Author: kathleen

I weighed today, and of course, checked my blood sugar, and even after the few excursions in the last week or so, and even with the higher insulin usages, between the agility trials, the workshop, and the holiday season, my weight is still good, and the blood sugar is good.

The next few weeks will be “different”. We’ve got one full day of class left, then 4 days of exams, then a little over 2 weeks for break.

I’m going to a weekend basal rate for the duration.

I’m working on a few projects to make things better. I’ve been having trouble doing longer walks on my treadmill. A lot of the problem is boredom — when I do exercise, there isn’t a lot of good TV on. I’ve decided to at least switch to a digital cable box so I can watch movies, but I’m also thinking about putting DVR box in that room. It’s a bit more expensive each month on the cable bill, but if it will keep me on the treadmill longer, it will be worth it, and I can always change my mind.

I’m also thinking of expanding my weight routine. I’ve about convinced my husband that a weight stack would be worth it for me, and I might get something small for Christmas. I have been thinking about a fold up unit, as I am starting to run out of room the study.

Some good news, my GERD isn’t bothering me as much. Even my pizza night, I didn’t have problems. I think what has helped more than anything is to stop eating salad in the evening. I like to get a really salad, with lots of lettuce and while it fills me up, I think it’s just too hard to digest in the evening, so I am limiting those to the afternoon.

I may have figured pizza out. Last night, husband and I had pizza and watched a movie together — it was a very nice evening.

We watched Knights of South Bronx, a movie about chess in schools.

I did Symlin, and did a combo bolus, then a correction at the end of the movie and ended up with a blood sugar of 101 this morning. Don’t think I could have done better! I’ll confess, I did four pieces, did a combo bolus for 60 carbs over 4 hours. I think — I’ll double check that the next time I download my pump. And I checked, and yes, it was for 4 hours.

And hey, I don’t have to worry about being in starvation mode for a few weeks.

Excellent movie. First you have to understand that Rich and I met at the Dallas Chess club and did all our dating playing chess. To make the marriage work though, I had to quit playing. We were just a little too competitive. It works much better with us doing seperate competitive events.

Kinights of the South Bronx is a feel good movie. It doesn’t show any of the bad aspects of chess — or even teaching for that matter. I think it is a really good movie for both chess players and teachers but just realize that it only shows the good side. Of course, seeing only the good side of teaching is a good thing at the end of a semester.

If you want to see a more balanced view of chess, Searching for Bobby Fischer is a better movie in my opinion, but still doesn’t show the bad aspects of youth chess as bad as it could be. I suppose that some of our experiences with parents and chess might have influenced us not to have children. Yeah, they can be pretty abusive.

We are having a bout with an ice storm — temps below 30, heck below 25 most of the time — and we had rain yesterday, so most of the school districts, including mine, shut down.

I always get irritated at the news reports — they always find some “damn yankee”, who criticizes the area for shutting down. I’ve been down here 20 years, and I have been very thankful every time we’ve shut down. My district is very conservative about shutting down — quite a few districts shut down yesterday but we didn’t. I was a bit concerned, but we got through the day, and apparently got every student home safely.

We have had some other times when I thought we should have shut down, but we didn’t. There are some major concerns when you are a district as big as we are: quite a few of our students will not be supervised and worse yet, a bunch of them did not get lunch today. The supervision doesn’t matter with my kids, since I do high school, but it is a problem for the younger kids.

I hate the timing, but it will work out for me. We start finals on Tuesday. I was a bit worried that I would not be able to fill all three days with review, but two days will be just fine.

When I went into school yesterday I did two out of the three things that would make it easier for me stay if we couldn’t have gotten home. One was to leave my contacts at home and wear glasses. The other was to make sure I had enough insulin on me, and to carry an extra meal — a tuna salad package.

The glasses thing was funny. It really bothered my ELI students more than anything. One group thought it might I was tired. The others just wanted to know. However, it did give me problems, as I have good far vision with my glasses but absolutely no near vision, and the Algebra students needed to do some graphing. I ended up leaving them to do the graphing on their own.

When I review, I like to make sure that I work each review problem for the students and that they have recorded how to do it. I’m sure that my students won’t study, but you never know. I work very hard to make sure I do my part.

I have to relate something funny — at least to me. They moved about 25 students out of my classes, as they were over crowded, and gave them to another teacher — the AP Calculus teacher who is VERY good at what she does.

She came to me yesterday upset because she says the students don’t like her, and like me better and tell her that all the time. I already knew this, because they tell me that when they see me. However, I don’t think it’s personal on either side. These were students who were all working for me, and were my best students. I think if they had had her first, and had come to me, they would still feel the same way. I also am not sure that there is anything that she can do differently to change things.

I’ve been reading Printcrafter’s posts also, and unlike some, I’m not anxious to run out and get one.

Unlike the pump I paid for out of pocket — I don’t see a direct benefit. First, I’m fairly hypo aware. Second, I don’t tend have any. Maybe that’s a function of being a Type 2, but the only time I seem to have lows is when I am exercising, and they are pretty easy to prevent.

The annoyance factor looks pretty high too. The inserter is pretty nasty looking, and having that much extra bulk on the body seems annoying too.

For someone like me, I think having the ability to wear something like that for a week at a time, and then return it to the doctor’s office would be the best model. I know that the doctor’s office has the gold version, but I think it would be more useful to be able to see what is going on.

I’d love to borrow one for a few days to learn how to deal with some specific meals. I still don’t do pizza well at all, and I also have trouble with Mexican meals.