Finally succumbed to the New Year ‘Sort myself out’ bug. So the Gluten, Soya, Caffeine, Dairy, Meat Free diet is back in force. Whats the old phrase – in for a Penny in for a Pound. So on top of that it is a fasting type regime as well. 10pm to 4pm no food. Allowed to eat in just 6 hours everyday. If I was sticking to the 8:16 diet then I could start eating at 2pm but as Son is not back from school until 4 then might as well wait. It’s funny the effect it has on me. Even a simple bowl of green salad takes on an out of body experience at 4pm. Almond Milk becomes pure nectar.

Anybody who experiences the pleasure of IBS will probably understand the length you will go to try and sort your innards out. You realise it’s unlikely ever to be that magic fix. You happily settle for work around that settles things down for a few months. As you get older more items are added to the banned list. Or at best the once a year I’ve got to have my fix and will take the consequences list. It never seems to be the boring or least favourite foods does it. This Christmas shockingly Marzipan has been added to the naughty list. Absolutely heartbreaking. It’s bizarre as Almond Milk is currently fine with my body and yet Marzipan…… So if you ever see me in the street looking like Mr Creosote then you know I’ve just succumbed to Marzipan with a large coffee.

Anyway the diet switch has been surprisingly easy this weekend. As soon as we have got up Son has wanted to play football in our mud patch and then take the dog for a walk. It’s helped pass the empty feeling hours. Frustratingly the football was set all day in a misty and rainy backdrop. Only as we started to pack up did the clouds finally part and we got to see the last embers of the setting sun. It will be a brief interlude as another Atlantic Storm is flying towards us. The Trampoline is hopefully well and truly sandbagged down.

So now we prepare for school. Last week was best described as a holding pattern. It didn’t get worse but certainly didn’t move forward. Currently we are trying to revise for a Science Test. For whatever reason Son suddenly gets areas of knowledge that he just can’t visualise. Being dyslexic visualisation is his memory method. I’ve previously talked about his struggles with decimal points and shapes. We can now add Waves to the list of struggles. Poor kid just can’t get his head round them.

Dad not sure I‘m going to do very well on this one. Can’t even spell Electromagnetic or Longitudinal. So even if I do fluke the right answer I still won’t be able to write it down correctly. Maybe as I’ve been practising for a Shakespeare spelling test I should just put down random bard words. At least they will be sort of spelt right.

That did make me smile. Imagine the look on the Science Teachers face when the response to the question. Which of the two types of wave produced by an earthquake is the first to arrive at a location. And will it be the P or S wave? Is as following

Macbeth and Stratford upon Avon.

61 thoughts on “Earthquakes and The Scottish Play”

  1. I like sons solution. As long as he spells them correctly. It sort of loses something if they’re misspelled.

    Ah, the joys of IBS. I just did a review of the past 10 years and almost forgot (blocked from my mind) the horrible summer/fall of 2018. 😱 That’s something I’d never care to repeat.

    Gorgeous sunset! I’m feeling envious.😉

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  3. Love your sons answer .. okay the diet sounds like no fun but you will feel great.lets see I do not eat pastas I do not do much if any dairy love almond milk . I do not eat much meat chicken if that . I do not eat bread . So I live on oatmeal with almond milk in it. Lots of veggies, protein drinks( plant ) spinach wrap ( organic) lots of water, I do love have to have my coffee almond milk in it, am I hungry ? Sometimes but feel great . IBS must be hard to live with..

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  4. just out of curiosity- have you ever had your pancreatic enzymes checked? several persons i have known( 5 or so) who had seemingly endless digestion issues had an enzyme deficiency. But they did not know this for years and went through literal HELL before some doctor was wise enough to check for this ( it isn’t commonly checked) . they all thought they had 1. IBS. 2. Gluten sensitivity 3. Lactose intolerance. ,…and a hundred other things.None of that was the case and a simple enzyme gave them a whole new life. Usually it is amylase. And that hs also been the case with some of the kids i care for. If you haven’t had this checked, i would like to suggest it . It was sad that so many years of misery were wasted by these people desperately trying any diet they could find for relief.

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      1. lol..it wouldn’t surprise me if you never tested for that.. as i said..most doctors never think about that. i watched one guy suffer most of his life until , in his early 20’s he was down to being only able to barely eat lettuce and had lost so much weight he went into the hospital multiple times. finally a doctor decided to check his pancreas ( no one ever thought of this before as he was thought to be too young for any issue) . Since then i have met several others – same issue…at any rate, it’s worth a shot. If it were me, and i asked for it..if my doctor tried to say no, i would definitely push the issue…

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      2. Thanks for that advice Lovie. I shall have to ask my doctor too. And sorry to hear you are suffering from IBS, Gary, but I hope you have not allowed the medical people to remove any bowel tissue. I did. My doctor advised me to let him take my entire large bowel due to ulcerative colitis, and I trusted him. Worst decision I ever made in my life.
        I too had a list of untouchables, but over the last 40 years have discovered that list to be false. What is inedible for some periods of times becomes edible in other periods of time. And vice versa. Every meal I eat has something that I was able to eat the previous day, but that upsets my digestive tract the next. Leftovers are almost always untouchable. But one cannot live like that. I have mostly given up and just live with the consequences of what I eat. It can be embarrassing, but my food at least tastes enjoyable.
        I doubt if the pancreas thing will help, my bowels were healthy the first 30 years of my life and I have no idea why I would lose an enzyme so suddenly, but who knows. Better to test than not test. And in my opinion, better to keep what you were born with. I am diabetic now, so life just keeps on giving. Diabetes and bowel disease diets don’t often mix.
        Enjoy life as best you can!

