Is this Idiocracy?

 So this weekend I traveled to Oklahoma to see family.  I saw a good part of my family but I did not get to see my sister so I now need to make another trip up and see her and the rest of her family.  Saturday my mother organized a big cook-out with a bunch of friends and family and for some odd reason I was put in charge of prepping the food.  Who puts the diabetic in charge of food prep?  It turned out OK and my brother also said I put too many pictures of myself on my blog, do you think so?  I don't.



Here is a picture of my brother cooking up the chicken and steaks, we did some sort of marinade that I forgot that kids do not like pepper or seasoning on their chicken so I verbally apologized and let them all know that at next years mothers day cook-out I would make chicken with no seasoning on it.  I figured they probably would forget by that time.  funny thing about my mother, you see the giant rocks by my brothers huge belly (he harasses me about my diabetes and I get to harass him about his weight, we have this mutual agreement) Those are not real rocks, they are like plaster fake shell rocks my mother had ordered so she could have like "art" in the backyard that was also fun for the kids to play on and could be moved.  They are pretty cool but the only downside to them is that they are hollow and tip over so she had her gardener put some cinder blocks inside them so that nobody would get seriously hurt.  Kind of ironic huh?  Fake rocks that need rocks inside them to stay in place.

 





 Here is where I pose my question in the picture above.  My mother bought this slip-n-slide for the kids to play in while the adults cooked and conversed.  This had a sharks mouth and if you know anything about a gaggle of boys is that by the end of the day this thing was thrown in the trash.  Boys have this thing about one-ups manship where just sliding on the slide is not enough, they have to then put dirt on it, then that is not enough and find a way to increase the water sprinkles, and it just keeps going and going till someone comes down with diabetes or gets an eye poked.

When we were cleaning up I saw these swimming goggles on the ground and thought that one of the boys had two pairs of goggles, a red pair and a blue pair and switched out the lenses.  It is hard to see on my brothers head that one side is red and the other is blue.

That is when Jeff, one of my brothers best friends since grade school told me that the goggles were actually for the slip-n-slide that it was a 3D shark you were sliding towards with the goggles on.  So yes we all had to put on the goggles and hold up the shark to actually see for ourselves what the 3D did and it made it look like the sharks mouth was real deep.

OK so that brings up the question is this taking a slip-n-slide to the idiocracy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ ) side of life, like not just having a slip-n-slide is cool enough and adding a sharks head was still not cool enough, they had to make it 3D to take it to the proper level of cool?  I remember (does that make me sound old?) as a kid we used to just play with the hose for hours on end, then if we were lucky we had a water balloon fight, and the ultimate was when one of your rich friends would get that clowns head with the stringy hair that whipped you and left red marks on your body.  That was what we had and it was a blast, not 3D sharks heads.  Did your mom ever make that dish soap bubbles stuff and you played with it for like a few hours and had to crank it up a bit and toss a gallon of it into the air conditioner and the yard became a bubble rave with bubbles shooting out of the air conditioner?  Or was that just us.  The backyard was such a magical place as a kid, maybe because we had a shop full of old FAA plane stuff our dad brought home from work but still it was just great fun.

Recycle, Reduce, and Reuse.

 I am sure you are aware that in this modern day and age we are supposed to recycle, reduce, and reuse anything we possibly can.  Throw your aluminum monster cans in the recycle bin, wipe your but with only one square of toilet paper, and of course reuse plastic sporks and stuff.  Well last week I had a traumatic event happen to me, OK so you might not think it is traumatic but my lawn mower of something like eight years or more finally bit the dust.  From the picture above you are saying it looks just fine but it is not, trust me on this I am not an expert.

 What happened is the spark plug wire somehow broke into two pieces.  You can see in the picture above the black plastic wire and the metal hanging out and in the background is the spark plug where the other half of this wire should be attached to.  This on a car is a simple fix, you just go to any random auto parts store and buy a new plug wire.  On a lawn mower the wire is connected to the coil, and nobody keeps this part in stock especially a random Home Depot disposable residential mower.  The part has to be ordered, received in like two weeks and installed.  The part costs 60 bucks, installation costs 40 dollars, then it would be good to go in like the middle of the summer.

