80 ... or Less

Controlling my blood sugar level is almost as difficult as controlling my weight. Just as soon as I think I have a handle on it, it takes off on a roller coaster ride, either climbing or falling out of control. I try to keep my fasting blood sugar readings in the morning between 110 and 130. A couple of days this week it has drifted up into the upper 170s, mostly when I got too little sleep or ate too shortly before going to bed.

Last night when it came time for supper I suspect my blood sugar had already started to dive. I had no appetite at all and the thought of eating was faintly revolting. Still, I managed a small meal about half an hour before tumbling into bed, exhausted.

I got up a couple of times during the night, as usual, to go to the bathroom ... but I had unusual problems navigating. I staggered like a drunk, weaving several feet to either side. Somebody had left the light on in the kitchen and I went to turn it off. I bounced off both walls of the passageway in the process. I was too tired to think much about it then but that was another signal of low blood sugar.

This morning my fasting blood sugar measured 80. I still didn't feel like eating much but I fixed myself some eggs, which I preceded with a couple of small finger bananas that Cathy had picked up in North County at a fruit stand.

I had a class at 13:00 but I didn't feel like eating anything before going. I should have. When I got to Mission Valley I was suffering from nausia and felt like throwing up, a symptom I haven't had for well over a year but which I know is due to very, very low blood sugar. Since my blood sugar was so dangerously low, I stopped at the Burger King for their $0.49 cheeseburger and a pair of tacos at $0.99, a combination I knew I could force down in the time available before class started, about twenty minutes. BK, however, dragged their feet, making a lie of their claim to producing fast food (not that it really is food, either), and I arrived a few minutes late for the class.

I had just one errand to run after class, after which I came home and heated up some soup, which I just finished. Now I'm going to take a nap.

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The Cur

Biting the Hand ...

It was Monday morning. Cathy was at work. I have no idea what Delia was up to. I decided to check the email on the high speed link and perhaps make a Weblog entry. I usually have the TV droning on while I work, so I first had to retrieve the remote control. I soon spotted it, sitting on the bed next to Rocky, Cathy's dog.

I reached for the remote. Rocky bit me at the base of my thumb. Then he bared his fangs and growled at me. I told Rocky he was a bad dog (without raising my voice). Then I used the comforter to protect myself while I retrieved the remote.

I wrote a long Weblog entry, which Xanga immediately lost. Then it was time to get ready to go to a friend's house for a barbeque lunch. I showed Delia the bite, which I had only been able to get to bleed a little bit while cleaning it up -- the area below the punctures was turning red in a series of bands. The red area was about an inch long by about half an inch wide.

Before we left, Cathy called. When I told her what Rocky had done, she explained why: he had a bone. He gets extremely protective of his bones. Cathy had gotten a steak at a restaurant the previous night and had brought the remains home for breakfast that morning, giving Rocky the bone when she finished. He wasn't supposed to take the bone from the dining room into the bedroom but obviously had done so after she left. I've since spotted the bone.

We took my little car for the visit to our friends' house, about 26 miles north of here, usually a congested drive of over half an hour. There was little congestion -- but the gear shift lever was hard on my hand. The pain had gone down considerably by the time we retraced our steps, near midnight.

When Cathy arrived home, a bit after 1:00, she reminded me of Tea Tree oil (AKA Melaleuca) and I spread some on the area of the bite and redness. This morning the redness was reduced, so I have continued to dose it. Meanwhile, I have an appointment with my doctor for this afternoon so I can get some antibiotics if he feels it necessary. I had a tetanus shot about six months ago, so infection is my only current concern.

As for Rocky, I'm not going to punish him or anything else. I'm going to do my best to ignore his presence in the house. I'll put him outside regularly to do his thing, but I'll no longer participate in his care and feeding.

You shouldn't bite the hand that feeds.

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Shower Sudsing

As late as 1990 I was still using bar soap in my shower, as I had always done. I was even taking infrequent, very long tub baths. Then the drains stopped running.

Drains always stop. You dump in a chemical and they start again. This time the chemical did no good. But I had a cheap little hand-powered pipe snake, so I decided to bore through the obstruction.

My snake stuck. It was deeper than I ever expected it to go and it would go neither forward nor backward. Finally it broke. I called in a professional plumber. He got out his big snake with a big motor behind it, the biggest that would fit in the drain. It went just a little farther than my little snake had gone before it, too, got stuck and broke.

