travel

Back from one trip Sunday and going away again tomorrow. We are going to a Thanksgiving retreat at an Episcopal conference center on the coast, so I hope that will be relaxing. But I miss my routine.

I'm here, sort of

Lots of appointments, including a big one that got rescheduled from today to yesterday. And tomorrow I head out for the History of Science Society annual meeting.

I was brought up short last week when I asked myself the question "Why am I doing this?" about working so hard to get my blood sugar into the normal range. I realized that I was just doing it so the doctors can't say "It's your fault." The rational answer would be that keeping my blood sugar in the normal range is the best way to avoid complications later on, but that doesn't work for me on a deeper level because there are feelings deep inside me of wanting to be disabled (wanting my pain to be visible). I struggled with some of those issues yesterday and where I ended up was to just say that I'm working on controlling my blood sugar because it is interesting. For example, how do certain foods affect me, and affect me differently at different times? That it is interesting is a good enough reason for the moment.

Episcopal History

A friend forwarded to me the following piece of humor:

"The actions taken by the New Hampshire Episcopalians (INDUCTING A GAY BISHOP) are an affront to Christians everywhere. I am just thankful that the church's founder, Henry VIII, and his wife Catherine of Aragon, and his wife Anne Boleyn, and his wife Jane Seymour, and his wife Anne of Cleves, and his wife Katherine Howard, and his wife Catherine Parr are no longer here to suffer through this assault on traditional Christian marriages."

If you want thoughtful discussion of the issue I point you to
AKMA.

Today

I feel like the new attitudes to food that I have worked so hard to build are destroyed by the diabetes. So I need the symbol of balance more than ever. The rocks gave me the courage to have icecream as a treat. The good news is that my blood sugar two hours afterwards was ok.

programming

I gave a talk at my 13 year old son's school on the history of computers. The concept I wanted to get across to the students is that computers were originally used just to do mathematics; the ways they use computers (applications and the World Wide Web) are very recent inventions. They were amazed that the computer just uses numbers and someone has to write a program to get it to do all the fancy things we do with it. Several of them were intrigued with the idea that games are programs people write and wanted to know if they could write their own games.

When I was in high school, learning to program computers was seen as a useful thing to do to be prepared for the new world of computers. When I was in college people like scientists wrote their own programs. Now it seems that no one but professionals programs any more, they just use applications. It seems to me that despite that it might be something valuable for students to learn, as learning how to flowchart still affects how I think about analyzing complex programs.

my body, my science experiment

I didn't have time to balance any rocks Thursday, but I did work through some of my feelings about the diabetes. Then yesterday I got The First Year: Type 2 Diabetes by Gretchen Becker, which is a wonderful book. It encouraged me in a direction I was already going, of wanting to test out what works for me. The idea of testing my response to different foods appeals to my need to feel in control (at least of the data, even if I don't like what it tells me to do) instead of feeling that some outside authority is telling me what to do with my body.

tired

A couple of busy days are done and things should settle down a little. Except my husband is going to a conference for four days, so I will be doing the single parent thing. I'm praying for several friends who are in hard places.

diabetes

I went looking memoirs about diabetes and was surprised to find just a few (and those dealing more with childhood). Very different from the huge literature by cancer survivors. Is it not dramatic enough or is the shame I feel more common than I realized? I did find Rick Mendosa's very helpful web site and a couple of yahoo groups to try out.