My weight tonight when I stepped on the scale, after mowing the yard, which hadn’t yet been mown this year (exercise, and lots of it—OWWWWWWWWWWW my back) and before dinner: 240 pounds.
Good gods . . . I haven’t weighed 240 since 1998. It’s remarkable what cutting way back on the starch and sugar, cutting back on the booze, and cutting back in general can do.
I stayed home from work yesterday, because the pecans blooming have got me into an asthmatic attack—a mild one by my standards, but involving tightness, congestion, and the inability to get air in and out of my lungs. M got sent home from school yesterday for the same thing, except she sounded worse than I did.
I managed to get her squeezed in late in the day at her pediatrician’s office. He listened to her, had her do an albuterol nebulizer treatment then and there, and sent us on with a script for low-dose prednisone to knock down the allergic inflammation, which is what was getting her down. And it worked. By this afternoon her breathing sounds almost normal.
I, however, am still going downhill. I have a nasty, hard, dry cough, and enough constriction that I’m puffing if I do anything, from walking across a room on upward. And the violence of the cough is starting to upset my stomach and make me queasy.
 |
|
| My father as a US Navy aviation cadet. He’s either seventeen or eighteen. |
I received this photograph, along with two others from the same period, today from the son of a woman whom Dad had dated when he was at Tarleton College, in 1948 or so. Family photos of Dad from his World War II days are very scarce, because almost all his war souvenirs and mementoes were lost when a tornado blew away the barn at the family farm in 1963. L says if you take his features and put them onto my mother’s head-shape, you get my face.
I have the cap that he’s wearing in this picture, and Mother has the flight jacket.
To the dentist today for cleaning and checkup, the first time in eleven years (first there was no insurance for several years, then there were other things that needed seeing to more urgently). The dentist and hygienist both remarked that for someone who hadn’t been in for that long, I was in remarkably good shape. The hygienist chiseled off the first layer of tartar, and scheduled a follow-up for tomorrow week to finish.
Then the dentist got down to what he did find: that #30 (lower-right primary molar) appears to have some new decay under the enamel and will need to be drilled out and re-filled, and #15 (upper-left secondary molar) has cracked—not cracked through, fortunately, but needing major work. He told me he hoped to get away with a medial-occlusal-frontal filling, which would preserve a good deal of the tooth and avoid having to do a crown, but if the cracks went too far, crowning might be required. In the worst case, crowning #15 and filling #30 would cost between $900 and $1,000 out of my pocket. If he can do an MOF filling on #15, the cost comes down to $350 out-of-pocket. Neither of which sums I have.
(ETA: weight today: 250 pounds. That’s a good ten pounds lighter than I thought I was, but I still have too much hanging on round my waist, so my shirts still don’t fit properly.)
As a side test while chasing something else, the doctor at the Empire’s health center ordered an HgA1c check for me, to see where my diabetes control was. The answer was a bad one—8.8%, when normal range is five to seven. In short, I haven’t been paying any attention to what I eat, I’ve been eating too much of the wrong things, and I haven’t been exercising at all. That can’t go on.
The upshot was that the physician assistant raised my Glucophage dose from 500 milligrams to 1,500 milligrams, and wants to raise it to 2,000 after a week for my body to get used to the first increase. She also arranged for a consult with a nutritionist, which I was able to squeeze in today because of a cancellation. The nutritionist gave some pointers on things I should mostly avoid (she wasn’t foolish enough to tell me to leave off anything altogether), things I can to do change diet and get the best effect, and how to assess where I’m going. She also wants me to gather a month’s worth of data on 2-hour PP glucose readings, to find out how I tolerate processing carbohydrates, which are the big bad actors for me (and many other people). (I remarked to her that I was blackly amused by her speech on reducing carbohydrates. When I was a kid, my mother always nagged “Don’t go filling up on starches at the dinner table!” Then the Eighties came along, and suddenly carbohydrates were supposed to be the Wonderful Thing that would cure cancer, bring world peace, and make you a two-pants suit for a hundred dollars. Now, fifty years later, I’m right back where I began, getting speeches about “don’t fill up on starches!”) Naturally, she recommended finding some kind of exercise regimen I think I can comply with, and start doing it.
The dietary changes are going to be the hardest parts to do, because both L and M like almost no cooked vegetables whatever although they’ll eat green salads, and I’m bored completely to tears by the prospect of green salads at dinner EVERY SINGLE DAY. And dinner is the principal meal where I can hope to have any significant impact; my breakfast is almost invariably bran cereal (which I have to have for its fiber), and lunch is already under control—maybe a bit TOO much; the nutritionist thought I might be low-balling it with my budget-conscious Smart Ones or Lean Cuisine lunches on weekdays.
