better

A better day today. The committee chair who was unhappy yesterday with the curriculum I had struggled to put together was happy today with the revisions I made.

On my personal journey, I think I've finally worked through a situation in which I was feeling unsafe and unsupported. Once some of the issues were resolved, I picked up a marble as a symbol. The other person said the marble was a symbol of what we are handing back and forth, so I handed it to him. It took him a while to figure out that I wanted to actually hand the marble back and forth. But I think he is beginning to really see the advantages of using that kind of symbol and wants to learn.

bike humor

I got a laugh today from a captioning contest for this photo:

Suggestions from rec.bicycles.misc:
"The peloton outfitted with the latest in GPS technology, hits a magnetic anomaly on Fillmore St"
"Helping a fellow biker, the breakaway pack searches for a lost contact lens"
"The BIG ONE drops California into the sea, as the remainder of the men's field weaves its way up Fillmore Street for the last time."
"Where did you say the finish line was? I know it's around here somewhere..."
"The Shriners trade up. Replace headgear too."
"Timothy Leary plays one last prank."

the doctors don't know

The community that supports my approach to diabetes is at the newsgroup alt.support.diabetes. One of the members of that community has being doing her own research in the medical literature and has compiled quite an impressive collection of information on innovative approaches to diabetes. For example, doctors will say that type 2 diabetes inevitably progresses. But no research has been done following diabetics who actually keep their blood glucose in the normal range--what is defined as tight control in the studies is significantly above the normal range.

I said Friday I need to learn to be more flexible

Yesterday I was going out for an early morning 35 mile ride (which still takes me over 3 hours). I had 1/2 cut of granola with a peach on top and a little heavy cream--a high carbohydrate treat. As I was getting ready to leave I pumped up my tires and the rear tube failed at the valve. I didn't have a spare tube and I knew my bike shop was going to be closed that day (small town with big-time college football, many stores close on football Saturdays). I wanted so much to go out riding that I decided to take the tube out of my husband's front tire and put it in my tire. I actually checked both sides for pinching before I inflated it, but somehow I did end up with it pinched and it blew when I tried to put the wheel back onto the bike. I burst into tears. I was too upset to go for a long walk to work off that granola and my blood sugar did go high and then crash--I felt hungry most of the morning. I drove to a bike shop 20 miles away and bought three new tubes and I got in a ride in the late afternoon. But I guess I have to be more careful about high carb breakfasts and eat my extra carbs when I am safely out on my ride.

Actually there was another funny story yesterday when I finally did go out riding. This isn't a very bicycle-oriented area, and they have put in lots of traffic lights that only turn when a car is waiting. Some of them have pedestrian buttons and some have no way for a bicycle to cause the light to turn. When I went out for my ride the football game was about to start and the traffic had pretty much cleared but there were two policemen still directing traffic where my neighborhood road meets the main street of town. I said to one of them that my problems is I don't trigger the demand light, and he started telling me what he described as one of the funniest things he had seen--a student jumping off his moped late at night to hit the pedestrian button to get a green light. Meanwhile the other cop is holding up cars and motioning to me to cross the street. So I didn't point out that there is something wrong with a system that forces us into running red lights.

science

Some enterprising person did a scientific experiment where they divided diabetic volunteers up into two groups. One group hiked uphill 3-5 times a week for a vertical rise of 600 meters. The other group hiked downhill the same distance. Both groups took a cable car the other way. A glucose tolerance test after two months showed a 9% average improvement for the group that hiked uphill and a 25% average improvement for the group that hiked downhill. The conclusion is that eccentric muscle work is more helpful for diabetes than concentric muscle work. I think it is an amusing scientific experiment.

trusting God

Sometimes I'm able to take the attitude that if what to do isn't clear, just wait for the answer to become clear. I'm naturally a fairly action-oriented person; I'm sure there are other people who need to push themselves in the opposite direction. But for me it was helpful to hear someone say yesterday that she struggles to let go of trying to control everything and trust God. That is another way of going in the same general direction and putting the two together makes something stronger (at least for me).

experiential learning

I'm teaching an honors seminar this fall on computers and society. I told the students that this course would be about experiencing the online world, not just studying it. At the moment we are doing history and it is harder to do, but I have them writing blogs and I had those who know how to program computers spend a class period teaching those who don't know how it works. Judging from the people who have written about it so far it seems to have been a successful exercise. I find it interesting that I am stressing the experiential in my teaching at the same time that in my own inner journey I am emphasizing I need to focus on what I can experience rather than what I can understand.