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      3. the people i am referring to were missing it their whole life( not suddenly)…it was just that testing for adults has not been common. In fact only preemies were commonly tested for the last few decades. But now, more specialists have started testing because nit having it leads to other long term issues( like diabetes and malnutrition) and the cure is so very simple ..one or two enzyme capsules a day for most…And while it is still a prescription, it is only an enzyme that the body usually makes and not an actual medication per say…again, worth a shot…cant hurt to check.

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      4. I thought about that, but what the hey. I’m sure my doctor will play along. He gets paid for every test he runs. It’s all about the money, and if they find something, bonus for me. (Canadian health care!)

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    1. To talk further about the Scottish play, I was in it once, many years ago.not as the god lady or indeed as everyone thought I would have been, a witch, but as the one scene wonder Lady MacDuff and one night, the night we all battled through playing to 250 unruly schoolchildren, I had the misfortune while having a bit of after scene banter with the 3 murderers, one of whom was never sober, to step off the spiral staircase behind the set, in the dark, into thin air and plunge several feet to the ground, meaning the rest of the run was done with a plaster cast on my ankle. And, talking cursed, from then on, there was an accident to that ankle in every play I was in, a chipped bone, damaged tendons. To this day it’s a beggar. And continuing in the Scottish play traddy, on the opening night of the Mr’s play, alas we staged the only recorded performance of the play–by William McGonagall at that– where the lead does not die. And at the last, the night before, when my older girl who had stepped into a few roles, cos two cast members couldn’t do the Sat night, said to me, she just wished she was on every night now, I bestowed upon her her the MacDuff part as well as some others that were mine, in the full confidence that being trained she could take onboard the ‘choreography’ at the last. And she did but the Mr . who had the lines explaining this scene started poncing about with his sword instead while she stood there …bear in mind, everything in this play is in full audience view… next to me,,standing there all nicely waiting for my next line,… mouthing ‘ Mum… what will I do?’ out the side of her mouth To which I mouthed, ‘You’re trained. Think of something.’ And eventually ‘ Give him a mo. if he doesn’t stop I will think of something,’ But I could see by the look that he was going to start the scene and then no-one would understand it, so in what I felt was my finest hour at that point, I stepped forward and delivered his speech about this being McGonagall’s finest hour only alas I said it was in his efforts to escape the killing fields… instead of floors and then ..then I said the dreaded word. Macbeth. And really from then on in every single performance of the Mr’s play, has known NOT the script….

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      2. LOL…. You prob would have cracked up. The next nite was the one where he’d plainly lost the running order and whispered 3 times…what’s the next scene at that same spot, to which I nicely whispered back 3 times the Highland scene. But then he asked a fourth time and the Highland scene became another sort of Highland scene. More than one person sitting just there in the audience, when I turned round was decking themselves. Our girl and this other cast member didn’t know where to look. I said to them after.. ‘that will only have been heard on that side. Then later this pupil of mine who I’d got onboard to play various parts requiring a junior, who was over on the other side, admitted how impressed he was with the language. It was just a different sort of way of performing I guess….

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  7. Oh, that’s funny! I like the way he thinks 🙂 I am doing the same intermittent fasting diet as you! I am off from 3PM to 10PM. And oh my, food is so good when I finally get to have some! I am dairy, gluten, soy, oat free – all those foods give me some sort of pain so they are out. Still pretty excited for 3PM. C’mon 3! 🙂

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  11. I did have IBS once but it gradually went away and never came back… then I developed psoriasis on my hands instead… that got better and the list goes on. Anyway, I would be saddened to be unable to eat marzipan, even though it is only a Christmas/New Year event.
    Pardon the pun: my gut feeling is that stress is the root cause of your digestive troubles. Probably a good idea to check on enzymes, as suggested above, but stress is a nasty little number.
    Needless to say, the anecdote about your son’s science test was very amusing. He is clearly very clever.

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  13. Your fasting diet wouldn’t work for me….. not enough food, so I try to have three meals a day, but nothing to eat after 7pm and nothing to drink after 8pm except Tuesdays (darts supper). Weigh In tonight and Ilm the same as i was before Chrostmas so still within target Yay!!
    Love your son’s answers.

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  14. IBS is no fun! Mine is such that I cannot do fasting or else I get extremely light headed. Small meals through the day is easier on my system. Plus avoiding the ever-lengthening list of trigger foods. I really let the holidays get the better of me and now I need to get back to it as well. Have never been good at starting on January 1 either. Must be the rebel in me. Don’t want to follow the crowd 😉

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  16. I thought I had IBS … as did the doctors. Everything was checked out and nope, whilst I had all the symptoms, I was fine. Apparently it was stress. Stress which had wrecked my insides for two years. For another (related) illness, I was given whilst on holiday a couple of weeks ago some anti-anxiety good old American medication called Xanax. I’d never heard of it, but apparently it’s very common over here … I believe it to be addictive which is a great shame because not only did it sort out my current problem, but for the first time since 2016 my IBS symptoms disappeared. Completely. It really had been stress related. I read a little about it and apparently doctors over here regularly offer it to patients with IBS as well as for anxiety amongst other things. Do you think that stress is causing or exacerbating your IBS? Just a though. Now I need to talk to my doctor and find out how to move forward with all of this without becoming dependent on a bloomin’ pill! I can’t begin to describe the relief of not having any symptoms though … almost four years is a long time.

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      1. Neither had I … maybe it’s a bit of an American thing … they certainly seem keen to hand out pills over here, but perhaps they don’t have the same limitations as in the U.K. Also, of course there may be massive side effects that aren’t listed! Oh God!

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  17. I have been gluten free Vegan for over 5 years and counting now. Sorted my innards out completely. Have never looked back (and it is kinder to animals and better for the planet in a lot of ways, taking the pressure off). Hope you can stick with it!

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