Tikkabik

From Corey’s blog:

I’m issuing this as a challenge to the other bloggers who read coreytamas.com: To use the old wedding-day adage of “Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue” as a jumping-off point for a blog entry in which you cover all four of those criteria as they’re relevant to your own life and thinking. I’ll be checking your blogs to see if it’s there.

Something old

Check this out.

Something new

I want one.

Something borrowed

Best intarweb post evar.

Something blue

… and vaguely disturbing.

Remember that Bill Murray movie, where he’s doomed to live the same day over and over again until he gets it right?

I looked outside this morning and saw snow falling, and knew how that character felt.

Looks like school is out for the rest of the week, thanks to the recent blizzard. Some of the parents and others I’ve spoken to seem to think that the schools will cancel spring break as a result, but I suspect the teacher’s union will have something to say about that, if it comes to it.

We got several more inches last night and it’s still falling — I haven’t gone out yet to shovel it but am not expecting any problems, as it’s the light and fluffy kind.

The kids and the parents in our house are all getting rather stir-crazy with cabin fever. Frankly, none of us are really “into” the snow, so we’ve basically just been staring out the windows, and the kids have been playing board games or tormenting each other to pass the time.

After being sick for more than a week I’m feeling more like my normal self today, though I still have a persistent cough that isn’t going away. It’s the same one I’ve heard from both Emme and James — I’m not sure who gave it to whom, and I don’t really care, but it’s just one of those winter things we all have to deal with until we can all collectively shake it.

James has been down for the last couple of days with a fever, but that’s gone now, replaced with a rather thickly running head cold that doesn’t show any signs of lessening. Fortunately he’s clinging to Bonnie less, so she has greater mobility — even if he is grossing his brother and sister out with thick clots of snot running down his face (he has to be constantly reminded to blow his nose into the tissue).

Me, I’m trying to make the best of the situation and just work straight through it. The kids at home have given me the excuse of working more from my basement office, which is actually quite pleasant once the space-heater kicks in and warms the place a few degrees. The basement casement window in the office is normally obscured by the porch, so it doesn’t let in a lot of natural light, but all this snow surrounding the porch has made it totally dark.

Being down here has made me realize why I don’t come to the office more often. I have so much work still to do before it’s “done.” I’d really like to run permanent heat down here, whether it’s electric baseboards or a new zone for the forced hot water system that heats the rest of the house, I don’t care. And I need a floor: There are great and relatively inexpensive vinyl solutions that would work great, but it’ll still cost a couple of grand to do right. And shelves. I really need shelves for the tons of software and peripherals that otherwise just occupy moving boxes or piles scattered hither and yon.

Once all that is done, my office will be real and habitable. Now, it still feels a bit too much like a workshop for my taste. But, like anything worth doing, these endeavors take time and money, neither of which I have in any great supply. So I make do.

I kinda surprised myself earlier today by stepping on the nice digital scale that Bonnie bought me for Christmas, which I frankly have barely glanced at since then. When I stepped on it the day after Christmas I weighed in at 285 lbs — which is, for better or worse (well, for worse, actually), the weight I’ve more or less resigned myself to for the past few years.

Just checked myself this morning when I was getting myself ready for the day and I measured in at 268. This isn’t a doctor’s scale, so I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but it seems pretty consistent (weighed myself a few times on it throughout the morning and the value didn’t change), so I’m pretty sure it’s fairly on-the-mark. And I expect the bulk of that loss is water weight. I’m not exercising, to be honest, and I’m not eating radically differently.

For the past few weeks I’ve been concentrating harder than I have in years to better hydrate myself — drinking upwards of two or three liters or so a day, sometimes more, sometimes less.

Part of it is simply an awareness that I was really, really dehydrated, all the time. After I started getting my blood sugar better under control last fall, my unslakable thirst disappeared, and with it, so abated my desire to have cold fluids on hand at all time. So I went from drinking maybe two quarts of fresh-brewed iced tea, plus a few glasses of diet soda, plus maybe a glass of water or so, to almost nothing. The payoff is great — you can’t know what it’s like unless it’s happened to you how desperate that diabetic craving for liquid is. Imagine being a sieve, where the water goes through you but doesn’t stay with you at all.

That lack of conscious desire to drink beverages has, in fact, dulled my sense that I *should* be drinking fluids at all. I went from constant fluid uptake to almost none at all: Most of the time, I’d go through lunch and dinner without having anything to drink. My skin started flaking, I’d get rashes, bad acne patches, dry scalp irritation, headaches. As painfully obvious as it is in retrospect, it didn’t dawn on me for weeks and weeks that my problem may be that I wasn’t keeping the water levels up high enough.

So starting a few weeks ago I picked up the pace and started drinking more. Water, specifically. I’ve largely lost my taste for diet soda all together, especially since I’ve developed a paranoid suspicion that the artificial sweeteners in that crap may be dulling my mind. (I can thank AlphaX for that, after he posted to one of my blog entries from last August telling me that NutriSweet made his mom forgetful.) I haven’t convinced Bonnie to write that stuff off, but one step at a time: When we first met, she was drinking whole milk and sugared soda.

Anyway, we’ll see where it goes. But at least now I know why I had to close my belt another notch last week.