Blog

  • Schedule Change Today

    The worst part about the schedule change is that I am getting a bunch of new students.  I never do well the night before getting new students.  In fact, I hate teaching students I don’t know.  That’s why I don’t like to do tutorial sessions when I have to teach new material.

    I have a friend I teach with who I discovered is just as bad as I am.  We never sleep well the night before a set new of students, etc.  The sad part, is that she gets to meet all of hers in advance, I never do.  The good news, is that because of what I taught, I usually had (and do today) some students that I knew.  That helps.

    I’m sure I’ll survive today, but it’s not going to be easy.  Tomorrow is going to be interesting too since we have prime time, and my first period class returns to me after 2nd period (I’d like to kick the person who came up with that concept.).

  • New Courses

    I’m not that worried about the new courses I start teaching tomorrow. For those who are new to the blog — I taught computer science for 14 years.

    Nice retrospective — I started out teaching computer math, with BASIC on Commodore 64’s and AP Computer Science, which was Pascal. In the years, I’ve gone to teaching on real IBM PCs in a networked lab, teaching QBasic and Pascal, and then to Visual Basic and C++. Even last year, I’d been doing Java for a couple of years, and sitll was doing Visual Basic.

    Yesterday was really good. We had a computer lab set up for the math students work do tutorials on. Four of our math teachers showed up included the math department chair. We worked in one lab for a while, then fed the kids, then moved them to a different lab. The different lab was my new lab, and I found the gradebooks. Now I know my student’s names and have some grades for them.

    Since we had so many people, it freed me up to spend a couple of hours, even paid, to get situated.

    I may even be able to move my Algebra I class into the building, we’ll have to see.

    Right now, I’m working on getting my class website back up and working on lessons for the week.

  • Sadly, he won more for the next guy

    Sadly he won’t get what he wanted but maybe it will help others.

    Diabetic wins suit against IRS

    Gary Branham didn’t anticipate striking a blow for diabetics who face discrimination because of their disease. He didn’t even know such discrimination existed.

  • Interesting day

    I arrived at a meeting early today and got my new teaching schedule for Monday. I’m teaching computer science again, and I’m leaving my ELI kids.

    I’m now teaching Algebra I repeaters, Computer Science (Visual Basic) I, PreAP Computer Science (Java), AP Computer Science A (Java) and AP Computer Science AB (Java).

    I haven’t written any code almost a year, haven’t thought about CS in about that long, and sure haven’t thought about getting the kids to pass. I have no idea if there is any money.

    I also have no idea what I am doing with those students.

    Life is fun.

    I have a feeling my TDD is going up, as I think I’m going to need cards to get this to work.

    I’m going to try to keep in my the following:


    • I can’t do anything if my diabetes isn’t under control.
    • My diabetes isn’t under control if I am not exercising.
    • If I try not to eat, it just makes it worse.

  • Things I’ve learned about Symlin

    It’s not quite as temperature sensitive as they claim — I think that may be true of insulin too, as Medco treats both fairly cavalierly and they are sure careful with depo.

    If you do much more than 4 symlin injections in a day, you may have gastrointenstinal distress. When I asked my doctor about it (who has had years of Symlin experience), he said, “yet’. I really think that is what caused nausa at Christmas and caused diarrah one weekend.

    Symlin does work well for me for turning off the hungry, even some of my emotional hungrys. However, if I use it too late or too much, I am going to be sick to my stomach in one way or another.

    It doesn’t work well on grazing food. It will work on the initial food, but additional food need more insulin.

    It would be better if I didn’t have eating issues and could do better at controlling carbs. Unfortunately that isn’t true.

  • Knee and Pump

    I swear this pump is noiser than the other one. Oh well.

    I’ve downloaded the old pump, but need to do it one more time to get today’s information from it. I’ll probably ship it back then.

    I’ve also uploaded my old settings to the new pump, AND the food database. That makes life infinitely easier.

    Knee has been talking to me all day, and the surrounding muscles. Especially on the stairs. He cut the stairs from the program tonight. The ice and TENS unit thing really got to me tonight, but I’m better now that I’ve hit the hot tub.

    Sure didn’t feel like much day today.

  • New pump

    The new pump has arrived. It looks new, which is good. When Animas replaced my IR1000 it was worn, and it kinda gave me the creeps, so I was worried about that.

    I’m keeping the old pump until I can download it, and I make sure the new pump is working.

  • Knee and Pump

    The pump has left Louisville and on it’s way to Dallas.

    I woke up with a stiff knee but as I move around it gets better. I’m sure that doing knee exercises would be more productive than blogging, but oh well… I can’t bring myself to exercise in the mornings. I should probably get over that.

    Right now, I’m too sleepy, my hair is too wet and I just got dressed and don’t want lint and dog hair on me.

  • My knee

    Ran again tonight — one regulation course, twice. I took it easy the first trip, and it wasn’t bad. Just one dog and one class. Making up for Thursday night when our classes are cancelled.

    We did an exercise in the barn that really required a front cross — for the non-dog people, that means you get in front of the dog and cross. To do them right, you have to plant your leg and change direction at speed, so that means you put a lot of force on your knee, and I always end up doing them on my right knee.

    Then we went out and ran the regulation course again. I took it at full speed, and it went very well. The first 14 obstacles were gorgeous, both me and the dog, but you could see when I started running out of both lung and knee, things started to get a bit ragged.

    Marcie is a fabulous little dog, even if she hasn’t got a hunting title referring to the fiasco this weekend. She was very happy to be a) first for a change, b) mom without a lot of pain, and ran REALLY REALLY fast. We call that border beagle, as she is running like a little border collie. She’s also a bit out of control that way. I don’t really want to see border beagle at a trial, I like nice solid little double Q beagle the best.

    I really think I’m going to be up for the next trial. It’s the weekend after next.

    FYI: The pump is on it’s way to Lexington and is due at school before 3:00 pm. I got the tracking number via email from Animas which always rocks, have the tracking number subscribed to via bloglines. and checked the shipping schedule via UPS.

    I love the internet.

  • Pump Failure

    They are going to overnight my pump and I’ve had them deliver it here at school. It will be interesting to see how that goes. We’ve had some very expensive items disappear from our office.

    I’m going to give them instructions to call me as soon as it comes, and send someone with it.

    So far the current pump is still working.

    I need to remember to download the settings off of this pump and print everything out.