Breakin the law! Breakin the law!

 I don't mean to break the law but I have this crazy thing inside my head that says I am not really breaking the law.  It is like when you jay walk, that really isn't "breaking bad" cooking meth kind of law breaking.

 Over the weekend I was looking for some chords and headphones I have misplaced.  I went through my camping bags and as I was reaching into the bottom of one (never blindly reach into the bottom of any bag a diabetic owns) bag and came across a rock I picked up in Montana.  Taking a rock from private property or a park is technically against the law and also against most "leave no trace" codes and my buddy Ken would whap me up aside the head for taking it.  The thing is I just like to have a small piece of rock to remember where I was.

I will put this rock with my other small rock tokens from years of camping and they all just take me to a place inside me where diabetes doesn't roam free and I don't have to prick my finger.  So call me a thief or a bad person and all that is true just remember I don't do it to be malicious, I do it as a keep sake.

old school stuff!

http://www.backpacker.com/skills-sept-2010-fit-to-be-tied-four-common-knots/articles/14441?utm_source=newsletter01&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter03

I know this is pretty useless stuff but for some odd reason I just like to know my knots and how to tie them then to know when to use them.  A friend of mine, back when I was like a sophomore in high school taught me some really neat stuff one year working at scout camp.  This guy was one of those guys that could survive any where, any time, with anything.  He was like Bear Gryls before there was a Bear Gryls.  We were doing alot of fun "ewok village" stuff one week just because we were bored and were working on a monkey bridge that went between two towers we built but the monkey bridge was about 50 yards long and we were having problems getting the ropes tight enough and also keeping the towers from collapsing.  That is when my buddy busted out the old school truckers knot.  The truckers knot you see above and can read about in the www.backpacker.com article I posted is used to hold things down or to gain mechanical tension in holding something tight.  Think of a trucker with a load of gear on the back of his rig and doesn't have any ratchet straps, tarps, or stuff to hold the gear down he can use a truckers knot to tie things down with more force than he could by just pulling the rope with only brute muscle strength.  Our monkey bridge was staked out with five foot long stakes that were about six inches around that we hammered into the ground with an axe and we used three of them.  Then on each stake we had a rope with the figure "A" part you see above and we used the loop as a pulley and progressively on each stake repeated figure "A" and that created a monkey bridge that could hold an entire village of ewoks on.

The only downside to this new truckers knot that I learned was when it came time to tearing down our elaborate ewok village the part in figure "A" you see above we just used simple over hand knots which once tightened down fully and had a thousand kids running up and down the bridge was impossible to take out of the rope.  So we had to cut the rope at the last over hand knot we put in and sacrafice the un-tie-able section to the knot gods.  I know this story is going somewhere, the picture above shows a better start to the truckers knot by using the over hand loop.  From my ewok village issues years back I have always avoided using a truckers knot because of the possible loss of the rope.  Now I know a better, modified version of the truckers knot I can put this old school knot back into my arsenal of knot weapons for future need of tying down crap in my truck the next time one of my ratchet straps give out.  It just goes to show that if you always keep an open mind and stay informed, you can learn cool new things just like I did.

Diabetes can always ruins a good thing

 Tuesday I was working out with my group and our trainer had a cool gift for all of us and that was a free T-shirt!  What made this T-shirt even cooler was that is was a fig Newton running shoe T-shirt.  I wear fig Newton running shoes so this was a nice addition to the swag.

 When I got home there was this funny feeling coming from my belly (no not that kind of funny feeling).  The kind of funny feeling that you know something diabetes related is not going so well.  Then I looked down my shirt ans saw the blood on the shiny and new T-shirt where my pump site was.

 I lifted up my shirt so see the stream of blood gushing from my pump site and knew that I was not going to be feeling well for the rest of the night.  Not sure if the rest of you "normal diabetics" have ever had this happen to you but I am first not normal, and second a klutz.  What happened was my pump site either slightly came out during workout and was pushed back in, only to rip and tear my insides, or my site shifted and hit something that makes blood gush out of me like a Texas oil rig.  Either way I get a real nasty bruise, quality swelling and pain from the area, and also it makes me sick.  Not sure if it is like insulin going into my blood stream or something it just makes me queasy when this happens.

The first thing to do is always replace the pump site and monitor my BG's to see if I am doing any sort of insulin resistance or something.  All in all I made it through the night and my upset tummy was not too bad of an issue but my new shirt probably has a permanent blood stain on it.  Oh well, what do I own that isn't covered in diabetes?