No idea where the idea went.

I’ve sat down to write up a post. A cup of tea is steaming away on my computer desk along with my can of mixed nuts sitting beside it just in case I need a quick snack (got to have that protein in order to write you know). My chair is adjusted properly, the room is at just the right temperature and the cats are nowhere to be found (probably on the bed trying to push my wife’s legs into unnatural positions–you know how cats are). In other words, every thing is set for writing up a lovely late evening post and…

…my mind has suddenly and completely gone blank.

I had this wonderful idea for a post and I seem to have lost it. I know I had it when I was downstairs beating the bed into submission for tonight’s sleeping activities but I seem to have lost it between then and now. Thinking about it though I may have lost it when one of the cats, who was obviously lying in wait for me, ran through my legs while I was climbing the stairs. Yeah, that’s most likely it. I dropped the thing as I stumbled over the cat and she took off with it. Probably has it under the couch by now and I do my best not to reach underneath the couch unless I absolutely have to. It’s dangerous you know.

So I sincerely apologize to all those who came here looking for another thought provoking post and found this instead. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll take a sweep under the couch with an old yardstick and see if I can fish out that idea I had. If I find it I’ll immediately sit down and write it before it gets lost again.

Thank you for your understanding in this matter.

When everything happens at once

Sometimes things happen every now and then that tend to shake up our normal lives and routines. You know these types of things I’m sure. A move to a new dwelling, sudden illness, the car terminally breaking, financial problems, a sudden windfall, etc, etc. With any luck these sort of “wake up calls” that throw our respective lives into turmoil are spaced out a bit so we only have to deal with one say, every 4 to 5 months–or so we hope. Unfortunately, it’s not so in our little household in the Clyde River valley or at least it wasn’t this time around.

No, I’m wrong there. It always happens like this. Everything happens at once it seems and this time was no exception. So with no further delay and in no particular order…

I start insulin and eyesight goes on vacation.

I began injecting insulin at the end of October and by the second week in November everything is blurry. Sure, having my blood sugar reading at something less than the sugar content of a pint of maple syrup is great but not being able to see is not so great. That plus I seem to be having all these massive low blood sugar attacks. Especially when I’m not doing anything. Like at 3:00 AM in the morning for instance when waking up dead is not an acceptable situation. So now I can’t see well enough to find the refrigerator that contains the orange juice I need to drink at 3:00 AM during a rather bad hypoglycemic attack that has me three quarters the way to passing out.

And right about this time…

We have to move my wife’s quilt shop.

Yes, now that we put all the effort into remodeling her 500 square foot quilt shop, my wife came to the notice of one of our local (one of the oldest and most respected and most successful) commercial real estate developers in the State that just happens to own the plaza that runs along the shore of Lake Memphremagog here in Newport. Appropriately named the “Waterfront Plaza” of course. And it just so happens that he loves the idea of her selling only Vermont made products, that she makes all her quilted items she sells herself in store and it just so happens that the center store front has gone empty so he wants her in there and he wants her in there right now!

Okay, so this is all fine and dandy and although Laurie would normally balk at moving from a small 500 square foot shop to a 2002 square foot store (with 3 times the rent as you might imagine) we both decided that this time it just felt right–so we went.

In fact we moved the whole kit and caboodle in 10 days despite my constant low blood sugar attacks and blurry eyesight and our mutual exhaustion. But one thing for certain though…we had all the energy of a couple of anemic gnats as compared to the last time we moved the shop (gasp, cough, wheeze, die). We were all done in by the time 3:00 in the afternoon rolled around and we just knew we had to keep it up till well past dinner time everyday if we were going to make opening day on the 21st of November. It’s the holidays after all and everyone hits the plaza.

Of course with the move to a much bigger store front comes the need for financing the endeavor which means contacting the small business loan department head of our local bank who further complicates matters by sending my wife a…

Corrupted .pdf loan application that demolishes her Windows partition.

