RE The Weather: so this happened last month

Most of us, though not all, have had our share of lots of rain, storms and or tornadoes.  One or the other and combinations too.  We have been fortunate this season in that we have not had tornadoes in our area.  We did, however, have a couple of serious thunderstorms! One which blew through at about 2:30 AM.

Like the earthquakes in California, I have also become conditioned to harsh, booming thunder, that shakes the house and makes the windows rattle.  Upon occasion, I have even witnessed it hit the ground or fire huge snapping thunder bolts into the pine woods behind our house.

This particular storm was different in that I was awake and bumbling about in the kitchen and dining area at that wee hour of the morning.  I heard the storm, but wasn’t concerned until it BOOMED right outside our dinning room windows!  On the tail of the boom, there was an almost immediate explosion over the kitchen sink!  One of the overhead sink lights was gone out.  Just one, but it sounded like an M80 when it went, and right as I was walking by the sink.  I shrieked of course, and then quickly ran to the dining room door to turn on the backyard flood lights.  Nothing happened.  I tried the dinning room lights.  Nothing.

Bob came in and checked the breaker box and found the thrown breaker.  Resetting it fixed the problem. Crisis averted I thought, but no…

Later that day we tried to turn on the television in the dinning room and it wouldn’t turn on.  Bob checked the breaker box and nothing else had been tripped.  “Strange”, he said.

Further investigation revealed that the signal booster, television, cables into the TV and out of the TV and into the computer that provided the feed to the TV, and ultimately the computer itself, were all fried!  Later we would find out that the standing TV antenna out by the corner of the house had been hit.

That is what acted as a lightning rod and fed the electricity into the house via the coaxial and into all our equipment.  And, most thankfully, not our house.

Just like this

The bold black line is the path of the coaxial from the TV antenna to the computer

I also discovered in the morning, that a monster oak in the neighbors pasture had taken a direct hit too!

LOL!  I never noticed until this moment how much of an accent I have picked up after 16 years in Alabama.  No doubt some of my Cali friends will get a big laugh out of this.

And then this week we have discovered that one of the flood lights was toasted at the base as well. Only one, not both, though both are in the same fixture.

What else may we find as time goes by?  Hopefully that was all of it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Over then next few weeks I would like to catch you up on what other things have been going on here.  Some within the last year and some even longer into the past.  Title form will look something like this:  RE (whatever): so this is what happened (some time frame from the past).

BUT FIRST, I want to tell you about my vacation, and That’s in my next post!

See you soon.

Ladies Only ;)

That funny feeling you’re getting when you walk, and you can’t figure out what’s in your pants.

NO NO THAT!

Today when I came in I kept feeling something touching the back of my thigh, just under my cheek and straight across.  I checked a couple of times today and then, just now, I figured it out.

It was the leg elastic of my underwear hanging low.  Apparently, my backside shrank… not necessarily a bad thing.

Time to buy a smaller size!

🍎🍐🥑🥕🥝🍋🥦🥒🍊

6:00PM Last Thursday Evening

 

I have done really well with keeping my resolve to follow the new diet. However, on this night I decided to give in with self imposed provisos:

1. What I chose to eat must not be over a safe carbohydrate level even with *bolusing.
   
2. I had to eat a balanced meal.

What I did was to thaw a premade Amy’s **GF mac and cheese and divide it in half. This was baked with a couple tablespoons of cubed ham (all fat cut away). I prepared a well built side salad (lettuce, cucumber, tomato, pickled beets with vinegar and olive oil dressing. I ate the salad while I waited for some fresh broccoli to steam to be served with the half dose of mac. All good, all within parameters, then…

I picked up the bowl holding the mac & cheese with ham, placed a hot pad underneath of it to take it to the table, then watched it miraculously flip out of my hand, turn upside down in mid air and spew the contents onto the kitchen floor.  All in a straight line from me to Walker, who stood about four feet away.

Walker immediately went into pointer mode, his eyes bulged, and then looked at me for the OK.

Calmly, and I can’t believe how calm I was, I held out my hand, palm facing him, and said: “You can have it, but you have to wait because it is too HOT. You have to WAIT. After about a minute I tested the mess on the floor and found it to be cool to the touch. Looking at him I said: “OK!”

