The big numbers: Long term blood sugars measured by HbA1c, was 7.6, this time, 6.3 ... Normal is < 6.5

Blood pressure, 123/75, normal.

Wow.

Alas, per my testing scale, my bodyfat% is disgustingly high, and I DID have it trending down before I went on the program to change all this around.

So. Healthier but fatter. And all I need to do is some exercise to help deal with that, right?
My doctor had a new diet plan based on logging everything you eat and tracking the nutrients, which seems to me to be a great idea ... so great that I've done it several times before, and ... it works, but I have to remind myself to keep with it. Every time it failed in the past was because for some reason I stopped logging, and stopped PLANNING.

I also got a referral to a new endocrinologist. The old one I was going to was useless, refused to address anything at all until the diabetes was fixed, and I didn't need to spend $50 per visit to have him tell me the same thing my regular doctor could.

Today is the anniversary of the day Penny died.
12 Jan 2006.

On the 12th of January 2007, I thought about doing something special to memorialize.
I ended up taking a brief nap around the time she died.

On the 12th of January 2008, I thought again about doing something special to memorialize.
I ended up working, instead, IIRC... but had a narcoleptic episode at about the time she died.

On the 12th of January 2009, I know I was in the office, I knew when it was coming up, and I took a moment to pray around 4:00. I woke up with a start at 4:30.

Today, I stayed home from work. I had to deal with the place being inspected.
I was online, working on things, and didn't notice what was happening. I woke up at 4:30.

It's always dreamless. I don't remember what happens in that dark interim.

But I increasingly think I'm visiting, or being visited. There's a change in my emotional state after each time.

When I wake up I usually think, LOUD! because my radio is set to wake me to music.
Sometimes, I think "NO!" and throw the cat off the bed (usually Clint) because what woke me was the sound of horkHorkHOrKHORK and I hate waking up to cat-barf in bed.

Going to sleep? Usually, the last thought going through my head is "Settle down, CAT," because one of the two is stomping around trying to achieve a superior position of domination over the other and I am the territory.
Sometimes, though, it's a quick checklist, "do I have my mouthpiece in, is the door locked, are the lights off, is the alarm set?"

I see no space babies. Just as well. Who wants an alien-spawned messiah? The Vorlons should have taught us about the dangers inherent in that concept.


I thought about going to a party at the Church last night, and about going to a party at the Smiths' and about staying in and doing virtuous things and about staying in and not doing virtuous things.

I didn't go out. Was so tired by 11pm that it took me a half hour to find the energy to take my insulin and go to bed. Of course, the activity of taking the damn shot started to wake me up, and I had to clean my teeth so the mouthpiece I wear to let me breathe at night would not get disgusting and my mouth would not taste like a septic pit when I woke up.

By the way, waterpik is a wonderful thing.


Ended up finishing the space-military-opera (Kris Longknife, Mutineer) that I started reading at my folks' place on Christmas Eve. It was pretty decent, and the guy who writes it is a local, I think I know him from Orycon.
And maybe this year I'll feel up to Orycon again finally.


I'm remembering 2006, of course. If I want to NOT be reminded so strongly then I need to get out of this apartment, make a home elsewhere. I feel that I cannot do that at this time simply because it costs more money than I have, to get a house, and requires a steady job, and while a bank MIGHT loan me money to get that house, I would not be stupid enough to think that it was in any way appropriate for me to take out that loan.
Yeah, after 53 years on earth I have learned a tiny amount of fiscal responsibility.

I owe Epiphany gifts to Pat, Lisa, small things to the girls, to the Smiths and the Needhams. I should send something to Cherie and Liam as well, and probably to James and Brit and the two future rulers of the earth, i.e., their terrifying offspring.

I need to clean. My apartment is so cluttered with stuff that it becomes more cluttered, but it's not as horrid, quite, as it was before. It's well past time to take out the recyclables. My living room arrangement is broken, and the feng-shui analysis that Susan did for me (completely as an amateur and with suggestion in mind only) has helped me do some small things to make it feel better, but the way the apartment is laid out defies the rules of that system. Probably better that I not try too hard to make that work since it's ritual magic and I prefer to keep my ritual in the context of Church where I won't be tempted to misuse it.


Work... I had this week off, involuntarily. As I expected, I did NOTHING work related and I find I don't have as sharp a grasp of what's going on with the project work I was doing, but that's usual for two weeks in a row of vacation. And I did need that. Scott-my-work-boss got me a month contract while they try to get the 2010 budget past the bean-worshippers. He has me down for a year, but they haven't come back with the answers.
I have to decide, though. If the contract doesn't come back for the year, but instead is per-quarter like last year, I will not be happy but I will continue. If it's per-month now, I will begin actively looking for work elsewhere. I love the group I work with, I love the people, and I rather enjoy MOST of what I do, but month to month is just too much stress for my health at this point.

