In my last weight loss post, I talked about some of my challenges. I think this time it’s a good thing to talk about some of the successes. If you have never struggled with weight, some of these may seem a bit silly, but for me they are huge.

1. Most days I can walk without wheezing. Okay, there are still those days when I still have difficulty, but it is due to my respiratory issues and not due to the weight. Even if I were a twig, I’d still have those days, so I am thrilled with not wheezing for the majority. Before, I wheezed with minimal exertion.
2. I can cross my legs, and that means without struggling to do it to. It was one of those things that I didn’t think about, but one day during a business meeting I crossed my legs and then realized what I had done and the shock of it made me want to get up and run around the room fist pumping the air. I didn’t.
3. I can put on my shoes and tie them without sweating or having to take a break. And I no longer have to haul my leg up by a pant leg to do it.
4. I know I’ve mentioned this one before, but it is still very much a success. NO MORE blood pressure medication as it is no longer required.
5. I can climb multiple flights of stairs with no problem. My knees still bother me on occasion, but as with the wheezing the cause is other than weight.
6. I have to use belts to keep my pants up, and this is for the smallest size I own. Belts will suffice for now as I will buy clothing very sparingly until I reach my goal.



7. I am comfortable in normal sized chairs.
8. I no longer have to leave as much room on the driver side of the car when parking, because I don’t have to swing the door as wide for me to get out of the car.
9. My complexion has improved dramatically.
10. And for the last one that I’ll list, and one that is currently giving me a spring in my step, is that the pink outfit in the picture is something I bought several years ago (5-6) because I loved the color. I knew it was too small at the time because the top was a large and at the time I was fitting in 3X or sometimes a large 2X. This outfit symbolizes my determination to lose the weight, because I wanted it so much and I wanted to wear it. (Okay – I have very simple tastes in clothing and comfort is a prime concern and vibrancy of color is a close second.) So, when I picked it up off the rack, I vowed someday I would wear it. Today is that day. I’m not straining to get into it. I’m not stretching the fabric. I waited and now IT FITS!!!

Really, this list could go on and on because the simple things in freedom of movement alone could take a page and a half, but you get the idea. I am really pleased with my decision and the results.

While I am thrilled with how far I’ve come, I have had a little bit of a setback within the past two months. In January I had a flare up of gastritis, which I am prone to and was one of the reasons, I selected the lap band procedure over the gastric bypass. When the gastritis was diagnosed, my doctor sent me to have my band deflated, which is a scary thing for a lap band patient. But deflating the band allowed the gastritis to heal. I went this past week to have the band re-filled and the surgeon was very pleased that I hadn’t gained, as that is the norm when the band is deflated. I was hoping for continued loss, but will be content with lack of gain. We did run into a glitch when attempting to refill the band. The needle wouldn’t go into the port, so I am still flying without the help of my tool at the moment. The doctor sent me for X-rays as she suspects the port has flipped and is backwards. Apparently this is a very rare possibility, but one she think is highly likely because she was unable to get the heavy duty industrial strength needle in but has no problem in locating the port itself. If that is the case, it will require a minor surgery to correct. And I was hoping 2010 could be a surgery-free year. Oh well, I will continue on.

I have added the extra picture to his post to give a better Before picture. I found this when cleaning out my desk during a recent office move and thought it provided an excellent visual of how far I have come. Oh, and the guy I’m with is hubs.

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I bought Misfit McCabe for my 12 year old daughter to read. I was lucky enough to read it first.

Misfit McCabe is the story of 14 year old Katie McCabe. Katie’s mother died when she was very young and her father has his hands full with her mischievous behavior. After Katie and her best friend Timmy burn down a shed, her father sends her to live with his brother Charlie and his family. To make matters worse, Katie’s father is ill and is going to the hospital for tests.

