nessienoo

Went camping this weekend. 
Friday night was quite cold which made the fire even more lovely!
I wanted to stay longer but Matt had to work.
I hope we go camping again very soon!

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ



1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (I've read a few of the tragedies and the comedies but not all)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 

Today sucked.
I'm glad it's over.
Tomorrow I need to redefine my responsibilities and find some clarity. Things are going to be changing....
again....
and it's easy to lose track of the basics.

Maybe I should start going for a walk at lunchtime?
This afternoon probably would have been better if I'd left the office for twenty minutes.
Oh well, spilt milk and all that.

We had an awesome weekend camping on Straddie. The beach campsite was excellent. We fished quite a few times and I even caught a few fish. It was also warm enough to swim and snorkel.

No-one wanted to come home.

Two days of working at home has been great so far. I can watch TV and re-edit procedures at the same time!

I haven't been putting in a whole day though. It's hard to concentrate non-stop with Matt home until 2:30pm and no interesting distractions like phone calls or visitors.

The surgery and my first ever stay in hospital went relatively well. I'm a bit sore but coping with the pain at present. I do feel like they must have wrenched me around on the operating table though. I have a sore neck and sore ribs. Hopefully it'll settle down quickly.

So for the next 10 days I'm only having liquid foods. I can keep having Optifast as long as I keep it quite watery. I can also have juices, soups and cups of tea as long as I drink them very slowly.

There's no better way to work than to be snuggled into the lounge watching Buffy re-runs and patting the dog.

Found it really hard to maintain focus today. I think it's a side effect of the diet I'm on so this evening I had some tuna with my veges. I've got enough to have some tomorrow as well. Yummy.

When I was speaking with Matthew this evening he had some interesting news. Apparently, my soon-to-be-ex sister-in-law had a lapband put in 6 years ago and it was a monumental failure for her. We never saw any changes in her eating or exercise behaviours and never guessed! She was one of the 5% failures. Recently, she's lost quite a lot of weight because she's finally working the program.

I'm starting to feel nervous about going to hospital. It's the big unknown for me and as per usual I feel quite anxious. Matt will be there for some of the day but we don't really know what time the surgery itself is happening so it's hard to plan. He'll need to come home and sleep at some point.

I have managed to stick to this compulsory diet for nearly 2 weeks now. I'm quite proud of myself. After surgery, I won't be able eat anything but fluids for a fortnight. I've bought another drink bottle to carry when I'm moving around a lot too. I have to be drinking fluids almost constantly but really, really slowly.

Whatever I eat has to get through a straw. Yesterday I cooked a massive pot of vege curry so I blended some of it to use after surgery. It's fairly concentrated so by adding water I'll have quite a bit of "straw-approved" soup to consume. If I make more cauliflower soup this week, I'll do the same thing. I've fallen in love with this dish but at the moment can't put anything in it but veges and stock. I'm keen to try it with a bit of butter or cream sometime. I think it'll be awesome.

After a fortnight, I'll be able to move to mushy foods and eventually I'll be able to go back to eating 'normal' foods. I'll just be eating a lot less of them.

I've already lost 5.5 kgs and will continue to lose quite a bit of weight for the next few weeks due to the severely restricted diet. That will slow down in a few months and the aim is to lose only 2 - 3 kgs a month.

The next few days are going to fly by!

1 day over.

Today I've had 3 sachets of Optifast (1 at each mealtime) as well as Metamucil at breakfast and dinner. For lunch I also had some raw veggies: cherry tomatoes; snow peas; cauliflower; and mushrooms. I could also have a cup of strawberries with some blueberries thrown in. I love berries!

Dinner was also accompanied by cooked broccoli, cauliflower and brussel sprouts with a sauce made from reduced beef stock, garlic and pepper. I have a cup of this left to have for lunch tomorrow, too.

The only other things I had today were 2 cups of black tea and 1 can of Diet Coke.

My energy levels are good today but I don't expect that to continue. I suspect that walking to the train tomorrow may take a little longer. It was freezing again this morning but today I was well prepared with a long pants, a jumper and scarf. Matt said it was only 7 degrees at Amberley at dawn today - the very time that I'm walking to the train. I love the cold!

I wanted to come home and take Charger for a walk this evening but she has had a seizure today and can't be exercised. Maybe tomorrow.

Not long to go now.
I've been to all of the specialist appointments and will begin the pre-op diet tomorrow.
I've been walking more too, getting up earlier to walk to the next train station. It's about 3 km's and a very pleasant walk. It's just a bit longer than I'm comfortable doing which is probably a good thing. When it starts getting too easy I'll know to extend the walk a bit more.

The pre-op preparation consists of two weeks of a very low calorie diet - Optifast. I could wait for thursday but I'm going to begin tomorrow. I'm just cooking for myself over the next two days anyway and I just want to get started.

The morning walk will help to kick me into ketosis. I hope I don't get too moody during the next few weeks. There are a few strategies I can use to mitigate the mood-swings: taking a break; working in another room; going for a walk; and listening to my iPod; and, blogging.

