing stinging sand with it.  I hotfooted it back to the car, but I stopped to take a quick picture which I shall post here.

We drove around and took a few shorter walks here and there.  We went up to Iao Needle park and chased cats!  So many of them....

Back home now and as you can see from the pics, I made a green juice for me and a fruit juice for Bill.  Blachhhhh!!!  I must be doing something wrong.  I am just not getting that fresh delicious flavour that they all talk about.  Oh well, I shall just plug my nose and down the crap.  TTYL!!

DAY ONE-JUICE FASTING AND EXCERCISE

One day down, 29 to go!!!  It wasn't quite as bad as I thought it would be.  I got on our scale here for the first time in a long long time and it wasn't quite as horrific as I thought either.  

I got up pretty early and within an hour made a green juice and downed it.  It was okay.  Around 11 we went to the pool and I am sincerely hoping today was water change over cuz the pool was so cold.  It is never cold and today was kind of a shock.  I will try again tomorrow but there is no way I am going to swim everyday in cold water like that!

I went out to an organic food store/cafe/produce place.  It smelled so good in there!  I  bought a couple of teas that will help along the way.

At five thirty we took off down to Makena and walked along the ocean front walk they have built.  It was so beautiful and as we walked it got dark.  I love walking in the warm wafting dark.  And now here we are, back at the condo and I am hungry and cranky.  I just finished watching that movie "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead"  Really informative and good.

And...its so cool here.  There is no CRTC to screw up watching missed tv shows or movies.  When they say something like watch it here, I can watch it!!!  I love having an american ip address.  I can also vote in American Idol et al.....!

LAST DAY....HELP!!!

Well today was the last day of eating and relaxing. I put the juicer together this morning and made a carrot/apple/celery juice. It was way better than I expected and way easier to do than I thought too. I am glad I have garbage disposal unit in the sink!

This evening, early evening, we went to the bird sanctuary just down the road and walked the boardwalk all along sugar beach. It was cool and easy. Tomorrow Bill wants to walk the beach, seawall down towards Makenna. We are swimming first!

So good day and I feel really ready for what is to come, if still a little scared. I despise being hungry!

THE PLAN

Its been a great few days here in Maui. We have shopped, gone to movies, trekked about and lazed around. We have not gone swimming, hiking or anywhere really great. I consider all of this a "holiday"! We have been eating crazy food without a care in the world. And thats because.....................it all comes to a grinding halt day after tomorrow....Monday.

I am committing to thirty days of juicing. I have researched. I have read blogs. I have talked to people that have done this. I am READY!! My ultimate goal and reason for this is to shut my digestive system down and reboot it in thirty days, eating a solid balance between alkaline and acid foods, the goal being to get off the drug omaperozol. That acid reflux drug is causing me to gain weight and keep it on. I may not be totally successful at getting rid of acid stomach (it runs in the family) but I can sure get it back to half or less the dosage.

The collateral benefit would be the weight loss. I am hoping that when I go back to eating the way I need to eventually, it won't all come roaring back. At least I will try.

The other part of this equation will be the exercise part of all this. Next spring we are going to China and part of that trip is climbing a million stairs, in temples, museums, cliffs and gorges....and we want to be able to do it.

So, some of you will definitely have zero interest in all this so see you in thirty days. But for those that are interested in this journey I will be blogging all the nasty and happy details, complete with a pictorial of our hiking/not eating. I shall post at least one pic per blog of something. Hopefully it won't be us falling, eating crispy creams, sitting on our asses in our living room, glued to the inside of our car ...... you get the point! wish us luck!! TTY Monday!

DILEMMA

I do have a dilemma right now. Not an earth shattering one but a dilemma just the same. I have clothes, tons and tons of clothes. I have clothes for every stage of my body size, from reasonable to..well lets just call it what it is...fat. Over the many years I have managed to get myself down to a much smaller size than I am right now, just to balloon up again. When I am at my smaller self I have optimistically chucked my fat clothes (or passed them on to pregnant people). Then inevitably it would happen, back up I would go, all the way to huge and, yes, I would have to go out and buy new clothes.

Right now I am packing for Maui. We are heading back on Tuesday for a couple of months so I hauled out all my clothes, summer, winter, big and small. This is a good time to organize and downsize the heaping heaving amount of clothes I own.

And now the diliemma. Do I stay goal oriented and get rid of the fat winter clothes, or (probably more realistically) do I hang on to them, knowing that every pound I Iose in the next couple of months, will be gloriously regained, with a bit extra? It seems self defeating to keep the fat clothes, but it seems stupid to throw them away, knowing I will probably need them again...I have noticed that I never throw out the skinny skinny clothes. Ahhh...what to do.

I did decide last night to go through all of the clothes piled high on Bill's side of the bed, and pick out the ugly mistakes that I have been keeping, no matter what the size, out of guilt about wasting money. I did and reduced the pile minimally. Next I got rid of stuff that was just old and maybe stained. The pile went down more than I like to admit. I then divided the remaining stuff, and there was stil a four foot high pile, into summer and winter and both. Knowing I would not need the winter clothes again, i folded them, skinny and fat, and put them in the hard to reach shelf. Now my pile was down to about three feet. What the hell is wrong with me? You know I bought a LOT of summer clothes when I knew we would be in Maui lots. But I have been there enough to know I wear, alternately, two pairs of shorts, two shirts, and two bathing suits. Thats it. And I don't comb my hair. So I do not need all those summer clothes, except sometimes on cruises. So, no I won't take them to Maui, but I can't use all those clothes on a cruise, so maybe ..............I threw the lot on the floor and said SCREW IT, I will figure it out tomorrow!! in true Scarlett O'Hara fasion. And now its tomorrow and there they are, all over the bedroom. I don't know what I will end up doing with them. Methinks garbage bags shoved in the closet will be the sad answer and that is exactly where I got them from in the first place.