The exercise component solution is the most obvious: I have to start walking again, frequently. The difficulty is that that M is still not old enough to be left alone at home for an hour together, and by the time L gets home from whatever she’s doing in the evening, anything from two to four days of the week, it’s often nine or ten o’clock, and I have just come to despise having to do my walks every night in the dark, when no one else is out and you can’t see anything. Nonetheless, I’m generally left to be the babysitter evenings, and try to eke out whatever time I can scrape up for exercise. Which gravels me.
I’m going to have to spend a lot of time in my back yard today, minding a BBQ job I’m doing for a friend. Since watching a barbecue only requires intermittent attention (also known as “throw another log on the fire”), I have a lot of time and not so much to do.
Then I thought: “Hey! I got this wonderful new portable computin’ machine now . . . I wonder if the wireless signal is good enough to reach the back yard?” So I came out and tried it, and connected right away.
And that led to me sitting in a lawn chair with my portable (whose name is Pitr, btw), a mug of cappuccino and a tote full of books beside me, cataloguing away on LibraryThing. (Current progress: 1156 volumes catalogued, just finished the main fiction shelves, five book presses done, now starting the cookbook collection.)
The photinia of the orange fairy light mowed the Capitol dome. Fnord.
The place: the Empire’s on-site health center. The cast: starring ME, with supporting roles by three lab techs. The goal: enough blood for a CBC, BMP, and HgA1c. Three sticks. Three sites (left radial, right radial, left hand). Different tech for each stick. Total blood drawn: none.
Everyone was embarrassed and rather apologetic about it. They were all certain they were properly into the vein each time (lots of palpations and “I can feel the needle’s right where it’s supposed to be . . .”), but I wasn’t giving out any blood. After consideration, they concluded I might still be dehydrated after Monday’s round of GI upset, and my blood is approximating sludge at the moment. They sent me away with advice to hydrate myself more, then go to the contract lab and let them have a go.
Moo if the buckram has an oyster. Fnord.
when you open it to pour some of the coffee you made to drink yesterday but didn’t . . .
. . . and it’s still hot.
I lasted all of one hour at work yesterday before my stomach totally rebelled (yes, I got to the men’s room barely in time). I’ve been home ever since, with a low-grade fever and GI upsets in both directions. Today is better, but I still don’t feel up to going in. This probably means that everyone I communicated with on Thursday or Friday about their system exchanges will be writing me frantic “Why won’t you ANSWER me???” emails, even though I left my out-of-office message on so they know it’s not going into the Internet Black Hole, and I’ll spend all day tomorrow un-ruffling their feathers.
You must go to the western world and operate the desalination sprocket. Fnord.
This month, I’ve been worried about my job at the Empire. Three weeks ago, my manager finally gave me a drop-dead date of March 31st, by which I had to find another position in the company or else. While the internal job market isn’t as grim as it was last summer when I first learned my team was dissolving, it’s still not rosy. However, I had one bright spot: my grand-boss was very much in my corner, and told me repeatedly that he would find somewhere for me to go before April first, that I was much too good an employee to walk out the door. He had to repeat this to me several times this month because, being the fretful person I am, I have trouble really believing at bottom that an upper manager was really that committed to retaining me.
Two days ago, I stopped g-boss in the hall (gotta think up a good alias for him) and said I was really getting worried now, with the end of the month just a week away. He told me yet again that he was not going to let me be escorted out, and that if it came to the worst, he would call one of the managers under him and say, “I have this guy with lots of gumption and talent, and I need to park him somewhere for the short term. Make it so.” He also said it looked as though there were some projects being generated from divisional strategy meetings this week, in which he was involved, that would call for somebody “with your particular skill set,” and that was another reason why he’d find a short-term gig for me until the projects could mature.
I reminded him that I was already working as a loan-in on another team that handles full-system exchanges and certain cancellations, and perhaps that manager could use me for a while. He replied, “you know, you’re right and I’d forgotten about that.” I also told him I had worked out a couple of big improvements midstream to the Ghost server project that I’d been working on in our hardware lab since last August, and I’d like to be able to follow through applying the improvements to the systems I’d done early in the project, before I knew exactly what I wanted to do.
Yesterday afternoon he hunted me down and said he’d talked to the manager of the team I’d been loaned to, who said there was plenty of work to keep me busy and it wouldn’t have to disrupt anyone’s headcount, which would make HR happy, and that I’d also have the opportunity to keep working on the server project, and was that a deal? I agreed to it at once, and I’m to transfer officially to the new team as of Monday.
And in other news . . . I have finally joined the Digital Nomads™ and bought a new-to-me portable computer, a lease-return Dell Latitude D620, about three years old. It has a respectable dual-core processor, two gigs of RAM, 100MB hard drive, a good wireless LAN card and Bluetooth card, and a DVD+/-RW drive. Next thing is to get an access point device that supports the IEEE 802.11g standard. The 802.11b WAP I’m using now is a dog for performance.
A brassy owl has bartered a plank of plankton. Fnord.
Get your Badge!