We had to saw the pipes off and replace them. From the old pipes we extracted an object about fourteen feet long that appeared to be composed of plastic, dark reddish brown in color, with large amounts of hair embedded in its whole length: a soap scum hairball, the product of nearly forty years of using bar soaps and toothpaste in the bathroom sink and bar soaps in the tub. We found my piece of snake, the plumber's piece of snake and a third piece of snake that had been broken off in the mess some time before we moved back into the house in 1989.

Yes, bar soaps will produce a lather that appears to be some form of liquid ... but it rapidly combines with minerals in the water to produce the plastic-like to rock-like scum that blocks the plumbing. I decided to switch to detergents, which are and remain liquid, forming no deposits.

I was already using some liquids or near-liquids in my shower anyway. There was the shampoo and conditioner, often a single liquid but sometimes two, and there was the foam or gel I used to shave with in the shower.

It's a lot less messy to shave in the shower than it is to shave either before or after. At one time, when I used a straight razor for shaving, I would also cut my hair in the shower. I would lather my hair up good with shampoo and then shave off the top layer with the straight razor by feel, making sure I got a clean, straight edge all around the back. I did this by feel, without the use of mirrors, and I got pretty good at it. Of course, you have to do it regularly or you start to make mistakes. I wouldn't dare try it now.

When I first switched to liquid soaps in the shower, I used one soap for both my face and body. My face is oily but my body isn't, so that soap was too harsh for my body. I had to find something gentler. When body washes first came out, I tried them ... and immediately switched forever. I have a variety of them now and switch off between them as the mood strikes me. Sometimes I feel like something fragrant, at other times I prefer something creamy, and so on. And I've switched to a milder soap for my face, too.

So I now use five different liquids when I shower: face soap, shaving gel, shampoo, conditioner and body wash. And I don't call the plumber as often.

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Playing Mensan

I went to a party last night! I went alone! Delia was working but was aware of my plans.

Richard Lederer has been inviting me to the monthly gathering of Mensa he hosts for a couple of years now. I decided to go to this one because it was intended to celebrate Richard's reaching the age that qualifies him for Social Security, sixty-five years. His birthday won't come for a few days yet, but the meeting is a regularly scheduled event.

The first thing I noticed as I entered the house was a large number of signs directing people in various ways. One, for example, on the access to the garage, said, "Cat Prison. Please do not open."

The next thing that quickly became obvious was the lack of loud, obnoxious music blaring. Music, when it was provided later, just before lighting the candles on the cake, consisted of four voices and one guitar in a nearly original composition (original words, old music) celebrating a portion of our host's life. The sound of multiple conversations prevailed most of the time.

I was given a brief orientation talk, in which the group's activities were mentioned. They have lots of social activities as well as community service activities. They like games and have have some special holidays, such as the Ides of Irish that combines St. Patrick's Day with the Ides of March; something edible must be prepared by the participants in the colors green, orange and red, to be judged on the basis of creativity or any other criterion the judges arbitrarily decide to use.

They say most of them are introverts, which I can well believe. Even though they were friendly and helpful to each other and to invited guests like myself, I had the impression that they were more reserved when dealing with the rest of the world.

True to their reputation, they are intelligent people, which made for interesting conversations, which was the primary activity for the evening. Even with touchy topics that led to raised voices, the participants remained friendly one with another.

There seems to be a tendency for Mensans to marry within the group, which is not unreasonable. They are compatible and protective of each other. Sometimes these matches work out well.

I had a glass of chardonnay when I arrived and a glass of merlot a bit later, then switched to chilled bottled water. I passed on most of the foods, sampling a few cheeses and half a dozen meatballs only. There was a variety of veggies, lots of candy, cakes and sweet things, some chip / dip combinations ... the usual party layout. But I passed on almost all of it. I also skipped trying the cake, which was chocolate with various kinds of chocolate spreads all over it. I wasn't hungry and I was having too much fun talking to people.

The house had a large patio area, and the noise level on the patio was low enough that I had no problem hearing other people ... but there were mosquitoes. Inside the house it was hot and noisy, causing me problems hearing what was said.

People started leaving at about 22:30. I remained until nearly midnight, by which time only about a quarter of the full number remained. I expected to receive a bit of static when I arrived home, but I was only asked if I had a good time.

This morning my blood sugar was high and I felt under the weather, despite not having over-indulged myself. Maybe it was simply the lack of sleep.

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Snarl

Yesterday was not a good day for drivers in San Diego.

