Sunny, warm days are made for naps with the windows open

It is a lovely day today, warm enough to sit outside on my porch in a t-shirt and enjoy the sunshine.  And pants.  I am wearing pants, too, don't worry.

I've got my watered down fountain drink beside me (I'll quit tomorrow, Tracy.) as well as one or both of my animals as they lay out in the sunshine, get overheated and periodically go inside to get some water.  I am grateful for this fabulous apartment and the big tree that filters the sunlight.  I would make some comment about global warming, except that October was frickin' cold, and it will get cold again soon.  For now, it's a lovely day.

Before the battery dies, I need to announce my win in the Reno News & Review's 95 Word Fiction Contest.  Hooray!

http://www.newsreview.com/reno/dynamite-comes-in-small-packages/content?oid=11970988

I caught the announcement this year and decided that- come hell or high water- I was going to enter.  I enlisted Tracy's help for editing and encouragement, and she was awesome with her timely feedback and shooting down my self-conscious defenses.  I tried to follow a loose requirement of working on one daily, and ended up submitting four.  They printed three of those, which blew me away.  I am honestly most proud of entering the contest at all, and as far as I can remember, this is the first piece of writing I have submitted anywhere since high school, and I missed the deadline on that.  Procrastination is my biggest problem.  Stephen King wrote a book called On Writing, and most of what I remember about his advice (aside from writing in everyday language), is the discipline required.  Perhaps I need to give myself a schedule or at least one day a week where that's my job.  I do want to write, I enjoy writing, and this... this is such incredible encouragement.

In addition to such amazing ego-boosting from the contest's judges, I received a tremendous amount of love from my family and friends in response to this link on Facebook.  My heart has been pounding ever since I hit the send button on my entries, and I feel so filled up with love, support, and encouragement that I can't possibly absorb it all right now, but I will be rolling around in the overflow for quite some time.

I do not currently feel a mania to rush around doing chores today.  I have some errands to run and I am also rolling around in an overflow of laundry, but I feel happy and peaceful and unrushed- perhaps because my cushy government job is giving me a paid day off on Monday, so I get to go over to Squeeze In for my free breakfast for veterans, YUM.

It's so quiet in here- just the hum of the fridge and the cars outside.  In apartment complexes, I always feel like the cars are like bees, flying in and out of the hive all day long.  Solo is out on the porch, curled up in my chair, and I am inside attached to the power cord with Riley at my feet.  She's losing some vision, and can no longer find me if the sound of my voice is bouncing off of anything, so on my list of errands today is Big Lots, so I can go find a retractable leash.  I'm going to make a vet appointment to see if they can give me some kind of parameters for how bad it is or what to look for.  I don't think they'll be able to tell me too much more than I already know, but maybe they can warn me of what I don't know or what I can't see.

I'm hungry and I need to get some groceries, but these lulling noises are putting me down for a nap.  Mmmm.  Happy nap.

Accu-Chek Complicated Machinery

Went to meet a couple friends for dinner and drinks and my lancet device (aka stabber) decided it was dead.  This meant that I had to take the lancet out of the device and jam it directly into my hand, which is one of my very least favorite things to do on earth.  What makes the device preferable is that it has a spring inside, so it's a very quick jab, and you can also set the depth of the jab.  Neither of those benefits is available in the self-jabbing method.  I tend to stab myself very slowly (Little did you know that my minor was not art, but actually masochism.) so as not to hurt myself more than necessary, so I have to push the lancet into my finger a little further each time to get enough blood, all the while saying OW OW OW.

I decided to keep the broken lancet device on the table (much to the delight of my dinner companions, I'm sure) to remind myself to drive over to Walmart afterwards to buy a new one.  Brilliant!  Except, at the end of dinner, I just got up, put it in my pocket, and drove home.  I must have used up all my brilliance on Sunday, when I thought to check the gym shoes Chris had just bought for Ant to make sure they were both the same size.  Ding ding ding!  One was 10 1/2, the other was 11.  It would have been awful to get all the way out to Topaz the night before he had to have the shoes to figure that out.

I really didn't want to drive to Walmart tonight, so I checked my box of extra diabetes crap to see if I happened to have an extra lancet device.  Why yes, I do!  But that one's busted, too.  Let me just put that back in the box and see what else we've got.  Ooh, this one looks fancy.



I had a small, sealed bag with two of those little drums, so I ripped it open and tried to figure it out.  Pulled the cap off, stuck a drum inside, turned this, turned that, pulled, played Bop-It... nothing.  Pulled the drum out, tried flipping it over, pull, twist, spin... nothing.  Pulled out the laptop and googled it.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/pM8aZJQ5Kb0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Learned that I had the drum in the right way the first time, but pulling it back out made the red stripe visible, which means that the whole frigging drum is now deemed useless and will not go back in.  I just wasted six lancets.  Nice.  Next, follow the instructions, insert new drum, use low depth setting as suggested, prime the device by pushing the plunger all the way down, make Hulk noises as I learn that "all the way down" is deceiving advice because the release button has already turned yellow, press the release button as I hold the device against the heel of my hand, and... dink.  The depth setting is too shallow and I have to squeeze and squeeze and SQUEEZE the heel of my hand until I milk enough blood out to fill a test strip.  As I'm squeezing, I realize that if I want to try again to get more blood, like I could with my (broken) lancet device, I would be forced to use a new lancet each time.  Seeing as how the lancet drum has to advance after each lancet deployment, I think I had better save my remaining lancets until I can get back to Walmart to buy another $6 plain lancet device.

"Isn't that easy?" says the clearly non-diabetic Australian lady.