I've got chewing gum in my bag and my desk. Tomorrow I'll be buying a toothbrush to keep at work. The toothbrushing is a strategy I came across when Matt was giving up smoking and attended a "Smoke-enders" group (or something like that). Many smokers have trouble letting go of the oral stimulation of smoking a cigarette & are encouraged to brush their teeth more often to help deal with this issue. I figure this might help me as well. I'll soon see.

23 days to go until surgery.
I have thought about dying. As I've never had an kind of surgery before, there's no way to know what will happen.
It's extremely unlikely that anything out of the ordinary will happen but I like to be prepared.

Thursday is the psych appointment. I have no idea what to expect.

I felt quite cranky and impatient with everything today. Work was not enjoyable at all. There was too much noise, too many interruptions and a lot of frustration because I just couldn't seem to get anything done.
Tomorrow will be a write-off as there's a big work event in the evening. I'm even driving my car to work tomorrow instead of catching the train!
It's a once-a-year event and should be pretty good.

I'm re-doing my budget. What needs to be paid out of my salary each month? Lots.
I really need to sell my car but that entails getting off my bum and cleaning it. Bummer. I hate cleaning my car.
I also need to book it in for a safety check. Matt is never going to get around to it so I'll have to do it myself as per usual.

It's getting closer to surgery time now. In the next week I have a few specialist appointments to attend and pay for out of my pocket. I'll get some of it back from the health insurance but not all. I've basically cut out buying teas, coffees and lunches in the city to save money. It costs a lot to buy food and drinks in the city each week.

Ooops. I just realised that I forgot to include my train fares in the budget. Better correct that - it really adds up over a month.
I got a 'Go Card' recently to see if it would save me money or cost me money. Their website is a little confusing and I just wasn't sure.

Anyway, after a few weeks of using it I've found that both ways are the same cost per week for Monday - Friday travel to the city.
Now I just need to activate my account online so that I can top it up with my credit card.
And it's all "Go" then. lol.

Last night I went fishing on Moreton Bay with Matt, James and John. It was really lovely. John's boat is quite large and comfortably fit the four of us. I didn't do much actual fishing. It was great to just watch and be there.

In four weeks today, all going well with the specialist appointments in the next fortnight, I will be having weight loss surgery. After years and years of weight issues and failed diets, I have decided to get a lap band.

I've been thinking about the whole process. A lot. Although I'm not looking forward to the surgery itself, I am excited about the prospect of improved health. I've never had surgery or even spent a night in hospital.

I've begun to cut down on sugar and wheat. The first part of the process is a fortnight on a very low calorie diet (like Optifast or something) and I'd like to reduce the sugar-withdrawal-hangover as much as possible. The whole process will be one-day-at-a-time coping and I hope I'm not too hellish to live with in those first few weeks and months. I've been re-reading previously helpful books and reminding myself of the strategies that have helped me cope in the past

Matt took me out to Sizzler tonight. We know that it will be a while before I'll be able to handle eating out. He's been doing some research and is being very supportive although the whole 'trip to Sizzler' thing may not come across that way. It's important to know that this process is not a diet. I don't diet. I don't believe that dieting is good for you and it certainly doesn't work for me. My weight stopped increasing when I stopped actively dieting.

I won't be dieting after the lapband - just learning to appreciate really worthwhile, healthy food in small portions. Your food intake is limited and every mouthful counts!

I feel like I am stuck in a negative cycle at work.
Lot's of change and angst is hard to deal with. I know I'm acting out in a negative way but often don't consciously realise this until a little while after the fact.
It's not completely work though. I am a bit nervous about my up-coming surgery. Actually, I'm more worried about being turned down by the surgeon at the last minute, than the actual discomfort associated with the procedure.

I am finished with the second part of the WHSO course and will be back at work tomorrow. Now I know that some would consider me insane for being excited about such a prospect but I really like my job and the people I work with.

After two days of government legislation and safety talk, I'm keen to get back and catch up with my usual work.

On another note, Matt and I are trying to decide what to do for the Easter break. We have a couple of options and can finally make a decision now Matt's work shifts have been sorted out for the week. We can choose between camping with family somewhere nearby, camping with friends in the forest near Armidale or staying at home. I've left the decision up to Matt.

Four days in Melbourne.
Two bouts of heat-stroke.
F1 was great!

Come home and it's cold and rainy.
I'm looking for my tracky-daks and jumper this evening.
Fabulous!

That's what I was thinking as I walked home this afternoon.
It was a long, frustrating day. There were just too many distractions today and I found it hard to work. I ended up taking my work to an empty room on another floor and got more work done in an hour than I have in the past two days.

I have one more day to get everything caught up at work.
What if this is as good as it gets though? Should I be doing something else?

Thursday Matt and I are off to Melbourne for a few days for the Formula 1. I don't even feel that excited about it yet.

The moon is a beautiful shape tonight.
Turn on the cold weather now please.
Put the thermostat down really low.
Thanks :)