Katie does not want to be with Uncle Charlie, his two sons Matt and Mark, and Charlie’s niece Sarah. She feels like an outsider in a house full of rules and she plots to make them send her back to her father. To make matters worse, she makes an enemy in record time– Harvey, Jr. Harvey, Jr.’s father owns the bank and most to the town. Harvey, Jr. wastes no time in throwing this in Katie’s face and insulting Katie’s family. Katie, not one to back down from a challenge, punches Harvey Jr. in the park– right in front of 3 football players.

Just as Katie begins to settle into her new home and get a new boyfriend, Tom- one of the football players, she finds out that her father died. With her entire world ripped out from underneath her, Katie struggles to find her place in her new life while struggling to deal with her grief.

I loved this book. Misfit McCabe portrays a 14 year old in accurate light. As the mother of multiple teens, I am qualified to say this. What I loved about this book is that it was a wonderful story. Although Katie does have a love interest, it is not the entire premise of the book, unlike several book series my 12 year old reads. The true test was whether or not my 12 year old enjoyed the book. She loved it too. She couldn’t wait to read book 2 of the series, Nowhere Feels Like Home. My 12 year old cried several times when reading Misfit McCabe, which surprised her. She didn’t think a book could affect her that way. It brought up some interesting conversations about being truthful and losing a parent, an experience my daughter could relate to. My daughter has told several of her friends about this book and I have purchased a copy to donate to her school’s library.

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Sixteen is a pivotal age, stranded between childhood and adulthood. At sixteen life ranges from ecstasy to despair and the cause of the emotion can be trivial or momentous. I remember wanting to be taken seriously, to be treated more as an adult than a child. To be free to make my own decisions for the course of my life. But of course, along with the freedom of decision, comes responsibility and consequences for those choices.

In Katherine Marple’s novel, Okay, the sixteen-year-old unnamed female protagonist makes choices which swiftly alter the course of her life, and takes her best friend, and protector, London with her. After setting up the pair as best friends, living in the same neighborhood, in the same style homes, the differences are revealed. London has a loving, supportive family to come home to, while the protagonist fears her alcoholic, abusive father. Coming home late from a graduation party with London, the protagonist attempts to sneak into the house avoiding her father’s wrath, unsuccessfully. When he has beaten and choked her, and threatened her with more abuse and potential rape, the protagonist runs to her best friend to enlist his help.

“Please,” I begged. “Let’s go now.”
He solemnly nodded his head, stroked my hair, and whispered, “Okay.”

Having convinced London to abandon his loving home, his college career, and essentially his future to run away with her, the protagonist wastes no time in making bad decision after bad decision along the way. Drugs, alcohol, and sex with relative strangers, and all the while London is there to pick up the pieces. The protagonist is on a roller coaster of emotion from the freedom of living a life she has never known before to the despair over some of the choices she has made.

Marple presents a strong, clear point of view with her unnamed protagonist, and while I found the pacing to be a little quick, lacking in emotional depth with the heavy topics the book covers, the voice is unwavering and draws the reader along. For the bulk of the book, the lack of a name for the main character was not an issue, but a few times felt a bit gimmicky. The narrator herself explains the lack of name.

My name isn’t important. What is important is helping someone hope for a better view, at the end of his pain. That is the purpose of my story; to help someone heal.

Originally reviewed for the LL Book Review

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I am a voracious reader. Science fiction enthrals me, fantasy rivets me, romance gives me goose bumps and detective stories intrigue. There are books that grip me so that I can’t sleep until I find out the ending, and there are books that make me laugh out loud. However, very few books make me want to cry – LK Gardner-Griffie’s young adult novel, Misfit McCabe is definitely one of them.

Reading Misfit McCabe stirred up long buried emotions – feelings of internal dissonance, disappointment, abandonment, fear, overwhelming embarrassment – all the ups and downs of a highly strung teenage girl that I thought I had long gotten rid of. What do you know -they were merely lurking beneath the surface, waiting for Gardner-Griffie’s well-placed words to stir them from their slumber. One of the reasons I identified strongly with Katie McCabe, the story’s protagonist, was when she claimed, “It’s not fair I have to be a certain way just because of my last name.” Story of my life, seriously. There have been times when I have wanted to yell, I am not my father, when people place ridiculous expectations of how I should behave just because of the family I grew up in.