TOO ANNOYING FOR WORDS

I KNOW he can't help it. I KNOW he hates it. I KNOW it is really really annoying to him. But.............When is it okay when someone elses's problem intrudes on your life so much, it becomes your problem and you get the right to be totally pissed off.

I am talking about Bill's sneezing. He has sneezed and sneezed and sneezed ever since the day I met him. Allergies he says, attention getting I say. And I am not just talking about cute little one offs. As a matter of fact we are sitting in a hotel room right now as I write and he is in the john sneezing. We are up to 13.

It isn't so much the actual sneezing I get pissed with. Its the way he allows himself to do it. Full open mouth, tensed up body force, loud as possible, spraying everything in sight. Try being near that, ten or more times in a row. What pisses me off is that when we are in a church at a wedding or at a funeral or somewhere serious, he stilll sneezes, but quietly into a wad of paper towel. And thats another offshoot of this. Every pocket he owns is stuffed with paper, wads of crumpled snotty paper. And they fall out everywhere. Because he can't bend over easily, they just stay there. I pick them up. I have picked up as many ten at a time, spread through the house. He lines them up along the fireplace near his chair. He says he is still using them. God forbid if they get left in a pocket and go through the wash. I will be picking paper bits for hours, off everything that went through the wash with it.

I don't think he is alone in this. On the last cruise a nasty cold spread through all the old peeps. About the second week they started coughing and sneezing. So, to make a point I pointed out to bill that men seem to be particularily self indulgent when it comes to sneezing. From that point on I would say man or woman each time we heard a sneeze. And it became really clear really fast. Men just simply don't have any self control whatsoever. They sneeze really loud and really messily. Women don't.

I worked it out once. I actually did the math. Twenty five years. That is 9,125 days. Average 10 (low) sneezes per day. And I would say that I have heard 91,250 sneezes since I met him. Very soon here we will hit 100,000. Now some say the sympathy should be for him. Nay nay I say. It is HIS problem that has become mine. There seems to be no justice in this. Good thing I love him.

THE GIFT THAT IS MY DENTIST

I hope my dentist reads this one day.

My dentist and all her crew have changed my life. Not in the way you may think but in a very deep visceral way. Let me explain.

I was raised in a very small community up north. We lived on a government farm halfway between Smithers and Telkwa. My early childhood was a miracle of wonderfulness. Keep in mind this was back in the fifties and you had to ford creeks to get up there. There was no tv, no radio other than CBC, no magazines (we were pretty poor), no newpapers etc... We lived a pretty isolated bubbled life, but a truly good one. We belonged to a strange cult like religion that cocooned us even more.

Our tiny town did not have a full time doctor or even a part time dentist. We had a hospital run by nuns and very competent nurses with visiting doctors from Prince George. Life seemed a lot simpler then. If you got aches and pains and sickness, you waited. Either it got better ....... or not! You saw things like goiters...and for those of you that don't know about those, they are HUGE swollen round like baseballs growths on the neck. And you saw giant round grapefruit size growths on stomaches under shirts, later to be told those were hernias. You saw crossed eyes, handicapped people due to polio, pock marked skin from measles and chicken pox, clubbed feet, and on and on. Things like that didn't get fixed in those days.

Dentists, (I still cringe a little at the word) were in Prince George. PG was a long long way to go in those days to get a tooth fixed. Once in a while a fly by night dentist would come to town and set up in the local school or community centre. These dentists were not nomadic for "I want to go north and experience the great white outdooors" reasons. No, they were nomadic because they sucked so bad communities would put the boots to them. I was always taken to them because I had terrible teeth. I shall recount only one of the horror tales. But make no mistake, I have quite a few of these awful stories.

The one that stands out the most to me was when I was seven years old. A dentist had set up in the old elementary school in Telkwa. After school my mom took me there and at the doctor's insistance, left me with him. He had told her that kids behaved better when there were no parents present. This being an era of innocence, she gladly dropped me off and left. He was very large and had huge glasses. I climbed up into the chair and opened my mouth. He took a cursory glance and instantly decided I should have two of my teeth pulled. This wasn't the first teeth I had pulled by a dentist. Not really understanding the whole proceedure and exactly what was happening, I trustingly, with some trepidition, kept my mouth open. He gruffly told me that it was going to feel like a bee sting (which scared the pants off me) then grabbed some pliers and proceeded to yank my two teeth out, without freezing. The pain was blinding. The fear neuropath in my brain, which became my default reaction in later years to dentists, became deeply entrenched forever. There were many more episodes to come, but that is the one that started it all.

I bless the day I found Andrea and her team. They offer sedation dentistry. I accepted that offer with alacrity and no sense of weenie shame at all. To date I can't count the number of trips to that dentist and I love going. They make you feel so comfortable and at home. And Andrea and her awesome husband have worked miracles in my mouth. I now have ridiculously awesome teeth and i didn't feel a thing. Now when I have an appointment I look forward to it. Either I get to visit with friends whilst having a checkup or her lovely husband is going to give me that happy juice that puts me out. (I love being put out. I think I could be a drug addict. I will have to be careful!!!) So all in all, a trip to the dentist now isn't that gut wrenching fear inducing event it once was but a happy occasion to look forward to. I have, with help from the best dentists ever, burnt a new neuropath!