After a very long and exhausting flight back home via Dubai - I hit the ground running in the UK on the 23rd!

We traditionally celebrate on Christmas eve with a candlelit dinner and all the trimmings so time was very short. Shortly after arriving I went  to Costco to gather supplies for Christmas dinner and a few christmassy odds and ends. Then a swift decorating of the mantelpiece and a  mini tree to put a bit of Christmas spirit into my home.  Spent the 24th cooking and cleaning for our evening celebration plus many moments in the day spent on bended knees cuddling my two little dogs who I have sorely missed.

My daughters boyfriend made us a wonderful ‘Cerviche’ (?) with lime marinaded fresh sea bass as a starter. We followed this with a huge hock of mustard & pineapple ham and a roasted fillet beef replete with sweet potatoes, buttery nutmeg parsnips and asparagus.  Dessert was rich chocolate sauce, ice cream and berries.  So quite a simple meal, but delicious if I say so myself!

We caught up with each others lives, pulled crackers, read silly jokes, exchanged gifts, laughed  and  I felt at peace and extraordinarily blessed.

Christmas day was a lazy day - I finally got a chance to do a bit of reading and pottering around the house. Mostly we just lolled about in a relaxed fashion eating leftovers, mince pies and dipping into chocolate boxes!    Not the best diet for a DSer but Christmas comes but once a year and I felt no guilt about eating so profoundly badly! lol

I have in recent weeks not thought much about my DS. It is so much a part of my life that aside from times when I’m shifting out of routine (like on the recent Truck trip through Zaire, Botswana and Namibia) I don’t feel the need to focus on it.

It goes like this in these ‘longerterm’ years. There are long periods of time when I don’t think about it. There is no need really.  I’ve long forgotten how difficult it is to adjust to a wls initially and what I live with now is generally easy for me. I say ‘generally’ because there are times I’m desperately aware of my bowels shortcomings such as when I was running across a campground deep in the night with my torch & bum clenched,  frantic to get to the communal toilets in time. :roll:

My DS did play up to a degree while out in the African bush.  Usually I have a bowel clock that wakes me around 8 am for the usual hummungous deposit in three parts. Suddenly I found myself needing the loo at 4am.  Which was not such a bad thing as most mornings we left our camp at 5.30 to 6 am, and the prospect of needing to do the biz behind a bush was not a pleasant one. It is very strange how my metabolism and ds clock adjusted itself and it convinced me that the DS certainly does have it’s own intelligence all over again!

The big prob is that this intelligence did not right itself for 3 weeks after the trip!  I’d awake at 4am with uncanny precision & then find there was no camp and no truck waiting after all!

I found the toilety side of DS life bearable after all my pre-trip fretting.   I’ll always detest communal toilets as a matter of course but I coped. What I did find hairy was the lack of privacy sometimes. Some showers left one with no space to undress except outside the cubicles in full view of the female public. I devised a complex process of undressing under a sarong as no way do I feel okay with baring my 120 year old looking body full of saggy boob & skin publically. 8-O

I also got the bloats again - which I think was partly down to less time to eat meals.  Meals were often rushed affairs during the day as we had to hit travel deadlines. I’m a very slow eater since my DS. My food often goes cold on me and I can be seen still chomping through my mains long after others have finished dessert. Eating fast is not good for me, but there was no choice.  Also I admittedly ate a lot of crappola en route. With 8 of us on board the chocs, crisps and biccy snacking never seemed to end.

By 4 pm most days  I was in true bloat looking 12 months preggers. I was also in dire pain trying to hold my wind so as not to cause pandemonium among fellow travellers.  And the truck had no suspension so I was jostled and bumped about to further cause discomfort.  Once or twice in the first week I thought I would start to cry with the pain of it. I thought I might have made a big mistake doing such a trip as I convieniently blotted out the fact that this misery was self caused.   I started to take Beano & Lactase twice a day and this combo worked brilliantly. Too brilliantly really … as I continued to snack heartily on junk between my meals.  There are times I don’t understand it - why did I eat this crap given that I don’t even like it much and given it’s side effects???  It’s still a mystery to me!

Still, amazingly I did not gain any weight at all.  A little gain might not have gone amiss in reality,  but then again I seem to be stable at around 54 kilo’s -55 kilo’s which is okay. When I think of my recent lapses into bad eating practises, I have to say this DS is a seriously incredible weight loss surgery and I do love it to bits still! :-D

Aside from a bad reaction to the anti malaria pills ( I think - or is it a deficiency of some kind rearing it’s head…Zinc or Vit B12 maybe?) which resulted in me getting raised blister like bumps all over my hands and arms plus a weird de-pigmentation problem after the blistering subsided - I had loads of energy and felt well.

I’ve not had time to assimilate my journey yet, what with Momli’s death, travelling home  & Christmas preparations. But it was an incredible time full of beautiful landscapes, happiness and warm sunshine. I’ll write more about it soon.  :-)

Meantime I hope you have had a happy Christmas and I wish you all the Very Best for the New Year. x