Which of you hasn’t ever felt driven to do something mischievous for revenge just because it seemed fun at the moment (AND would seriously annoy the person) and then regret it later? Which of you hasn’t felt the pang of first love, when that cute guy you enjoy hanging out with just so innocently – or not so innocently maybe – slips his arm around your shoulder? Gardner-Griffie doesn’t just deal with the good stuff, though. Katie has some pretty tough times to go through that none of us would like to deal with: a hospitalised father, living with unknown relatives, nasty bullies and a long cycle of revenge with horrible results.

Misfit McCabe is a well-crafted book that definitely deserves the Pearson Prize Teen Choice Award it received.

Where to obtain a copy

I actually got to know about the book through my interactions with the author(@lkgg) on twitter (see Twitter and the NaNoWriMo Experience) and it probably isn’t on Malaysian shelves yet (Malaysia’s book scene is way behind). I bought my copy online from smashwords, where it’s available in Kindle, Epub, PDF, RTF, LRF and Palm Doc formats as well as plain text. It’s also available as paperback on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

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Reviewed by Shannon Yarbrough for the LL Book Review

I was given the privilege of reading LK Gardner-Griffie’s new book, Nowhere Feels Like Home, while it was still in its infant stages before publication. I was first introduced to LK’s writing when reading her first book, Misfit McCabe, the first in a series of three books following the teenage days of Katie McCabe.

Katie becomes displaced from her routine after her father gets sick and passes away, and she has to go live with Uncle Charley and her cousins. The book came to a climax when Katie was kidnapped by her school bully, Harvey Denton Jr., and left in the hills all alone. After almost drowning, then getting bit by a rattlesnake and breaking an ankle, Katie finally made it home alive.

Nowhere Feels Like Home picks up right where the first book left off, where we quickly discover that while Katie is okay and recovering, things don’t really feel like “home” to her. She still feels displaced, and if it wasn’t for the broken ankle forcing her to stay in bed most of the day, she’d probably be back out there into trouble or searching to find her own self once again.

As I emailed back and forth with LK during the writing and editing process, I can remember in the very beginning how she had no idea how she was going to write a book with her main character stuck in bed with a broken ankle throughout most of the book. I was anxious to see how she was going to pull it off as well.

As an author myself, I know the challenges of coming up with a plot and then finding out how you are going to move your characters through it. What scenes will you create and how will you connect them? What conversations will your characters have and how will they be relevant to the plot? How will you breathe life into your characters without making them seem like stiff pawns just moving around on a chessboard?

After getting to know “Kit-Kat” so well in the first book, it was obvious the second book would have to focus more on Katie’s new family: Uncle Charley and Katie’s three cousins. And that is exactly the focus that LK took. There are indeed some very heartfelt conversations that take place from the edge of Katie’s bed between her and Cousin Sarah and Uncle Charley, shedding a bit of light on who her relatives are and why Katie should have no problems in calling their place her home now. Then there’s Cousin Matt and Mark, two rebellious boys, who respect Katie and make her laugh, and take up for her. LK embraces the emotional and physical discomfort that Katie is experiencing and uses it to further mature her lead character even more so than she did in the first book.

This is also a book of secrets beginning with Katie being instructed to keep quiet about how she broke her ankle in the first place. Katie also discovers that her personal vendetta with Harvey Jr. runs deeper with a family feud between hers and the Dentons. Katie and Sarah share moments as Sarah helps Katie cope with her pain, and sheds light on Sarah’s personal love life while Katie gains a boyfriend of her own. Timmy, Katie’s best friend whom she got into trouble with in the beginning of the first book, also makes an appearance and further solidifies Katie’s premonitions that things are changing, whether she likes it or not.

In the end, this is a book about family and not the traditional family we know as a mother, a father, a brother, and a sister. Sure, Katie is with blood relatives now who love her just as much as her immediate family did, but such a transition during your teen years can be hard when what you need the most is a place and a family to call home. LK balances this theme with Katie also adjusting to fit in with her peers, while avoiding the trouble that made her the “misfit” in the first book. It’s been nice seeing Katie mature and develop so nicely.