Vacation felt very good in that I actually stopped thinking about work, for the most part.
Not going to love two weeks in a row of no paycheck, though. Still, I have a bit over 3K in the main account in the bank, 11K in a CD, owe 855 on the car and 213 on the Visa. There's a lead time on getting paid, which means I get paid next on the 20th.

It appears to cost me a bit over 3K a month to live, with rent and meds and stuff, which annoys the hell out of me because it should be possible to live much more cheaply than that. A chunk of that is rent on the apartment. I pay a chunk for storage and a chunk for cable/internets and a chunk for insurance and a chunk for electrics and two chunks for phones (mobile and voip) and a big chunk for meds and a big chunk for food which I should NOT be doing the way I do. And I have it much better than some of my friends.

The world in general didn't end, for a number of people.


2009 was not so much a bad year for me as it was for other people I know. But, I am hoping that 2010 will close the first decade of the 21st century CE ... with things improving. I am hoping that the self-serving authoritarian greedy bastard political demagogues (mostly Republican, alas, but certainly not limited to any party) will be shown the error of their ways in suitably just fashion, and perhaps that people will start to remember that we actually DO need to cooperate, not auto-predate, to survive and thrive.

The movie, that is.

Saw it last night on a "RealD" screen. Without spoiling it, here's the precis.

It was 3 hours. Do not drink soda in the early part of the film. I did not and I was happy.
It was gorgeous. It used but did not abuse the "RealD" 3D technology.
A huge selling point was how it got past the "dead eyes" "uncanny valley" effect of many high-CGI works previously. It ... really, really did a good job.

It was, yes, trope-tasmic, trope-tastic, and trope-a-licious.
But with three hours in which to show you the characters, even the obvious, in your face bad guys are allowed enough screen time that you can see there is more to them than that.

There were two places which got a HUGE audience reaction, one a disbelieving groan and muttering of disgust at the words coming out of one character (but ... they were appropriate to the character) ... the other was at the end. The audience broke into applause with some cheering.

I have not seen that happen for a movie in a very long time.

There will be people complaining later about the heavy-handed political message, the politics evident in the story, and even about some technical details. Ignore that. It's not important to what's really going on.

Watch the pretty. In a theatre if you can, or on the best quality HD TV you can find.

Tired, grumpy, cat will not leave me alone (I am a catbed) and I still need to do some serious work on the build system for the new project at work before Monday.

OK, my cat Clint is being a little JERK lately.

Because of some circulation issues, I have a chair which reclines slightly, elevating the feet.
He likes to climb up and curl up on (what he thinks is) my chest. His enormous cat butt with pointy "heelbone" parts is jammed into a pressure point on my left arm, and the 2300 pounds of cat weight benumbs my left hand.
So, I try to shift him.


Lately he has been GROWLING about it. Swearing, in cat. Foul foul language.
Normally I put him on the floor immediately, but today he was squinking and nuzzling, so I let him stay for a while longer - about 15 minutes, before I had to shift, and the growling started, and any movement, even a deep breath, got it going more, so I finally had enough, but when I tried to lift him off, he grabbed my hand and bit.

Not enough to break skin, because he knows better ... but the claws do break skin, so I bapped him (light, open-pawed slap to the head like mom-cats do) and then put him on the floor. No more climbing on me tonight. Cat is in COVENTRY.

Still. Wondering what's up with this recent trend. It's quite annoying.

That's a very very light cake in the icon there.

Tonight, the "Batman: The Brave and the Bold" animated series is a musical.


The explanation could have been reasonable except that once they're out of the influence of the mind-controlling singing villain, they keep improvising a musical. Except Batman.


And, I want to know who the singers are because they're actually tolerable.


I expect jarodrussell was singing along with "Deathtrap".

Greetings, dear friends.

Thanks to the three-way clusterskcuff of Microsoft Data Centers, Danger-now-owned-by-Microsoft, and T-Mobile pushing a broken firmware update from Danger to all Sidekick phones, I am now the proud owner of an empty brick rather than a useful central device for coordinating my data.

The phone itself has a SIM card (which held an old copy of my contact list as it existed on my phone in 2005) and a big honking SD card I added (which contains music and PLENTY of room for photos, but I didn't have the small number of critical photos on the flash card, and you cannot back up other information to the SD card, because gosh golly their data center will handle all that for us, right?

So sometime last week, they discovered that something was BROKEN at the data center, except, as far as I could tell when I looked, my data was still there on the data center. T-Mobile sent out an urgent, nay, frantic note telling us all that we needed to leave our phones powered on and not under any circumstances to unplug the battery or let it drain all the way.

And, yesterday on my way home, I glanced at my phone and there was the little spinny icon that said the phone was going through its power-up cycle. Which I have only seen when I deliberately power it off (I did not) and when a firmware update PUSH has happened from the network.

Yes. T-Mobile, a week after announcing their collective disaster, was still pushing the broken update.
And my photos, memos, calendar, and contact list (150+, not backed up onto SIM card because it can only be done a single number at a time and I never bothered and it doesn't actually store full data there anyway) was completely gone. I was able to find 20 phone-number-only entries, the rest of it's unreliable or I know it to be obsolete.

