Confessions of a Starbucks addict

It's been 4 days since I've had a mocha frap from Starbucks. I don't really miss them. How bizarre. I never thought I'd go more than a day without a mocha. Those were my passion, I couldn't go without them. My mom would be so proud. :)

Today is report card day in the Kent School District. This means that the kids get the day off so that the teachers can work all day on report cards. I just don't get this... I mean they have online grading, so you can go in and see what grades your child is getting throughout the semester, which means that the teachers pretty well keep up with their grade books. So, why do they need a whole day to do report cards? Some things just confound me.

It's a cold day in Washington today. It's snowing in the mountains, luckily not here in the valley areas. It's still cold though. 38 degrees today. I'd really like to have central heat in my house, unfortunately almost no one has central heat, unless you put it in yourself. We've got electric baseboard heat. People think that's so great because it costs less. I find that to be untrue. Our power bills during the winter are insane. I'm sitting next to a heater right now and I'm freezing. I hate Washington. Okay, I don't hate Washington, but I do hate the weather here. I guess I'll always be a California girl. I like warm, temperate weather. Not too cold, not too hot. If I could find somewhere that was 70 degrees year round, I'd be in Heaven!

Back to my addiction... I don't know if it's from not having mochas for the last four days or now, but my blood glucose has been so even and steady it's scary! On the new "lifestyle" I'm eating fruits and veggies, some complex carbs, etc. and wow my bgs are super! I'm waking up in the 70s and usually don't waver by more than 30 points in a day. I have had a few lows...54 yesterday. Ugh. I was so tired after that. I'm still trying to learn bolusing splits with the new foods. Seems to be around 27% up front and the rest over an hour or two, depending on what it is. An hour seems to be the best. I'm going to have to basal test though, since I am dropping overnight. I just don't like staying up all night for basal testing. :) Who does, really?

I'm thinking of taking the little girls to the "Bouncy Place" today. Their school's PTA is sponsoring the get together. Only 125 kids will be let in, so we may have to get there early. We'll see. It starts at 4:30 this afternoon and goes for a bit under 2 hours. They'll have a blast... I told Kaycee I wouldn't take her if she didn't help clean the front room. Nothing's been done in there yet, so I may end up going back on what I said and taking them anyway. I guess it will depend on how I feel around that time. :)

I lead quite a boring life, don't I?

I decided that I needed a new blog to keep track of my journey to "lifetime" weight loss. Please read it if you want to know all about how good, bad, and ugly my journey has started.

Of course, I will still be writing in this blog, since I'm prone to rambling about my life and the lives of my children. You really don't need to read that in my weight loss blog. :)

Click here to see the new place!

I have started to feel better. My lungs aren't attacking me nearly as much as a month ago. My doctor took me off of Atenolol, which is a beta-blocker, because the pulmonologist looked back over my history and decided that maybe, just maybe, the Atenolol was causing my shortness of breath. So, I decided to look into it. Did you know that Atenolol has a sulfa-derivative in it? Not many people do...nor do many doctors. Oh, and Cipro, that has sulfa too. By the way, I'm allergic to sulfa drugs. How nice. So I've been slowly poisoned for a year. Neat-o. Thanks.

Now, because of my year of inactivity, I've gained weight. A lot of weight. Not that I was skinny before last year, but I've never gained this much weight in a year, unless I was pregnant! I can't do a lot of exercise yet, as my lungs are still scarred, but I can reduce my intake, that's for sure.

I joined Weight Watchers. Troy joined with me. Our weigh-in/meeting day is Sunday. We allowed ourselves to eat whatever we wanted on Sunday, but we counted everything. Monday turned into a similar thing, though we tried being as low in Points as possible. For the week I'm -16 Flex points. Hey, I got really hungry after combing out Tani's hair for 8 hours... I did do pretty well yesterday though. Troy and I went to Denny's for lunch. I had a chef's salad and a bowl of veggie beef soup. Total Points for that was 14. I ate the soup first, with a couple of saltines crumbled and mixed in. When the salad came I dug in with gusto. I normally hate salads. I have to say, this was a really good salad. I didn't eat all of it, so was able to take the rest home and have it during a "resting" break while combing out Tani.

Today has been difficult. I've so far had 7 Points worth of food. 2 Lean Pockets (3 Points each), a WW Yogurt (1 Point), and an apple (1 Point). I had Troy buy some low-fat tortillas, ham, turkey, and fat free cream cheese when he was at the store today. I also had him get some salad makings and some fruit. It's weird going from excessively processed, overly messed with foods to raw, make-your-own foods. I'm lazy, I don't want to cook. This is going to be a struggle!

By the way, Weight Watchers is in no way low-carb. I thought that they might have some skew on the whole "low-carb" fad. Nope. Which makes my life doubly hard, since I have to count *all* carbs and input them into my insulin pump. This is also not helpful because a lot of the low fat items are really carb heavy. A normal diabetic should have about half of their insulin come from basal and the other half from bolus. So far, I'm changing to 1/3 to 2/3. Which doesn't help me in losing weight well, since insulin supposedly makes you gain weight. Ugh.

