Has Eddie Bower changed?

 The other day our mail person delivered the new Eddie Bower winter catalog and I have always considered Eddie Bower as a kind of north of Mason Dixon meets Connecticut kind of magazine that appeals to your 40 plus crowd and has some "adventuresome" clothes with the handy gadgets for all of us that need another gadget.  Then I noticed my son had not only read through the magazine once he was going through it for a second time and not just quickly thumbing through the pages but actually reading about the products and then he says to me: "Is Eddie Bower a good company, because they have some cool stuff in this catalog" and I had to look through it for myself to see what 40 plus year old people were wearing that would have a high school kid thinking "neat."

 The minute I open the magazine the feeling of "Columbia" brand came to my mind with new fancy words about techno-clothes and ways to make a ducks feather keep you warmer with NASA technology.  Like the "Accelerant Jacket" that is like goretex, down, and something else that will keep you safe on top of a mountain during a hail storm.  I was expecting the usual pictures of dudes raking leaves with his kids in a 100 dollar flannel or a mom and kids throwing snow balls at each other in ski pants and barn jackets but none of this was in the magazine so far.

 Deeper I go and come across "synthesis" and how the new Eddie Bower jackets work better to do more for you.  Then I started to notice the prices on these things and let me tell you if you are gearing up to go camping with all Eddies clothes you had better be bringing in some solid change because Eddie used to just be proud of his stuff and now he thinks you should consider him one of the prime providers of arctic wear.

 I like how they did the picture above, which is what a normal person does.  They buy one brand of jacket but get a certain brand of rope, boots, and snow skis.  This kind of helps you match your Eddie gear with other brands.  I still wonder when we moved from raking leaves and throwing snow balls at kids to traversing a mountain with your skis on your back?  Did I miss a few catalogs or something?  Where are the flannel lined denim jeans and fancy water bottles?

 Look here they got an award from my favorite magazine (yes that was a joke) Backpacker for their new rain jacket that is light, filled with down, and does something 2.0.  This now looks more like a winter Dallas jacket that I could wear (if money was no option).  With all the new diabetes gear we carry, zippers and pockets are my new obsession and having them in the right place at the right size matters.  have you seen the snow jackets that have a sun glasses pocket under your arm, I have one of these jackets and let me tell you the only thing that goes in the sun glasses pocket is my glucagon injection because anything else would be destroyed.

Now we are getting some cool things I that I truly have to agree with my son that are cool.  Those gloves are definitely on my gotta get list.  Then I saw the boots and those were on my must try on list then I noticed the pants and I just bought last spring a similar style and cut pair of nylon pants that look just like those and they are great outdoors jeans and fit like you were made to camp forever in them with all my diabetes pockets in the right places.

Don't ask me how I put the same picture on here twice but I did and I am a moron and don't know how to remove it so enjoy this one more time.  Why is the WD-40 can in the picture, like anyone that is buying this stuff needs to know about WD-40.  We do get our first glimpse of flannel and a snow shovel so there is a tie in to the old magazines.

This is the bold claim of the year: Gear of the year, I don't think so.  Not saying this is not good stuff or is not worthy of gear of the year award but give us some time to adjust to your new ways Eddie before telling us you now have moved your tents and backpacks from the camping isle of Target to above and beyond everyone else.  Maybe two or three years and we will give you this award but let it sink in first.  The tent also has me as not being gear of the year because any tent that is dogie door enter and leave is not engineered right.  The new best in tents always have a side door so you can roll out of the tent instead of crawling on your hands and knees like a dog (get it that is why I call them dogie door tents with a head or foot entrance).

The back of the magazine finally is pure Eddie that we all know and love, flannel, flannel, and more flannel.  I just wonder where are the blue jeans and barn jackets?  Eddie does make the best flannel on the planet.

Back to those boots I saw earlier and I read how they have all sorts of this and that in them but most important is they are a three season boot which is what we know and love in the great state of Texas.  A four season boot would cause you to get blisters in the summer from all the insulation.  The bad thing though is they have my kryptonite of a soul the Vibram soles.  I am working on getting over my issues I have with them from 14 years ago but it is hard and these boots look sweet, don't they have diabetes written all over them.

In the end Eddie is not the same Eddie I used to know just a short time ago with a wife and kids, a house and pets, but is now younger and more adventuresome.  I don't know if the new Eddie will be touching my skin any time soon but I do have some items on my want list, do he does have my attention.

Hoarding Part 2

 OK, so yesterday was part one of hoarding and the theme was "insulin pumps from days gone by" and today we get to the bottom of the madness.  The biggest problem for me is changing out my finger pricker thingie.  I hate to do it, and yes I know that using dirty finger prickers can cause loss of fingers, toes, arms, eyes, and maybe internal organs but I hate changing my pricker.  We all get scripts for prickers and I of course love my doctor because she writes my script for testing 10 times a day, but the consequence is whenever I refill my pricker order I get 900 prickers and I hate to admit this but that would last me about a lifetime or two.  So you get what we have here which is 700 prickers that expired probably five years ago.

