My goodness, it has been a long time

     I looked at how long it had been since I posted here, and it’s been almost a year. Thankfully I don’t rely on my writing to provide income, or I would have starved long before this. Anyway, the many months that went by had a lot of things going on for me and my family. Work, school, and just daily life seemed to consume the days and weeks. There were times I considered writing something, and even began to put some ideas down, but I just couldn’t seem to finalize them. Politics? I feel like I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t write something without shocking friends and family with my views, so for now I’m going to follow the maxim of ‘if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.’

     I can’t say I did no writing at all during this time. I participated with two of my daughters this last November in the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I was able to write over 50,000 words and I have at least a (very) rough draft of a novel. I’m trying to sit down now and edit it as best I can to try and clean up some of the inconsistencies I know exist in the text. Hopefully I can do that sooner rather than later. What will I do with said novel? I’m not sure. No one other than me has read it so far, and so I’m not sure if it would have any mass appeal, or be worthy of attempting to publish it. That’s something for the future.

     Unfortunately, we didn’t have a garden this last year, as the house we rent was supposed to be painted (in the end they didn’t paint, so we will see what happens this year). We were able to purchase fresh vegetables, so we were able to continue canning. We even added some new items to our repertoire, pickles and turkey broth (yes, the last one was done with the remains of our turkey carcass from Thanksgiving). When you look at it, there are so many things you can home process/can that help you eat healthier.

     Health? That seems to have been one of the more interesting things this year. In the eye department, I decided to go back to wearing contacts. I quit wearing them due to my military career, and now that I’m done with the military, I finally went back to them. I found I prefer the clear peripheral vision they provide and they seem to make my vision clearer than glasses.

     I’ve also continued my post-heart attack recovery and life changes, but I seemed to hit a ‘plateau’ after a while. I couldn’t seem to improve my energy level, and there were also other ‘symptoms’ that seemed to indicate I had something else going on. However, I continued in true male fashion of ignoring what was going on. That worked so well for me before, didn’t it? Finally, I had some blood work done for a cardiology appointment. The day AFTER Thanksgiving, I received an email notice the blood test results were in (isn’t technology wonderful?). I go to the account I have set up for such things, and start perusing the results. Cholesterol? Better, but not where the doctor wants it. I figured that would be the case, so I wasn’t surprised.

     I start looking through the other tests out of curiosity. I finally got to blood sugar. The result? 235. Excuse me? Where did this come from? So I had to wait until Monday to talk to my regular doctor (who didn’t order the test) and say, ‘I saw this result in these blood tests, can we talk about this?’ I go in to the doctor, talk about the test and my other symptoms, do another couple tests (the dreaded A1C included) and go home with a diagnosis of diabetes. The next day, those new tests come back to include an A1C over 11 (normal is 4.5 to 6, with diabetes being over 6.5). The doctor labeled it ‘significant’ and ‘without control’ (anyone know the difference between with and without control? I have some ideas, but I’m not sure). So, what now? I get to poke myself daily, take horse pills (metformin), and hopefully keep more bad things from happening to me. I got to take one medication off my list for cardiac, so number of meds stayed the same. My Lipitor was increased (no surprise) so we’ll see how we’re doing a little farther down the road.


     I’m going to try and be better about posting things on a somewhat regular basis, and maybe I’ll even take the gag off and rant and rave about politics. Not until after Lent, though. I don’t need to add to my confessions voluntarily.