It started about 2:45 when a crane tried to move a rebar lattice column to its new site as part of a freeway widening project where the I-5 and 805 freeways merge (or split, depending on your direction of travel), the worst freeway congestion spot in San Diego. The load was about a quarter of the crane's rated capacity but a cable snapped, unbalancing the strain on the crane and causing the boom to snap near the middle. The broken boom fell on power lines that crossed both freeways, bringing traffic to a halt and killing electricity to Sorrento Mesa, including at least one hospital there. Nobody was injured in the accident.

It didn't take that long to clear the downed power lines from the way, allowing some traffic to pass, but moving the bent rebar column and the remains of the crane had traffic restricted for some time.

Meanwhile, on the newly opened Highway 125 section in La Mesa, a truck got on the freeway going the wrong way and managed a head-on collision with several other vehicles, scattering swimming pool chemicals all over the road, which required a closure for clean-up of those hazardous compounds. The truck driver was found to be in diabetic shock and claimed to remember nothing from the time he left his doctor's office, which I suspect could lead to one horrendous legal tangle when they start talking about such things as malpractice. Anyway, that blockage directly increased congestion on Freeway 94 and the Interstate 8.

Getting back to the first accident, electricity had to be restored to the hospital as quickly as possible. They had to string new wires across the freeway, and they decided to use a helicopter to do it, which made it a daylight operation. At 14:00 they began announcing that both of the freeways would be shut down from 18:00 on in periods of twenty minutes or more while the helicopter was stringing each of the three wires that were needed.

The cartoon in this morning's paper showed a line of stalled traffic in Oregon with the comment about the bad traffic backlog in San Diego. It wasn't that bad. With all of the advance warning, lots of people avoided the area and those who got caught in the effort only got stuck for a couple of hours. It could have been much worse.

But most people know only one route to get from their homes to their work sites. If they normally take the I-5 and it is closed, they don't know how to get to the I-15 to bypass the problem.

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Mixed Messages

The following messages were seen on the rear window of a dark Jeep station wagon ahead of me at a traffic light:

Jesus Freak!

Billy Graham

Don't follow me or you may get stuck. It's a Jeep thing.

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Homard

That's right, bugs! 'Homard' is the French word for lobster, the kind with big claws, like a cross between a giant cockroach and a crab. These bugs inhabit the cool waters of the northern Atlantic and are as popular in Maine as they are in France. A few were swimming in a tank in a supermarket in Southern California this afternoon.

Cathy chose three which, when removed from the tank, immediately began to fight among themselves. To calm them down, they were given a nice Turkish bath. After twelve minutes in the steam, their shells had changed from a dark green color to a very bright red color and all three were completely immobile. A little bit of surgery to remove their sand line and they were ready to accompany Cathy home, along with a bottle of champagne and some other goodies.

When Cathy arrived home, she gave her mother a bouquet of flowers, mostly pink carnations, to keep her Oohing and Aahing for a while, then locked herself in the kitchen with a collection of mysterious bags, telling Delia that she was forbidden to enter -- or even peek into -- the kitchen.

Forty minutes later, Cathy set the table and served her mother -- and only her mother -- an antepasto that was mostly white cheese balls and little tomatoes in an oily sauce. Then she brought out a plate of garlic fried shrimp and a big bowl of coconut flavored rice with guandu (also known as pigeon peas, a very special treat to Panamanians). She had me open and serve the champagne while she fetched the spectacular main course.

What do you do when faced with an intact whole lobster for the very first time? Besides make a mess, that is. I know there is a suite of very special tools that are generally used for the task: crackers, picks and so on. We had a nut cracker, which we shared. I got hit in the nose by a flying piece of shell from Cathy's beast. The dog was excited and difficult to restrain.

And the phone rang. Nobody wanted to pick it up. Our hands were too messy. Finally we hit the speaker button. It was Tsyla, one of Delia's friends from Panama who currently lives in Florida. Delia was able to brag while still enjoying the novelty of the meal.

We didn't finish the shrimp. That, in itself, is rare enough to be remarkable. About the only meat we didn't get out of the bugs was in the little legs. We left plates full of shell ... and memories.

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Courting Jurors

Did you miss me?

They pick about 200 names at random for each day they need a jury for the courthouse in El Cajon, where they try only criminal cases, never traffic cases, hoping that about 120 will show up. Of those who do show up, a dozen or so will try to beg their way out of serving on a jury. Most will get their wishes granted.

We all checked in, turned in our papers and picked up trolley tickets and some forms to fill out (there are always forms to fill out). I was asked if I was sure I wanted to report for duty two weeks early; I responded that I had a doctors appointment and some classes immediately following the originally specified date and, yes, I wanted to take care of it now. That generated some smiles. Most people try to avoid serving. People who show up early are very rare.