I’d also like to point out the beautiful cover of this book. And while I loved the bright colors of the cartoon cover that Misfit McCabe had when I first read it, LK has since given it a makeover to match the new “teen” feel that she presents with Nowhere Feels Like Home. LK definitely knows how to appeal to her target audience and knows how important that book cover is in making your book marketable to your readers. Well done!

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by Linda Welch, author of the Whisperings series, Along Came a Demon and The Demon Hunters, and the Novels of the Systems

Readers of all ages fell in love with fourteen-year-old Katie McCabe when they discovered MISFIT MCCABE, the first book in LK Gardner-Griffie’s young adult series. Now they can follow Katie’s adventures in book two, NOWHERE FEELS LIKE HOME.

In MISFIT MCCABE, when Katie’s father became seriously ill she went to live with her Uncle Charley, cousins Matt, Mark and Sarah. Almost before she could take the next breath, she lost her father, her home and her friends. Life for Katie would never be the same. Then Katie got into the worse trouble of her life when her new arch-enemy, bully Harvey Denton Jr., along with his cohort Emma, abducted Katie. Harvey then took Katie into the hills, where he left her bound and gagged, but not before pushing her into a river. Katie almost drowned. Trying to find her way home, she slipped and broke her ankle and then was bitten by a rattlesnake. Katie struggled back to civilization. NOWHERE FEELS LIKE HOME picks up the story where MISFIT MCCABE left off.

After an extract from Katie’s diary, which serves to reacquaint readers with the events in MISFIT MCCABE, chapter one begins poignantly with Katie in a delirious sleep, reliving almost drowning in the river. She hears the voices of her father and mother, only to wake and remember they are dead. From this first page to the last, readers are pulled back into Katie’s world and all who inhabit it.

Katie learns that her war with Harvey Jr. is only the tip of the iceberg in an ongoing feud with the Dentons, and escalates an already tense situation. She is besieged by unexpected, unwelcome, confusing emotions which appear out of nowhere in the form of sudden fits of raging anger or overwhelming sorrow. Cousin Sarah explains that this is a reaction to the trauma Katie experienced, and teaches Katie ways to cope. Underneath it all, Katie faces the same confusion known to fourteen-year-old girls the world over as they mature; she has the same questions. Sarah and Katie discuss topics important to a growing teen in a way I wish my mother had talked to me.

In fact, Cousin Sarah is a major player in NOWHERE FEELS LIKE HOME: a confidante, elder sister, substitute-mother and friend. At the same time, she doesn’t give in to feisty Katie’s tantrums an inch.

To ease Katie’s boredom, Sarah shares moments of her childhood and early teens. Katie is surprised and delighted to know Sarah was very close to her father Sam and mother Marie, and learns of events her father never mentioned. Through Sarah, we get to know the McCabe brothers, Sam, Charley and, to a lesser degree, Sarah’s father John. Katie realizes that young Sarah was not so different; she, like Katie, had her moments of rebellion.

To further complicate Katie’s life, she now has a boyfriend. Of course, that would not in Katie’s opinion be a complication, if she and Tom were not under Sarah’s eagle eyes all the time. When her best friend Timmy turns up at the McCabe farm, she realizes that their relationship will never be the same, either.

I waited for toad-like Harvey Jr. to reappear, and LK Gardner-Griffie does not disappoint. When Harvey re-enters Katie’s life, he does so with a vengeance.

In NOWHERE FEELS LIKE HOME, Katie gains maturity and (reluctantly) learns the art of compromise. Although at the beginning of Katie’s story she feels that “nowhere feels like home,” she learns that Uncle Charley, Sarah, Matt and Mark have her best interests at heart. She is family, and they teach and protect her the best way they are able.

After reading a preview of the next book, I can’t wait for the author to publish the third in the MISFIT McCABE series!

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