Discount

I have convinced the people at Mountainsmith that they need to start marketing their product towards diabetics.  This is because they make the best bag I have ever used and also the highest quality I have ever seen.  If you are anything like me and when you get that new meter you first throw the cheap carrying case in the trash and find a way to fit the meter into your current carrying case.  Then look at the products at http://www.mountainsmith.com/  They have camera bags that look great for meters and also their lumbar series (they gave me a day classic to review) is great as a diabetic bag for all your snacks, meters, pump supplies, batteries, tape, ID's, and junk we all love to throw into it.  The part I loved most about the Mountainsmith bag I reviewed is that it was rugged and tough with a boy look and feel to it or an "outdoorsy" person setup.  I once was at a diabetic convention and felt so bad for this 13 year old boy with diabetes that had to cary this tote that was pretty girlie and he knew it.  I could tell his mother gave it to him and you could see in his eyes that he hated it.  Seeing that poor boy and having been there myself (mom you gave me some girly things OK) I know that having something look rugged and cool helps ease the pain of diabetes.  The boy saw my Eagle Creek day pack I used as my diabetes gear bag and he looked at me like I was some sort of wilderness diabetic adventurer fresh from the jungle (that bag is now dead with holes and tears in the bottom).  No one should feel ashamed of this disease or the gear we tote to treat this disease.  I said earlier this week that one of my goals for 2012 (well, and starting now) is to find the best products for diabetics to use in the wilderness.  Mountainsmith bags are my first must have in this search.

For the month of December http://www.mountainsmith.com/ is giving diabetics 20% off their purchase at checkout with the code: TDC20. Get it, The Diabetic Camper 20%.  Kind of neat they did that for me.  Now if I can convince them to get with Frio and make some sort of ultimate diabetes line.  That would rock!

Junk Mail

This December 29th will be our 10th wedding anniversary.  Now I am running behind on getting my wife a gift or planning a wonderful evening.  I remember back when I was single and how my dietitian had told me that 87% of all type one diabetics would be divorced at least once.  She explained that it was hard on a relationship if I did not take care of myself with the highs and lows mixed in with the mood swings and depression.  This is just hard to manage for alot of people.  With that information in hand I knew that if I were to be of the 13% that got married only once in their lifetime I had to take care of myself first, and second find the right person that can handle all this mess that diabetes is.  I am thankful for my wife every day.

We spent our honeymoon in Italy on our first anniversary.  The thought of putting a honeymoon on credit just seemed bad.  So we saved our first year and paid for the trip with cash.  It felt so good and the trip was so worth it.  Italy was a perfect place to visit from just after Christmas through early January.  That is the season where there is almost no visitors and most Italians are on vacation to other places.  You get the entire place to yourself.  Our tour guide kept telling us how all these almost empty museums in the summer are packed like sardines and the lines wrap around the buildings to get in.  We just walked into each museum and had the places to ourselves.

When it came to getting ourselves a gift from Italy, we planned on not just buying a bunch of random junk to bring back from the trip.  So we decided it had to be one big ticket item.  In the pictures above you see a hand blown Morano glass lamp that we purchased as our gift to us.  My wife backpacked this lamp for a week in her day bag because it was going to cost us an additional 75 bucks to ship back to the states.  This was the only item we put on credit for the entire trip.  That was to have the insurance on it in case of theft.

Yesterday when I got home and was sorting through the mail and I came across this postcard pictured above.  Recently I have had postcards that looked like the one above about recall notices for my Ford F-150 and service notices from my local Ford dealership.  So I almost just chunked the card in the trash until I noticed it was from "Currency Conversion Fee Antitrust Litigation."  This got enough of my attention to see what it was about.

The backside of the card had a standard record update and information verification. I am still under the impression that this is complete junk mail and needed to be shredded.  Then I notice it was not just a postcard but it was postcard size and was folded in half and sealed shut.

I open the mail and low and behold it is a check for $18.04 made out to me.  The fine print on the bottom discussed how there was an antitrust suit with Visa and MasterCard on FX (foreign exchange) transactions from 2000 to 2006.  That puts it right at our honeymoon.  We did have to pay a hefty fee when we purchased the beautiful lamp that hangs in our entry way.  Is this a sign from god that I married the right person for life or is this just a weird coincidence with our ten year anniversary coming up?  In my heart I know that my wife is who was made to be with this crazy camping diabetic and that this is just god giving me $18.04 to help with our anniversary dinner!

The Walking Dead

 OK, so I have been wanting to watch this series "The Walking Dead" for a while now and just keep forgetting to record it.  Well over the Thanksgiving holiday and with the greatness of Netflix I had a chance to watch all of season one.  Then with on demand I had the chance to watch all of season two up to the mid-season finale which I caught on AMC Sunday night.  First, I have to admit that I am a fan of any zombie movie but was concerned how you make a zombie series.  Everyone tells me of how great "Madmen" is and that AMC shows are wonderful.

 After watching this series from beginning to current episode I must say it is truly a great series to watch and the zombies are just right.  The wonderful thing about end of world shows and zombie apocalypses is that you get to think about the "What if" situations.  Those situations are "What if" you were in their place and how would you handle it.  Being a camper that I am and having to know how to improvise and over come various situations when in the wild I love to see what they are doing on this show and think of better ways to do it.  Now I know what all of you are thinking out there is that, hey this guy is a diabetic and even if he survived the zombies how is he going to survive without insulin.  OK, so that part I am still working on in my head.  I do keep a solid six months supply of diabetes gear at the house.  So I have at least that long to live or find more meds.  The show is based on a comic book that you can read about on Wiki and see where the future might lie ahead for the TV series of our group of survivors.  Other "What if" situations are how would you fight off the zombies.  In the second series the main group we follow find a farm that is run by a man that does not like guns and actually captures the zombies because he thinks there is a cure.  This adds a layer to the show about are guns good or bad and are zombies really bad or is there a chance.  This is so much fun.

 What I have been thinking about is how to deal with these zombies just popping up at random times.  I came up with a solution to that by using the old Indian trick where they used to lure buffalo into narrow passes and either killing them with stones and arrows as they bottle neck or they run them off a cliff at the end of the narrows.  My thinking was to use a person to lure the zombies into the death area and once the person gets into the area the others can whop their heads off with knives and axes.  To protect them at night you could create a zone surrounding the base camp with zombie parts to mask the smell of the living.  Or you could just build platforms to sleep on at night.  Maybe even have a fresh area away from camp that would lure the zombies to another location.  Maybe an animal suspended in a cage above a giant whole and every morning the survivors can check the pit for freshly fallen zombies.  Have I gone to far with this stuff?  I then move onto water, food, shelter, and supplies but I use the parameters that the show gives us.  It is not fair to add an element they have not given me, kind of like cheating on a test.

This is just a little of what I think about while watching this show and well during the day while driving alone to and from work(I know how weird right?).  It all boils down to a fun experience of a TV show and the situation of survival and how we do it.  Either with zombies or if you are lost in the woods, knowing the basics of life that you can only survive 3 minutes without oxygen, 3 days without water, and 3 weeks without food.  Emergencies are limited with shelter, water, and food and how we deal with it.