Ailments, Alarms, and Amazing Progress

As a part of our "get fit" program, we have promised ourselves that we would eat more healthy (read more fresh fruit and veggies), and exercise either by riding our trikes or walking each day.  We generally have been working too late each day to safely ride our trikes, so walking has been the activity of choice most days.  On Sunday we went for a long walk in the neighborhood.  We like to see the vegetation that blooms in the winter, what people are doing to decorate their homes, and what we can do to better doll up old Gladys.

We took a long, long walk that night, and unfortunately, I overestimated how much insulin I needed to take to counteract the carbs of my dinner. I have been diabetic for 47 years, and sometimes I still screw up the counts. About a block from home, I was dizzy and staggering, just trying to keep putting one foot in front of the other.  I had no energy left, and the only thing that kept me moving was pure stubbornness because Rick was panicked and insisted that he could run home and get the car to pick me up. I made it home and took my blood sugar: even I was shocked to see 28.  A normal blood sugar is 80 - 120, so let me tell you that walking with a 28 blood sugar was like running with my feet tied together in a sea of molasses. Needless to say, I ate all kinds of sweet things to get my blood sugar back to normal which, in effect, negated all of the healthy food I ate for dinner.

That same evening, Rick and I went to bed about 10:00 p.m. and promptly fell asleep.  We were both dead to the world when a screeching alarm at 2:41 a.m. almost made me dead for real-- from a heart attack.  Disoriented, I thought that the alarm might be from my insulin pod controller system, but the alarm was way too loud and too high-pitched for my medical system. Rick sat straight up in bed and yelled, "Wh-what's that?"

I jumped out of bed and ran to our dresser. Rick's iPhone was brightly lit and the words "Amber Alert" were spread across the screen. When I swiped his phone to "open" it, a message appeared which told us to contact our local authorities for details.  At 2:41 a.m., the only authorities I would think of contacting might be an ambulance for my still-racing heart.  I checked my iPhone, and I also had the Amber Alert, but for some strange reason my phone did not screech.

As I went back to bed, I said to Rick, "I am SO tired, but I'm also kind of sad because the alert means that some poor kid has been abducted."  The next morning we turned on the news to see what the alert was all about, but nothing was reported.  Sadly, this evening while watching the news we learned that a father had killed both himself and his young daughter a couple of days ago. They were found together in his car. She may have been the reason for the alert.

One last alarm that we had this week happened today when we were driving to Home Depot.  We were in the right-hand lane of a road, waiting at a red light.  We wanted to go straight ahead, but the woman in a yellow Volkswagen behind us wanted to turn right, and she was not about to wait.  Dunedin and Clearwater are wonderful communities in that they provide citizens with bike lanes on several busy streets.  Since Rick was fully in our lane and was first in line near the corner, the crazy lady behind us decided to pass us on the right, using her own invented "lane" of the bike lane and the gutter!  She came within  inches of our car but somehow was able to squeeze by without side-swiping us. I hope that whatever she was in such a hurry to get to was worth it.

Baseboard finishes the guest bedroom.

The progress mentioned in the title may not have been really amazing, but it feels good to finally see some results of our hard work.  We tackled the baseboard today and finished both the hallway and the guest room.  What a finishing touch baseboard makes.  We also scraped and mudded the walls for baseboard in the dining room and the Florida room.

New living room design... with old Ikea chairs yet.

We had a decorator in yesterday who gave us some advice on how to arrange furniture in our wide-open floor plan.  She suggested that we buy two comfortable chairs for the living room and a table/desk for the Florida room.  She also offered to help with the decorating for a fee, but we did some calculations and decided that the laundry room remodel was more important that some new furniture.  This became even more important when Rick leaned today that our water heater (with its six-year warranty) is actually 12 years old.  Yikes! I think we are on borrowed time, so we both feel better about  buying a new water heater.  Of course, with our luck we'll buy a water heater with a 12 year warranty, and it will break down after 6.

My cake after a big "rat" got into it!

My final action today was to bake a cake.  Strangely enough, Wisconsin is a prime state to produce cranberries, but fresh cranberries are usually on the grocery shelves only from mid-November to right before Christmas.  Then they disappear.  Yet here in Florida, I found cranberries from Wisconsin on a prominent shelf in the fruit section of Publix Grocery store. I bought the cranberries to make a Cranberry Upside Down cake.  The cake was a bit of a challenge since I do not have a mixer, but the amount of cake that disappeared after dinner shows me that it must have turned out all right.  If I ask, my husband will probably say a fruit rat must have snuck in and eaten the cake, but I think a Rick-rat would probably be closer to the truth.