For the record:
Blood glucose at last formal CBC, in August: 135
Weight, ditto: 265
Blood glucose before dinner tonight: 95
Weight, ditto: 251
Maybe I can win this war.
In past weeks or months I think I must have done something(s) or said something(s) that has pissed off a string of local blogroll people, to the point they are Not Talking to Me. As in Avoiding-Me Not-Talking-to-Me. I don’t know what the root cause is; I’ve never been any good at intuiting or figuring out that sort of thing. And now I’m upset because I feel as though I’ve been charged, tried, convicted, and sent to Coventry and I don’t even know for what. Given me, it could be any of a dozen things, or possibly just because I exist.
Maybe I ought to say it plainly. If I offended you, please don’t just cut me dead. Tell me what I’ve done and why it offended you, provided the why isn’t blindingly obvious. If I can’t work out what I did, I can’t even attempt to make amends, and I would very much like to.
This constricting social circle that’s become my life makes me despair.
Someday people are gonna figure out that as a listmod, my off-topic/bullshit tolerance is REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEALLY low.
Just sayin’.
that Piet passed inspection yesterday.
This year Texas added a tailpipe-emissions test to its annual safety inspection for all vehicles between two and 24 model years old. At 18, Piet’s in there for several more years. I fully expected that, as he’s been running a bit off in recent months and his gas mileage has been low, as in really-needs-a-tuneup low, I was gonna get to pay a BIG chunk to get him in shape, so my visit to Groovy Automotive yesterday morning for “inspection” would turn out to be learning how bad the engine was, and what it would take to make it right.
I handed in my keys, proof of insurance card, and check for $28.50 (up from $12.50 last year; the emissions test adds a LOT to the price), and sat down to wait. About 20 minutes later, the mechanic came in and handed me the keys and test results. I was astonished to see a large “PASSED” at the bottom of the form! I was even more astonished when I looked at the emissions results and found that Piet not only passed the test, he wasn’t even close to hitting any of the limits.
So he’s now going about with a nice new 10-6 inspection sticker, right below the big star in the windshield where I took a rock from a gravel truck I was following one morning week before last, going to work.
Saint Gregory caught the Katy and left me a Komodo dragon to ride. Fnord.
After two weeks of Really Paying Attention to what they’re doing and without making any significant changes to diet yet, my blood sugar numbers are a little better than I feared. That’s not to say they’re normal, for they aren’t. However, they’re not quite as bad as the official CBC sounded last month.
| Date | Reading | Remarks |
| 9/24/05 AM | 113 | |
| 9/25/05 AM | 121 | |
| 9/26/05 AM | 125 | |
| 9/26/05 PM | 138 | |
| 9/27/05 AM | 135 | |
| 9/27/05 PM | 150 | after supper |
| 9/28/05 AM | 128 | |
| 9/28/05 PM | 117 | |
| 9/29/05 AM | 134 | |
| 9/29/05 PM | 113 | |
| 9/30/05 AM | 120 | |
| 9/30/05 PM | 119 | |
| 10/1/05 AM | 137 | |
| 10/2/05 AM | 132 | |
| 10/2/05 PM | 108 | |
| 10/3/05 AM | 123 | |
| 10/3/05 PM | 112 | |
| 10/4/05 AM | 112 | |
| 10/4/05 PM | 108 |
I’ve also managed to walk five days out of seven for the last two weeks, which is a good beginning. It helps that T came in one evening and said, “Daddy, if you’d like company when you go walking I’ll go with you.” She wants to get more exercise too, and she knows that it’s lots nicer if two walk together than one, not to mention that we’re lots more likely to go if we go together. Another benefit of walking together is that we have time to ourselves to have proper conversations. I may just get the chance re-acquaint myself with the person she is now. We’re planning a trip to Dublin together on the 22nd of the month so T can tour the Dr Pepper plant Tomax, are you listening?); she’s the only one in the family who hasn’t been there, and she’s the stone-cold DP nut.
I’ve been surprised at how well my stamina’s held up and how easy it’s been to increase distance quickly. I managed eight blocks the first night I went out. Tonight I went twenty-eight. (I need to take the car out and see how many “blocks” make a mile in this neighborhood.) Roughly, it takes me thirty to forty minutes to go twenty-whatever blocks without trying to power-walk. Our bathroom scale broke a couple of months ago so I have no idea whether the increased exercise is helping my weight any; none of my clothes seems to fit any differently yet. I wish I had a scale.
I saw my family doctor yesterday, to get the long-delayed lab results from my annual physical. (ClinPath managed to screw up quite thoroughly; they hemolyzed my first sample and ran the wrong test panel on the second because of a typist’s error. They finally managed to get it right the third time out.) Most of my results were in normal limits, and my cholesterol numbers were outright fine (159 overall, 122 triglycerides, 46 HDL, 89 LDL).
