Doing things I wanted to do for a long time.

I have been quite busy lately and that is one reason I have not updated this blog for a time. I have also been sick. Seems like I have been sick from just before Christmas until now and I am still a little under the weather in some respects. In fact I am a little discouraged because I was under the impression that after losing about 147lbs my health would be much better. In most respects it is, no more diabetes and high blood pressure for instance, but this past couple of months I have been sicker than I have been for years even when I was over 300 lbs.

Anyway lately Jackie and I have started the refurbishing of our home. We are going to paint most rooms and put new flooring in as well. We are starting in our laundry room and back bathroom as the floor in those rooms is very bad. We have not painted the walls for over 20 years at least. Well as of this date the rooms have been painted and the flooring is mostly in. We have elected to use vinyl tile called Ultra for the floors. It looks like wood but is resistant to water and other things you would expect to be on the floor in a laundry room. So far it looks very good, but a little harder to install than was advertised.

As many of you may know I am a Ham radio operator and that is my main hobby. I got a new radio for Christmas from Jackie. It was in a kit form and I had to build it. It turned out wonderful and I am enjoying using it. I was able to put it together without any problems and my old eyes and hands were able to get the job done.

My weight has stayed stable over the holidays. I was up about 4 to 5 pounds but I am on the way of losing that now. I am happy with my weight and even with a few pounds back from the normal regain you have in my kind of surgery, I am stabilizing and people are telling me I don’t look sick. I guess when I was still loosing and my face was very hollow I kind of looked like I had some terrible illness and now I look much better. I can tell you one thing and that is that if I had not lost the weight I did there would be no way I could do the work around here that I am doing. The surgery and all that goes with it is still one of the best things that I have done in my life for myself. I would for sure do it again. 

Happy Thin New Year

Well I made it through Christmas and New Years without gaining much weight. I think I am up about 4 pounds but will be taking that off soon. This year I could eat much more than last year, but still not what I used to eat like.

Because of the surgery, my stomach (now called pouch) is much smaller than most peoples stomachs, and last year I will still recovering from surgery so it was hard to eat more than a small amount of food at one time. This year I could eat more but was satisfied much sooner.

But I did not deprive myself of any of the holiday things that make life fun. We even baked a few cookies but have most of them to the grandkids an folks we had for our Christmas eve dinner we have each year.

Normally New Years is a time we would get bags of potato chips and pig out that day. We did not have one chip this year and in fact the only treat we had was a piece of cheesecake we had left over from the Christmas dinner. Even that was too much and I tossed half of the piece I had away.

We are just now starting on our big project for the year and that is to remodel the house. At least we are going to redo the laundry room, small bathroom off the laundry room, my ham shack, the family room and the kitchen. Mostly all we plan on doing is painting and putting in new flooring. We will be modifying the kitchen cabinets and getting some new appliances but basically like the other rooms it will be painting the walls and putting down new flooring.

We are going to use venial flooring in the laundry room because of having so many wet things in there we were afraid that wood would warp so we went with venial flooring. We are also thinking about replacing the ceramic tile in the kitchen with the same kind of flooring we plan on using in the laundry. The family room will probably have hardwood.

I have a lot of work to do and I hope I have the energy to do it all and get the house back in shape for another 40 years.