So, it's very likely that I no longer have correct information for you.
If you are someone who wants me to have your information, please leave a comment with your name, address, phone numbers, emails, birthdays, favorite color, airspeed of a laden swallow, and any other relevant contact information, and I will put it back on my phone. Which may end up NOT being this lovely SK LX2009 phone since I see no indication that this data is coming back quickly, and I see very little reason to trust their server-centric, backup-inhibited bugware at this point.

Your comments will be screened so only you and I can see them.

Emotional pain index, 2 on the 1-10 scale, equivalent to "if I think about it."
This is below the 4 where I noticed that physical, palpable pain also accompanied the awareness.
It's about the same as the arthritis/gout sensation that I have most of the time.

Recently had a "dream visit" - very calm, very quiet, amazingly undramatic. This was on or around the beginning of October, synchronous to when we had learned that it was quite serious. When I noticed that there was a reality-disconnect, it was fine, I acknowledged that it was a dream and examined for anything significant, at which time actual message came through as words, "I'm still resting and recuperating, that last period was hard. I love you, and you need to take better care of yourself now, OK?"
At which point I woke up, feeling quite peaceful and even joyful.

And typing that out is actually harder than the realization that I was just dreaming.

Felicitations on the anniversary of your natality.

So, I've been put on a low-dose statin (yay, I wondered why that had not been done yet) and on a NIGHT-TIME medium-low dose of humalin-N, and on a morning-only low dose of a longer-acting metformin which should not have the emetic properties of the current high dose. They've also taken me OFF the Januvia.


On the other hand, Costco tried to give me Novolin instead of Humalin, and I had to point out that the pharmacists were QUITE EMPHATIC about Humalin, not Novolin. So I will actually start that tomorrow.

And now, I'm a bit late starting, but time to put on the watch-pat and do a sleep study. Yay.

Yes, according to some definitions of friendship.


There are two ways that I generally stop being friends: loss of contact for prolonged time when the other person is not bothering to attempt to keep contact, or an outright breach of politeness, on my part or theirs, which results in a cessation of engagement.

On the other hand, when someone who is an acquaintance who maintains a social/society friendship, I feel no qualms about reducing my estimation of that relationship to "association" all the way out to "I know this person" and possibly to "this is my dearest enemy, we see each other only to continue to confirm our mutual loathing."

Although thankfully nobody has quite gotten the latter.

A quick rather than a detailed post:

My neurologist insists that most of my confused-sleep issues are probably due to failing to go to sleep at a regular time, and has imposed a 1 AM in-bed curfew, which I blithely ignored over the weekend. He also gave me "nuvigil" as a replacement for the provigil - it's longer acting, at a lower dose, and seems to be keeping me at a tolerable baseline longer. As they're trying to force people onto it and away from provigil, Cephalon (the manufacturer) has not only offered it at 2/3 the price, but is offering a year's worth of coupons to greatly reduce the cost. They also raised the price of Provigil, which they have somehow bribed lied arranged to have the Generic date happen in 2013, rather later than it should have been.

Neurologist also says to resume the practice of 15 minute deliberate naps at the key down points when I start falling asleep, and to stop drinking caffeine in the afternoons, which I choose to interpret as "after 5pm" - and I need to drink more water anyway to help with blood sugars.

My general doctor agreed that if the metformin I take for diabetes is to the point of causing IBS then I want to go off it, but started down the path to some OTHER stuff, before I said "Why can I not simply take appropriate insulin?" ... what is with these guys going down a path based on the assumption that people won't be willing to accept a particular medication? My issues with insulin were addressed last year.
Anyway at that point he had the AHA! reaction, and agreed to it. I will be seeing an Insulin Training And Dosage group on Thursday, which should allow me to get and manage the stuff. I don't think I have any more needles though.
I should inform the folks at United Health that I'm changing both. Otherwise they will do bad things regarding PAYING for the stuff.

I wonder if I can reach them on the phone as it's MUCH easier to manage.

Today (Wednesday, not Thursday) was Penny's fifty-fourth anniversary-of-birth.

I had a very strange dream on waking which I don't clearly remember except that Penny was, for some reason, my doctor, and I had some sort of cardiac thing, and I ended up having all my internal organs removed, and had to wait a while with everything sort-of-not-working in some sort of limbo.

Of course it's all very obvious when I'm awake thinking about it later, but it was simultaneously hilarious and creepy in a black-comedy sort of way while I was stuck in the dream.

Still having major issues with sleep, fatigue, and concentration.
Started a post about all the comedy of medical errors but haven't finished it.

Hope to get it done sometime soon, but it reads a lot like whining, and I'm tired of that too.

"One of the only"


It's "one of the few" or "the only" or perhaps "one of only (quantifier)" ... it's up there just above pronouncing the "T" in "often" - it's silent, people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=518XP8prwZo

You should watch that.