My spoiled mess of a dinner was gone in seconds. And Walker was very pleased with his second dinner of the evening.

Retrospection

I am still trying to figure out how my bowl flew out of my hand. I am also wondering where my inner ***Sailor Girl went to when this happened. Her vocabulary can spring into action at a moments notice in frustrating situations such as this.

In the end I felt stunned about dropping the bowl and rather amazed at how calm and controlled I was. The dog cleaned the mess, I cleaned the floor, then sat down and ate my broccoli.

All was well. I felt balanced, content, and in control.

AMAZING!

~*~*~*~

*Bolusing means to give an extra dose of insulin to counteract the load of a meal

**GF= Gluten Free

*** Inner Sailor Girl was acquired in the early 70s when I was in the Navy.  I am proud to have been of service, but not proud of my bad language habit which I have carried in my back pocket for all these years.   😛

The health post, read it or skip it, your choice. ;)

It seems the easiest and most succinct way is to just list what ails me:

• type two diabetes (blood sugar was rising well into the high 200s; sometimes into the 300s and I was onTW0 forms of insulin)
• stage three fatty liver
• advancing neuropathy

Newest treatments in order of categories above:

• Insulin pump prescribed by my new Endocrinologist
• Nutritionist for diet overhaul!
• Balance exercises, diabetic approved footwear

Items that are a direct result of the top list and helped by first and second items in the treatments list:

• Gastroparesis
• Overweight
• Depression and fatigue

I started the new journey to health about two to three months ago.  I had just been put on the insulin pump when, the very next week, I got a cryptic email from the gastroenterologist stating I had stage three fatty liver.  No explanations,  no advice, no request for a follow up to discuss the results…

zip – zilch – nada

I went online and Doc Google informed me that stage three was right behind stage four which is Cirrhosis of the liver.  That went over well.  I called the gastro’s office and as you may guess, you can never talk to a real person anymore when calling any medical office.  I was upset.  In retrospect, my message was deranged and angry.  I had no idea that there were ranges in stage three, or that this sort of damage to my liver could be reversed, or caused by anything other than alcohol, and in my mind they were now calling me an alcoholic!  For your reference:  I lost my mother to alcoholism.  It was wretched at the very end.

They called me right back and had me in the next morning to see the doctor.  I tell you the following in all seriousness:  I walked into the office and every one of the staff up front seemed to be looking at me strangely.  They must have all heard about my call?

That was then, this is now.

Long and short of it, my blood sugar ranges are great.  I won’t lie, learning how to use the insulin pump caused a few emotional breakdowns, but the Medtronic people were and are on call 24/7 to help.  It is wonderful to not have to stick myself so many times a day and to actually see a difference in my sugar levels.  I do have to stick and attach a new port and a sensor each week, but that, once you get used to it, is much nicer than injections several times a day.

Now, the fatty liver was something else, as I said.  It was the culmination of my trying to eat more protein and less carb laden food choices to keep my sugar down.  And one of my go-to snacks was cheese. Further,  I have never in my life worried about fatty meats.  Those are off the menu forever.  Well, I do get a one inch square cube of cheese a couple of times a week with my snacks.  I am a cheese head and this part is really getting to me, ya know!?  Some days I just leave the cheese out to avoid the torture of a one inch cube.

This is getting long and I will stop for now.  Next up, I will tell you what I do to lean out my meat choices and prevent getting gluten poisoned from processed food products from the market.

…and the readers said:  OH BOY!  I can hardly wait.  😉

But seriously, if you have the time, there is a lot to be said for making your own sausage and prepping your own meats.  Because, these days, when you do it yourself you know exactly what went into it.  And a bonus:  It is a lot less expensive to buy a larger cut, and process it into portions you can freeze for use later.

NOW:  I really need to hear from you.  Will these posts bother you here?  I don’t intend to put them up often, but when there is a change, good or bad, I will post it.  OR, if  you  would rather, I can make another WordPress blog and post all this there.  I know there are plenty of people out there with similar problems and this will help me to connect with others who share my issues.  As stated; I will make notation in the title that the post is regarding heath.