 With the repair to the old mower at such a high cost I was at a cross road, do I repair the mower, do I buy a new mower, or do I find a used mower on craigslist.  Well I went with option "C" which was to surf the inter-web on the list of Craig for a self propelled mower (yes I am old, lazy and enjoy my mower going on its own power) .  The price that kept coming up was 150.00 dollars and if you have ever bought anything on the list of Craig you know that whatever price they list is what we call the starting point, so I sent out several emails with a solid low offer to see if anybody would bite.  I received lots of emails that only had one word in them: "no" not even a counter offer or anything except one guy was willing to accept my offer and that is how I wound up with the mower you see in the picture above.

 I paid 80 bucks for this 6.25 horsey powered "quantum" self propelled mower.  Now my mower which is like ten levels below this mower at Home Depot costs 329.00 for a similar model and it has like half the horsey power as this one.  This mower is like in the 500 dollar range and up, it is darn close to commercial edition which is like the holy grail of mowers (OK I am a lawn dork) but they run close to a grand.

 Once I got the mower home I got it out of the bed of the truck and started to mow.  Now things were looking great with this new mower and life was so good I found the snake you see above in my backyard as I mowed.  I am pretty sure it is a rat snake, we have had field mice real bad this year.  I caught him and put him in the cull De sac and as I did my neighbors daughters boyfriend was pulling up in their driveway which gave me an opportunity to use one of my classic jokes.  He got out of his truck and I asked him to come over and help me identify this snake I caught.  As he got closer I then turned to him and pretended to be un-buttoning my pants, and he stops and goes "wow dude I am not looking at that kind of snake" and I laughed and stopped and told him it was on the ground and we laughed about it and he agreed that it was a form of snake (alot of help that kid was).  Then my neighbors younger daughter played with the snake in the street for a couple of hours afterwards and he is probably now hunting me down and going to eat me or something.

Then as I was mowing my forest I came across a random crooked neck squash plant growing in my yard.  Whenever I plant things in the garden I like to toss the rest of the seeds in the yard to see if any take and sure enough looks like yard squash will be on the menu in 30 days or so.

So the moral to this story is sometimes buying used is better if not worse, wait not worse scratch the last part but better because once somebody has bought something that has a long shelf life like small engine items and tools they resale at a fraction of their original price.  So if you are savvy, which if you have diabetes you have to be savvy, finding these items on the inter-web can save you money like getting extra free samples from your endo.

Diabetes Funnies!

 So today I am tired and well lets face it a bit lazy.  That means lets steal stuff from other diabetes blogs and today is from www.diabetesduo.com  They have a blog and a picture section with some rather funny stuff.  The picture above sounds about right for diabetes it just randomly hits a lucky person like you and I!

 I do wish my meter had nice sayings like this or maybe my CGM would say things like hey you have been low all day whats the deal?  Like my buddy Jeff always says his medical devices just always tell him he has diabetes.

 I have had diabetes for 25 years and never put something other than put blood on a test strip but I did use the old visual strips and I think they could double as pee strips.  I so think we should all get a bottle of visual strips and see if we can eye ball as good as a meter works.  That would be a fun test.

 These bumper stickers cracked me up and we always talk about this mythical "cure" like is an implantable insulin pump like an 80% cure or the CGM is that a step towards a cure or just another "help" item.  What about a closed loop system is that a cure?  I don't know but I have the worst punctured fingers of all diabetics.

 Sometimes I feel like just getting my handy dandy pocket knife out and just cutting the finger tip off and let it go when you can't find a spot that bleeds.  Have you ever been at the doctors office and the nurse is trying to prick your finger (the word prick is funny in itself) and they have it set at one and you want to just rip it from her hand and do it yourself because you know that it needs to be set on eleven just to get your tiny bit of blood that is in your finger.

 

Last but not least, Jeff sent me this so I am not sure if it is from his phone or stolen from another diabetic website but to see a sign that says "free diabetes" is just funny.  I am sure there was supposed to be more to this ad but when it is put this way makes you chuckle just a little.

So that is today's post, sorry I am tired, lazy and have diabetes so if you want more from my posts and better information next time please leave a comment.  If you personally have issues with me stealing from other websites send me an email: davehennesey@hotmail.com and include your home address and I will write you a personal apology to you.