The two parts that weren’t good are that I’m now clinically diabetic (132 almost-fasting glucose; I’d already taken my morning medications before they drew the sample) and mildly iron-deficient anemic (12.6 hemoglobin, 73.3 MCV, 23.2 MCH, 31.6 MCHC, 26 serum iron). None of those results are horribly wrong, but they’re not right. The doctor doesn’t know why the anemia is there since, as he put it, “you don’t have menstrual periods to explain it.” He wants me to go visit my upper GI specialist, whom I haven’t been to see in several years, to check for a silent ulcer, and I may have to go at last and pick up with the lower GI guy whom I’d dropped for lack of money, and get a colonoscopy done somehow. In the meantime, he ordered an iron supplement for me in case the problem is poor iron absorption. He said that iron deficiency could help explain the chronic tiredness of which I’d complained at my physical, too.
Actually, that fitted with something else that happened the other day: when I went to give blood last, about two weeks ago, the phlebotomist had to centrifuge my blood to check the hemoglobin level instead of using the copper-sulfate solution drop test. Normally my drop sinks straight down, but not last time. If I’m a little anemic, that would explain why the sample was marginal and required a second check. And I hadn’t noticed until I looked last night, but the multi-vitamins I’ve been taking for the past several months don’t contain any iron, although I thought they did; last time I bought a different brand from the one I normally get, and it has a different formulation. Perhaps just adding the iron supplement back in will straighten matters out.
As far as the diabetes goes, it’s been coming on for a couple of years and I’ve been steadily pretending it wasn’t a problem because the glucose count wasn’t much over 100, but 132 is too far over to ignore. I’m going to have to figure out how to cut back the starches in my diet (the easiest and best place to cut back for inactive men). The doctor recommended I buy a copy of Sugar Busters and start following its recommendations. I suppose I’ll go and see whether I can find a copy at Half Price before I have to grumble and pay list price at Book People.
I was sourly amused at his advice to cut back starches and sugars, as I saw dietary thinking coming full circle. When I was small, my mother preached that we weren’t to fill up on starches and sweets, because they’d make us fat. Then dietary thinking changed, and in the ’70s and ’80s we were all told that fats were the enemy and carbohydrates our friends. Now it seems that Atkins and his ilk and Sugar Busters between them are back to the idea of “filling up on starches and sweets makes you fat.”
The other part of his advice may be even harder to follow: to take exercise of some kind. This goes contrary to all my raising and life experience. You see, I’m a chronic asthmatic. I have been since I was four. My lung function is very compromised. Unmedicated, both my lungs together have just over the capacity of one normal, healthy’s person’s lung, and exercise or exertion are almost guaranteed triggers for me. Hence, exercise has always been The Enemy. That’s how I’ve lived my life for more than forty years.
The other part is, even if I could exercise without lung problems, I HATE DOING IT. I feel about the same as Ferret Steinmetz does: exercise sucks. It’s insanely boring, and I am one of the people whose metabolisms know nothing about endorphins or runner’s high and wouldn’t have anything to do with them if it did, so that “lure” is right out. I detest swimming, I don’t much enjoy dance any more, I’m utterly uncoordinated at individual or team sports and don’t see the point in them anyhow, and my feet won’t hold up for running. About the only thing I can still do that I might care to do is to walk, but finding time to do it is hard. L and T are often both gone in the evening, and I can’t hang M on a hook on the wall, so to speak, while I go walk the neighborhood—which is what, if I must walk, I’d rather do. And I don’t want to take her with me, because M simply will not be quiet. She babbles incessantly about everything, and that makes me miserable. I don’t WANT to hear a constant stream of irrelevant chatter. I want time to be quiet.
I don’t know what I’ll do for exercise, in the end, but I have to find something. In the meantime, the doctor told me to start doing daily fasting blood-sugar checks, and faxing him the results once a month. It’s fortunate that L never gave away the glucometer she got when she was pregnant with M. I put new batteries in it and it worked right off.
My fasting blood sugar this morning was 113. Just so I remember.
In a black-letter CD, there are no construction-paper powderhorns. Fnord.
All right now. For most of a week I’ve read this comparison and that comparison of hurricane Katrina against this or that disaster, and particularly against other hurricanes: Camille, Andrew, Ivan. I believe all of them are wildly off-base. Even comparisons to the 1935 Florida Keys storm are off. I think the true parallel to Katrina in destruction and loss of life will turn out to be a much older storm—the Galveston Hurricane of September 8, 1900.
The Galveston storm was, by modern estimates, comparable to Katrina in strength. Modern meteorologists put it at a high Cat 4, with top wind gusts somewhere around 150 mph and a sixteen-foot storm surge. The NWS’s lowest official barometric measurement was 28.48 inches (968 millibars), although another unofficial source measured 27.50 inches (931 millibars). NOAA scientists later made it 27.49 inches (930 mbars)1. Most hurricanes (i.e., Cat 3 or less) never go below 950 millibars.
