What's the carb count on Mudbugs?

Who doesn't love a good Easter feast?  Well this diabetic loves a good Easter feast and one of my wife's old friends invited us over for a good old crawfish boil.  If you have never enjoyed the greatness of crawfish or a crawfish boil then you need to experience it at least once in your lifetime.  What happens is you order crawfish from a fish market about a week ahead of time.  The fish market gets the crawfish fresh from the farm or the fisherman.  Then you pick them up and they are mostly alive with all their claws sticking out of the bag trying to get ahold of your tender flesh.  Then you get a big pot, some crawfish seasoning, put in some sides and you have a crawfish good of a time.

The great part of a crawfish boil and diabetes is there are few to no carbs in these guys.  Then you have to work a little bit and that usually burns off whatever carbs are in the tails.   Usually people put the sides into the boil with the crawfish to season them as well.  We had some awesome surprises in this boil.  The first surprise were the mushrooms.  I love a mushroom but have never had one in my crawfish boil, and they tasted like what it would be like to not have diabetes for one minute.  Then they had whole onions in the boil.  The onions reduced down to a nice sauteed texture with the bite of seasoning.  The final surprise were the sausage pieces in the mix.  Sausage is great no matter how you like it but with a Cajun kick they just complimented the crawfish perfectly.  They also had garlic cloves and potato's in the mix.  I of course had some of those as well.  The only thing I was not completely excited over were the garlic cloves.  They were just a hair over the top for me.  In the end I counted the carbs for the potato's and a few for the sausage but in the end I ate like a king and my BG's flat lined at around 125 the entire time.  How awesome is that?  I can't wait till someone else invites me to another crawfish boil.  Oh and yes you do just walk up to the table and grab and eat.  you use a plate but it is just for your shells.

Hiking out of town while staying in town

I hope everyone had a great Easter this past Sunday.  We had a training hike for our boys that are heading to Philmont this summer.  We are trying to get these boys out on the trail once a month getting that team mentality with each other and also breaking in their backs with a full load in their packs.  Since this was Easter weekend and doing a campout was out of the question our faithful leader put together a ten mile training hike at a local trail.  This was a great time to get the boys used to the heat.  Philmont is in Cimmaron, New Mexico and they are headed there in August so doing some quality heat training is a must. 

This trail we took on Saturday was real nice, shaded, and also a mountain bike trail.  Wow, I have never backpacked a mountain bike trail before.  OK, yes I have hiked a trail that was also open to mountain bikes but did not come across any on the trail.  This trail since it is in the heart of Dallas (Grapevine, TX) and the warm weather brought out all the local bikers.  The first thing the boys had to learn was trail etiquette.  I was the last person in the hiking file and was the first person to get a biker in the back.  Alot of the bikers were nice and if I did not see them they would ask to pass or some even had bells on their bikes to let me know they were coming up on us.  When a biker came to us I would yell: "To the right" and all of the boys would yell back: "to the right" and everyone instantly took to the right of the trail.  This is good practice for everyone to understand that no single group or person owns the trail and trail courtesy goes along way.  The nicer you are to others the nicer they are back.  Now I did get a few times where I would hear the skidding of tires before I knew a biker was coming on us.

Here I am testing my blood sugars and I had to take a picture of an epic 100!  There is something great to hit that number.  Now I like to keep my numbers around 150 to 220 but most of this Saturday was 56 to 110 all day and let me tell you what, I was sweating back to the oldies.  I definitely need to reduce my processed foods and try to add more fresh food to my diet.  We finished the day doing around 11 miles.

How scary is this photo?  My friend Charles took this photo as I was in mid changing my sweat soaked shirt into a fresh shirt to wear on the ride back.  The boys yelled at me to get my backpack loaded so we could get some ice cream.  So I threw my pack on and was taking it over and Charles was like, Hey Dave let me get a picture of your pale white diabetic self.  Then he asked my son to get in the picture with me.  I need to go on a diet, just wrong in so many ways.

So to take it one step further I decided to suck in my gut and have Charles take another picture with me.  Do you like my farmers tanned arms?  Nice huh?  This is now my motivation to get back into shape and not be so white and fluffy.

Is this yard art or disturbing?

 Sunday was my first whole day of yard work this year.  I went to home depot and stocked up on week whacker string, bought all sorts of vegetable plants, and also bought some seed potato's.  Since I camp alot my house gets little to no attention most of the year.  We have alot of perennials which is nice that they come back each year so I have little to no work for them.

 With the warm winter and all the rain Dallas has received the plants and trees are in full force.  You can see how nice my roses are doing so far.  They look nice for about a month and then the moisture gives them black spots and the leaves fall off and they just sputter along the rest of the year looking half dead and shocked out of their minds.  I have to find a way to get better drainage around them. 

 Every year I try to do some cute poses for my garden Nome.  He used to stand by a little bird feeder house thing my mother gave us but about two years ago it finally bit the dust.  Now the Nome is looking kind of pale.  Maybe I can do some touch up paint on him and the frog.  This year he is standing on a mountain (OK it is a rock, I know work with me here) looking down onto the frog prince below, or something like that.  Is it wrong of me to take rocks from parks?  The rock the Nome is standing on is from a boy scout camp that I saw next to the road.  It has nice lichens on it and some moss.  This rock would cost me twenty bucks at home depot.

 As I was getting the yard up to shape for the coming season, I came across a horse head my wife put under one of our gutter downspouts.  I really liked the skull and thought it would look nice under our live oak tree in the middle of our front yard.  So I kind of did one of those western scenes that usually have a broken wagon wheel, a rusty cast iron pot, and a cow or horse head.  So I did my diabetic interpretation and have a live oak, horse skull, pig jaw and random teeth and bones, a frog and a nice looking river rock.

My wife sees my beautiful western scene scape and tells me it is disturbing and a little tacky.  Does this scene seem that way or is this kind of cool western diabetes looking?  Please let me know.  I am sure my wife will make me take it down in a week or so but I just wanted to poll the diabetes community and see what you all think.  Or if you don't have diabetes but still have an opinion I would like to hear from you as well.