Isn't it funny how as you age you don't look forward to your birthday anymore? As much as I've told my kids to just forget that today is my birthday, I really would have liked at least one of them to remember that it is... The one time they listen to me. :)

My dad called me. He doesn't like people who drive and talk on their cell phones. He was driving when he called me. Silly guy...

My husband wished me a happy birthday and he got me a mocha and lunch. :D He got himself a mocha and lunch too... Good thing it's his birthday as well, otherwise I might feel cheated! Not. :D

I'm really testing to see when/if the kids remember my birthday. By the time they go to bed they had better say happy birthday to me or else they are scrubbing the toilets. :D

I used to be really smart. I used to have rather high-thinking jobs. In the last 10 years, I've not done a thing to keep up with the times. I'm a mom. I'm a stay-at-home-mom. What's worse is that I'm a stay-at-home-mom that literally stays at home. I don't go anywhere and I don't do anything. I stay. That's my life.

I've come to realize that I've really let technology pass me by. I used to be the person that everyone came to when they didn't know how to use some new program at work. I once taught an entire division (of a company I worked for) how to use PCs, since the company decided to migrate away from Macs. I knew how to use the entire MS Office suite. I knew Lotus inside and out. I kept up with stuff like that because I *had* to, or they'd find someone else to hire who knew more than me.

I guess I haven't totally let technology pass me by. I mean, I know how to use a DVR with the best of them. I know how do download mp3s and how to load them onto an mp3 player (never mind that I don't actually own an mp3 player, but my kids and my parents do). I can figure out a new cell phone within minutes of powering it on.

I once worked for IBM. This was back in the day, pre-MS Office, pre-OS/2 Warp. Heh, we were lucky if the computer we were given was actually a computer and not a terminal. Back then, when I first started there, I was unlucky and had a terminal. This wasn't so bad because for two weeks before actually starting work there, they put me in a class to learn Script. I learned two other programs while I was in that class, but Script is the one I used most. Script was what we used to type up simple letters and documents. Think of it as HTML for the MS-DOS generation. Scary! No, not really. It was just a ton of tags to put in front of your words. Make sure you close out the tags and your document will look fine. Like I said, it was HTML...sort of. It didn't have commands that didn't make sense.

My point is, I knew Script. It was coding for secretaries. Years later I moved beyond being *just* a secretary. I kept up with the times. MS Word made my life much easier. Give me a GUI over anything else, thanks.

When I left the workforce, I was working for Visa. I was in the international fraud department. I helped track perpetrators of fraud. I also helped everyone in the department with their computer issues, because I knew how to fix them, and I did it quickly and efficiently.

Then I became a stay-at-home-mom. I used to keep current with the new releases of MS Office, only because my husband's company used to buy the Developer's Suite from Microsoft, and he got one of the licenses. I used to get all the new MS stuff. The last MS Office I had was 2003. It's just too expensive to buy anymore.

All of this stagnation became quite obvious when I was trying to "freshen up" my blog by changing its template. I wanted to find something that someone else had done, tweak a few things, and have a nice, new, pretty page. This did not work out so well. What the heck is CSS? Who decided that HTML wasn't enough? Why would someone make it so that I cannot resize the column widths by making the header have part of the columns start in the header? Who decided to make my life difficult?

I'm sitting here, pondering going to the community college to learn all this *new* stuff. I know, CSS has been around awhile...but I didn't pay attention. I'm thinking that I'm about 10 years behind everyone because I've been at home. I haven't been a tax-paying member of society for that long (in case you're worried, I don't pay taxes but my husband sure does!) I'm almost afraid to admit that I have become exactly like my parents, calling on my husband to figure things out for me because I just don't get it anymore.

Do I really need all this stress over a blog?

So back at the beginning of December, I posted about the consequences of taking a D break, saying that I was going to ask my doctor to order an A1c. I did just that...asked. Then, I put it off...for quite awhile. Instead of just fasting that night and going in the next morning, no I decided to wait a little bit. See if I could fake my A1c into a good number. Note to self: this concept does not work. Well, it may work a bit, but I don't think the A1c test at my doctor's office weighs the previous 12 weeks differently than anyone else's A1c test.

So I finally bit the bullet and fasted (I actually had to get my lipid panel done as well, since you may be scratching your head as to why I needed to fast for an A1c), and went in last Friday for the blood draw. She emailed me my results today.

6.3! How did I manage that? No, I'm not in the 5s, but I'll take low 6s to be sure. Honestly I was expecting near 8 or 9 with as many highs as I've been having. And come on, I mean this was after our Christmas feast...just 3 days after.

My meter had no where near that average. I think it's time to get a new meter. Or maybe my doctor needs to get a new A1c machine... Until then, I'll work a little harder at testing and matching my boluses.

So it's 12:43 AM, January 1, 2008. I missed the time changing from 2007 to 2008. I was in the shower. It's cold here and I needed to warm up.

Sad. Really sad.

No party, no champagne. I live such a boring life. A couple of my kids are spending the night at a friend's house...they came over to wish us a happy new year. I was in the shower. They didn't say it to me. I'm glad. They would have walked in on a horrible sight... Probably would have ruined their whole year! :D

Happy New Year!