My wife uses Windows 7, she has a degree in computer systems management and she knows how to secure her system…and so do I. And we don’t use Adobe Reader but another well known PDF reader that has no history of vulnerabilities whatsoever so in other words, our Windows installations are terribly fortified. Despite all that, attempting to open this damn loan application .pdf file sent to her by our bank ended up corrupting her entire Windows partition as well the compact flash card from her camera that just happened to be plugged into her computer at the time.

(But it didn’t touch the Linux Mint 10 installation that lives in it’s own partition on the same hard drive mwahahahahaha!! So she’s been using that instead while her husband semi-blindly wobbles about here and there until he manages to figure out this insulin thing.)

But this is our bank. A local bank. The bank that holds our mortgage for heavens sake. Should I be worried now? I think so!

And to top it all off…

Our second oldest cat decides to die.

And rather messily as well. The reason that I called him our second oldest cat is because our first oldest cat had already passed on this past summer. This time, right after we had decided to move the quilt shop, I had to take Dingo for his last ride to the vet. And since we had already begun the process of moving I didn’t have the time to bury him so let’s just say it’s a good thing we have a rather large deep freezer where we could put the “cat coffin”. Come to think of this I really need to attend to his burial in our little pet cemetery before the ground freezes over.

So, even though some might think that all the above might not be a good enough excuse for not writing up 2 or 3 posts over the last couple of weeks–I do! I do have a couple ideas for a couple more posts in the very near future plus pics of my honey’s new quilt store. So stay tuned my dear readers (all 4 or 5 of you) for there is indeed more to come.

Unless something else comes up of course…all at once.

Meanwhile back at the farm

In case you’ve been wondering where I’ve got off to for the past two weeks or so all I can say is that several unexpected things happened to my wife and I  all at once (not necessarily bad but rather work intensive) and we’ve been up and at it from morning to late night since then. Things have just started to ease off a bit but we won’t be done entirely until the end of the month arrives.

I’ll write up a more detailed post as soon as time permits but for now please be patient while I attend to what needs to be attended to–so to speak.

Blood sugar down and everything blurry

blurred text

The blurry text above doesn’t bother you does it? It doesn’t make you want to rub your eyes or rush for an aspirin because you feel a sudden headache coming on or anything like that, right? Well, it does that to me no doubt about it.

For those that might have read my previous post (and ran away screaming due to the pic of the crossed syringes I stuck at the top of the post) you’ll already know that I’ve started taking insulin recently and I’m quasi-happy to say that the results have been immediately apparent. And one of the most obvious is that my world has suddenly turned into the above image. That and my blood sugar has dramatically dropped towards the realm of normal. Fine and dandy but I do believe I miss my eyesight.

Age brings on many things. Decreased hearing ability, wrinkles, irritable bowel syndrome and the need for store bought reading glasses and I’m no exception to this whatsoever. I’m aging just like everyone else and to be truthful about it, I was a bit ahead of the pack in one area–I was pretty much deaf to start with. But in all other symptoms of aging, I’m right on track including the need for those damn reading glasses I spoke of. Still, it wasn’t all that bad seeing as how I only needed 1.5 diopter reading glasses in order to read my computer display and 1.75 for reading the fine print. And my farsightedness was as sharp as ever.

Then came insulin and subsequent lowering of blood sugar.

It’s no secret that diabetes is harmful to your eyesight but as long as my blood sugar was as high as cake frosting my eyesight was fine–minus the aging factor of course. However, now that my blood sugar is between 70 and 150 (normal) my entire world went Gaussian blur. Near sight, far sight, no matter where I look it’s as fuzzy as that annoying image at the top of this post. Very irritating when I’m driving you know–especially for other drivers within my general vicinity. Wearing those store bought 1.5 reading glasses helps to some extent, I mean I’m not side swiping as many cars on my way to the post office as I was but it’s not the fix I’m looking for.

So, I’ve called the VA eye clinic, those nice people who make my bifocals which I’m supposedly entitled to due to being a diabetic and all and I’m told there’s a fix for this problem in the form of a brand new set of bifocals, goggles, contacts, visors or whatever. And I’m to drive down there later this month for the required eye exam and all that kind of stuff.

If I squint real hard I’m sure I can stay on the highway instead of in the trees.