The jury lounge had the same horrible coffee machines that were there four years ago when I served. I decided I would skip having coffee.

The judge who spoke to us this morning said there were 26 active courts in the courthouse at the moment, only two of which could possibly need a jury today. He also said that his introductory remarks would be short, about eight minutes, while other judges had been known to lecture the jury pool for 45 minutes or more; in fact, he said, he had expedited jury trials so they went to completion, from jury selection to verdict, in less than 45 minutes.

Cool!

Anyway, we were given a 40 minute break while the two judges sorted out what they needed to do. Then we were given another 40 minute break. In one case, it was decided to have a court trial with no jury. A single group of 42 names was called and told to report back at 13:15 for jury selection. From those 42, twelve will be selected as jurors and, probably, one or more as alternates. Call it about 10% of the jury pool.

The first time I served they had a lot more activity. They were able to send out two groups early in the morning and, when those not selected returned, sent out two more groups for possible selection. Then, in the afternoon, I was in one of the two groups sent out and was selected from my group to serve on the jury. That was a busy day and they used about 60% of the jury pool.

But I think they had 42 active courts at that time. They've cut back for budgetary reasons. Litigation is expensive.

The rest of us had to wait another twenty minutes for the final decision that we would not be needed, then we were released.

I will be free from jury duty for the next year.

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Will You Miss Me?

I might be gone for the next two weeks. If I'm lucky, I'll only be gone tomorrow. It depends on whether or not I'm assigned a case.

Yes, I get to play juror again. This time they explained in advance that if I'm assigned to a jury for a case, even if for just part of a day, they won't call me again for three years. But if they don't put me on a jury they could call me again in a fast 365 days.

Cases rarely last the full two weeks. The one I was on, the only other time I had jury duty, hardly lasted three hours until we were out the door, verdict duly delivered. That was enough to earn me three years of freedom.

They told me to come in on May 21 but they said I could come in two weeks early or late without bothering to inform them in advance. I have a doctor's appointment May 22 and a lot of classes I want to take from May 13 on. That's why I'm going in tomorrow. There will be only three classes at risk that way and the chances are good that I can attend all three of them.

Of course, with my notorious contrary luck I'll probably get some celebrity murder case that will last seventeen months.

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Intruder in Our Garage

For the last several weeks there have been indications that something has been paying regular visits to our garage. The garage is kept closed and was pretty well sealed up until we had a new hot water heater installed close to two years ago.

The garage had a vent with adjustable slats for control of the air while keeping out large animals. When we put in the clothes dryer, I removed some of the slats and installed an adaptor for the dryer exhaust duct onto a piece of hardware cloth, which I fitted into the opening. The guy who installed the water heater two years ago just removed the hardware cloth and stuck the copper pipe for the emergency drain from the tank through the opening, leaving it for me to repair the damage. I simply ran the ducting out the expanded hole, rather than fighting the accumulated clutter inside to make enough space to get in and fix it properly.

For two years, we had no problems. Then our luck ran out.

We began to suspect an intruder about three weeks ago. Things moved or got dirty. Last week, Cathy did some laundry accompanied by her little dog, Rocky. Rocky went berserk when he entered the garage. The next morning, when I entered the garage from the basement, the intruder beat a hasty and noisy retreat through the opening. I blocked the opening off.

I didn't block it off well enough. The creature was able to remove my barrier and get in two days later. It even got into the basement and moved some stuff in my bathroom there.

I still wasn't sure what it was that had invaded. I suspected a shaggy dark cat we've seen around the place for the past year, but possums and skunks are common, too. I decided to see what I could use to discourage it.

A search on the Internet showed that the products generally used to discourage animals from approaching homes are some form of predator urine. Which predator to use depends on what kind of animal is causing the problem. Other suggested remedies were for outdoor use only. I considered getting a couple of rat traps but the high probability of the pest being a cat made me discard that approach.

The only thing left is Rocky. But even the cat is bigger than he is.

Then I got a breakthrough: I saw the animal inside the garage. It was the cat. Now I can take care of the problem.

First I'll move a bunch of our laundry stuff out of the way so I can get to the hole. Then I'll get my supplies ready: a concrete block, a thin concrete brick and some wooden slats. I'll bring Rocky down to make sure the cat is gone, then run the pipe and the duct through the block, placing the block on top of the brick in the opening and holding them both in place with the slats fastened into the wall. There will still be mouse-sized holes but nothing the cat can use.

The cat is a survivor, lasting over a year outside despite the coyotes. I've always thought of it as a tom. But Cathy kept talking of it as a female. I hope it didn't invade to have kittens.

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