 Then there are the betes bags you get with your meter.  I used to use the bag that came with the meter but now the first I do when I get a new meter is chunk the bag.  These bags are crappy, odd sized, and cheap.  Why is it to Carry something to help us live better lives they wrap it in the worst possible container?  Now I am a smarter betic from my years of learned-ing so I use my set bags and look for third party vendors whenever I need to update one.

 What do they call these disks, something like a 3.5 floppy?  I have been holding onto this disk for like 15 years now and for the life of me can't remember what it had on it.  Now it is gone and I feel better about not having it.

 These silhouette infusion sets were the greatest thing when they started updating infusion sets a good 15 years ago.  Remember the little dangle part on the old infusion sets where the disconnect was about 4 inches from your site.  The looks I used to get at the pool, and not for my looks because who has a 4 inch tube sticking out of their stomach?  Oh yeah the diabetic does, silhouettes were and probably still one of my favorite updates that came to the diabetes world of pumps.

 More freakin lancets, and BD lancets at that.  You know how many times I have ever used a BD lancet in the past 10 years?  Lets put the number at less than 10 and I had alot more of these boxes that hit the trash.

 This to me is the part of diabetes that we all know and hate, the used test strip laying around.  I think they have some sort of electrical polarity that makes them stick to floors, drawers, boxes, and anything besides a trash can.  The good old comfort curve is probably another great diabetes invention that I loved.  That little curve on the strip and being able to add more blood while it was reading changed my life about testing my BG's.  I almost wanted to keep this nasty thing to remind me of how freakin big test strips used to be and how awesome the comfort curve was.  I need to do a list of diabetes advancements that I personally feel have made my life better, and another list of diabetes updates that are or were just dumb.

 More prickers and yes this was another 5 unopened boxes of 100 pricks.  The softclix was a pretty good pricker, I liked how it was more defined where it would stick you so you could like slowly do a circle around your favorite spot on your finger and make it last longer before you got the over-used pains.  See, another advancement in diabetes care that changed my life an accurate pricker that allowed you to abuse smaller parts of your fingers for longer.

Here is a small snapshot of what I kept and yes the boxes behind the onetouch ultra strips are 7 boxes of Accu-check mulitclix prickers.  Now this is the best pricker invention of all because it is like 7 prickers in one pricker so now I actually rotate the drum every month or so to get a new pricker and maybe now my spleen will not explode because I use dirty prickers.  There are 800 Accu-check complete strips back there as well.  The complete was the Swiss army knife for diabetes and still is to this day.  It had your meter, test strips, and pricker all in one unit that you could read in daylight or at night.  The only issues with the meter were drums getting stuck, cold or hot weather made the thing not work, the sheer size of it and a few other misc. items but I keep these strips around and a good five or six complete meters as a backup.  Oh yeah they also use regular batteries so you don't have to buy those overpriced hearing aid batteries.  This adventure into cleaning out my diabetes hoard was alot of fun and really an eye opening experience into myself and what features I have enjoyed or changed my life in the short 25 years since I became a sugar diabetic.  Who knows what the next clean out will look like.

Diabetes Hording part 1

 This weekend was horrible for me and diabetes.  I had all sorts of plans come and go, then I came down with a nasty cold that put the old blood sugars on a fun roller coaster.  If I wasn't 300 I was 40 and there was nothing in between.  So when I had a few moments of energy I decided to try and clean out my closet.  Now just think about this, my closet is almost the size of a bedroom.  Our house is a three bedroom but it is supposed to be a four bedroom and when you choose the three bedroom option they give you 90% of the fourth bedroom as a walk in closet.   So I keep all my random diabetes crap in this room and after Sunday I realized how much diabetes hording I do.  From the picture above is of a Minimed 507c pump, yeah I said Minimed not Medtronic, I received this pump before the buy out and have been holding onto the box ever since.

 Just to show you how old this pump box is, they gave me a VHS cassette instruction manual.  When was the last time any of us had a VHS cassette?  OK, I know we are all holding onto our old home movies but an instruction video on VHS.

 Then the PC connection cable looked like something you plug into your printer port onto the back of your PC.  I never even took it out of the package.  I must say though the best pump I have had so far was my MiniMed 507c.  That sucker was indestructible and never stopped working.

 The next pump box of forever and a day ago was my Animas IR1200 box.  Now I was wearing this pump up to about a month ago but still this is hording if you keep the box six years after it is out of warranty.  What good is the box if the pump is out of warranty?

At least the IR1200 came with a CD-ROM disk as an instruction manual.  Now I do have an Omnipod pump with the box that I plan to see if someone needs it, like they broke their PDM or something.  The PDM costs like 500 bucks and if someone can use mine then that makes the little diabetes Dave inside me feel better.  Now just for me to find someone who can use it.  Then I have the box from my latest pump, the Animas Ping.  The Ping is kind of cool since they have not changed anything on the pump in a solid 10 years from my old IR1200.  Just a different screen and a meter that communicates with the pump.  Tomorrow I will show you the other side of my diabetes hording.  Let me know if you have an issue with old diabetes crap you hoard.