However, meteorology isn’t where the comparisons are closest. It’s in the damage and destruction the Galveston storm caused. The Galveston storm killed somewhere between six and eight thousand people from a population of 38,000 in Galveston proper. That’s something between sixteen and eighteen percent of the population. Include all of Galveston Island, and total casualty figures rise to between 10,000 and 12,0002. For a similarly catastrophic casualty list, the New Orleans MSA would have to lose somewhere around 215,000 dead from a population of 1,340,000, and the Biloxi-Gulfport MSA 60,000 dead from a population of 374,0003. The next deadliest natural disaster of modern times after Galveston, and a distant second at that, was the Lake Okeechobee hurricane of 1928 which killed an estimated 2,500.
Two-thirds of Galveston was either flattened or washed into the bay in front of and the lagoon behind the island. Economic damage added up to $30 million in 1900 dollars; value conversion between then and now is almost impossible, but somewhere near a billion 2005 dollars is a good guess. The hurricane made sure that Galveston, which up to that time had led Houston as the most prosperous city in Texas, would forever after be a second- or even third-tier town.
You want to know what Gulfport and Biloxi may well be like in fifty years? Go look at what Galveston is today. It’s certainly a pleasant enough place, but it’s a backwater, totally overshadowed by Houston, because of a hurricane that nearly wiped it off the map. It’s not impossible that New Orleans could suffer the same fate, although the river barge and ship traffic make that less likely.
But don’t go on at me about Camille and Andrew comparing to Katrina. They ain’t even in the same ball game. Go read Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm and John Edward Weems’s A Weekend in September. Then you’ll begin to understand what the stakes really are.
Pictures of damage after the Galveston storm; scroll to the bottom of the page
The 1900 Storm Photo Gallery. A collection of historic photographs of the storm’s aftermath. This fine site also has contemporary movie clips, articles, and reminiscences of hurricane survivors. The photos show damage very much like the footage coming out of coastal Mississippi, which isn’t surprising; both regions were hit by the stronger east side of the storm.
1 Larson, Erik. Isaac’s Storm (2000), pp. 194-195.
2 The Handbook of Texas, Online edition. Galveston Hurricane of 1900.
3 US Bureau of the Census data, 2004.
And this is the score you get when you wrote the test yourself!
| Bill Monroe You scored 150 bluegrassitude points! |
| What can we say? You know your bluegrass upside down, backwards, and sideways. Are you sure you didn’t invent bluegrass yourself? (Oh, wait . . . you DID invent bluegrass yourself!) |
 |
My test tracked 1 variable:
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| Link: The Bluegrass Widow Test written by Marchbanks on OkCupid Free Online Dating |
I am disgusted at a world which Doesn’t Appear to Get It that assault isn’t, and can’t ever be, right. Nor does the world seem to Get It that the the line between assault and battery is infinitesimally thin, and infinitely easy to cross.
as•sault, n. 2 a : a threat or attempt to inflict offensive physical contact or bodily harm on a person that puts the person in immediate danger of or in apprehension of such harm or contact.
bat•tery, n. 1 b : an offensive touching or use of force on a person without the person’s consent.
Now that’s a pretty damned low standard to meet. Hitting someone who doesn’t want to be hit: battery. Restraining someone who doesn’t want to be restrained: battery. Poking someone who doesn’t want to be poked: battery. Tickling someone who doesn’t want to be tickled: battery. Offering to hit, restrain, poke, tickle when unwanted: assault, all the way round.
There’s a mighty low standard for demonstrating un-wantedness, too: resistance equals unwanted. Period. No qualifiers, no modifiers. To try to squirm away from that is no more excusable than if I told a racist joke and attempted to squirm out by claiming, “aw, everybody knew I was only joking.” When it comes to this, there is no joking. It is not a subject which allows of jokes.
No assault. No battery. No excuses. Not right. Not ever. Not ever. NOT EVER.
As I previously mentioned, I had a branch system break off one of my pecan trees two weeks ago. I called one lanscaping service to come give me a quote for getting it on the ground where I can cut it up for firewood, but the guy called me back to say that he’d had someone quit on him, he was overcommitted now with the jobs on hand, and wouldn’t do it. (Besides, he wanted $135 an hour for a crew of three men. That’s not an unreasonable number of people for the job, but it’s more than I can afford.) Meantime the limb is still lying there, blocking the front walk and bisecting the yard.
So for those of you who are local: do you know friends (or are you) handy enough to come over and help me deal with this mess? I have an extension ladder but don’t know whether I can find someplace to prop it securely, I don’t have a good chain saw, and I probably need people to haul on ropes and control it while it’s cut off the tree. Even more so, I need somebodies to help me get down a branch on one of the back yard trees, 15 feet up or so, that overhangs my neighbor/landlord’s yard, which he’s cutting up about ’cos he’s afraid it’ll come down one day and knock a hole in the roof of his rental house. He’s already tried to sic the city on me without success; they told him it was on private property and hence none of their business. (The city’s inspector gave me a courtesy call to warn me that trouble was on the way, for which I thanked him.) He also wanted to send his cousins over to perch in my tree and cut it off, which I wouldn’t let him do because of liability worries. Neither my insurance company nor I would ever hear the end of it if one of his cousins fell out of my tree and killed himself.
Anyone in Austin? Anyone?? Bueller???
Get your Badge!
