First Place (woo hoo!) and Forgetfulness (boo!)

Nora entered a self portrait that she painted during the school year into a competition at the National Press Club. The competition was sponsored by the National Arts Program.

Nora won first place in her age category! Here's a picture of Nora with her painting & blue ribbon!

Non diabetes stuff going well. Diabetes stuff -- I'm a little frustrated. Daniel forgot his lantus a couple of times this week. Once he remembered it at 1:40 a.m. when he was already between 400 & 500 (the meters aren't so accurate when you get that high). He was spending the night at a friend's house. He took the lantus at that point, then at his regular time the next night because he didn't tell me what he had done. I would have had him take the lantus at 11:40, then earlier the next night.

Then he forgot it again last night (I was out at my yoga class). I found that out when my hubby asked me what Daniel's number was last night at bed time. I looked at him with that wide-eyed stare/glare that's supposed to pin a person to the wall and said, "I WAS AT YOGA." Then checked the meters. There was no bedtime reading.

So today he is checking every few hours and correcting as necessary. I try not to be a nag, honestly.
But am I allowed to leave the house? Can I let him leave the house? Is this just teenage brain? Can I scream now and will you all understand?

Artificial Pancreas

Follow this link to an interesting Reuters article. It's not a cure, but it would make life easier!

Summer Trickles On

Noel Coward wrote, "What I adore is supreme professionalism. I'm bored by writers who can write only when it is raining."

Noel, you'd be bored by me. I miss my laptop! Perhaps if you had a laptop, you'd understand. Or not. I guess if you learn to do active writing longhand, then laptops don't matter. But then again, I've filled pages of journals in longhand. (Robert Benchley, a humorist, wrote, "I cannot write more than three or four lines of longhand without fainting." He composed on a typewriter.) But my little laptop -- it follows me everywhere! It's in the heart of the house, next to the kitchen, where I spend much of my time cooking, helping with homework, organizing art projects, entertaining humans large & small. I can pop on for a quick blog post or blog reading session, I can look up a recipe and then find a way to make it gluten free! I can post a question about diabetes, go water the garden, and then when I walk back inside, the answer is waiting for me on my little screen.

Mary Heaton Vorse wrote, "The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair." Okay, okay. I'm not getting paid to blog, so I'm not stressing over days going by without a blog post. But I miss my time at the keyboard when it's not easily accessible. The desktop computer is available. In the basement. Away from the action. What I usually think of as my husband's computer. It has a different vibe.

The good news is that I'll get my laptop back in a few days. The bad news is that it will be wiped clean. The hard drive died an unexpected, quite sudden death. The good news is that I backed up my documents about a month ago. The bad news is that I lost vacation pictures. *sigh* Have to just take a deep breath and let it all go.

I've been training for my new job these last couple of weeks. I feel, at times, like I'm taking a college course with the mountain of information that I need to digest. But it is all good. And when it is done, send me your struggling children. I'll help them learn how to read (teaching phonemic awareness) if that's what they need, or bring their grades up & brush up their basic math, reading, comprehension, writing, or algebra skills.

It's kind of funny that I got a job doing for others what I've been doing for years with my kids at the kitchen table!

Vacation

Diabetes doesn't take a vacation, but I do. Here on vacation my lovely, trusty little laptop died, just after I loaded 100 pictures into it and deleted them from my camera. *sigh* So I'm on a family member's computer, and will beg a friend for help with my dead laptop when I get home.

Diabetes has touched this vacation in ways other than our daily life. A family friend was hospitalized for blood sugar at 800+ (type 2) when her oral meds stopped working. I visited her, along with my mother in law. Hospital smells, hospital flashbacks, finger sticks & ivs.

I hope to be back online soon. Hope everyone had a lovely Independence Day!