It's Been a While

I see that I haven't blogged since Sept 25, over a week and that is not good. I have been having a wonderful time with my sister. Now she is in Phoenix with her son, daughter-in law and first grandchild. A is nearly three weeks old now and very darling. We are in love with "our baby" and I am hoping for more pictures soon.

P was amazed by the change in the old master bedroom, dressing room and just kept saying how pleased she was. She was also pleased and surprised that her bed, the roll away that has lived in the front hall for many years, was made up and waiting for her. Since it was nearly midnight my time and nearly 3 am her time, it was even more welcome.

We cooked and ate; laughed and ate, held a small "almost a yard sale" and almost got the dryer fixed. (Long story short, I am going to buy a new one.) Pat added her own special touch to the new room with the curtains she had made for the dressing room and little bathroom. This, with paint in the main part of the house that a friend did last year with help from P on all of the woodwork, is making my house come into the 21st century and I am gladdened each day by the beauty and the light. Where last year's visit was a work party, this year we played.

We celebrated my 60th birthday, a milestone for me. Friends brought treats and flowers and a balloon and I was and am so delighted to be remembered. It was a fun birthday and included steak for dinner. (May as well, so long as I have the teeth to eat it with.)

One present that I am going to give to myself is the software put out by the American Diabetes Association for cooking and diet tracking. Thirteen or so years ago I succeeded in losing a major amount of weight (probably about 50 lbs) with the Diabetic Exchange System Diet. Problem is I haven't kept it off. The pictures my sister took of me on the last day that she was here show too much person and it is time to take this seriously in hand. I am hoping that by blogging about this intention, I will do better at the attempts I need to make to reduce this person.

Portion control is my biggest issue. I like food. I like to cook. I like to eat. The kitchen is properly equipped with all the usual equipment--measuring spoons, measuring cups, a kitchen scale. I even have a very nice small work table that is the right height for my wheelchair that M kindly painted for me last spring shortly before she began tackling the larger painting jobs. So the problem is that it is rather like backing up the computer--the tools are there, I just have to use them.

I have eliminated the salt shaker from the table--something that I never thought I could do, because I don't want to take blood-pressure medication. Soy followed salt because research on the web showed that it binds with the Levoxyl I take for my thyroid problem. Thus I have broken the five food groups of chocolate habit that had developed through the last six years. (White chocolate, bittersweet chocolate, milk chocolate, baking chocolate and cocoa, in case you were wondering.) My cook book library includes several books devoted to chocolate and the recipe folder that went in my computer crash contained quite a few goodies saved from the web that I am probably better off without. To my chagrin, I discovered that almost all of the chocolate products I was indulging in contained soy lecithin. The next thing to go is going to be sugar and then calories will be monitored through the exchange system.

Diabetes runs in my family and I do not want it.

The computer recovery is going along nicely with most of the hardware reattached and found by windows xp. I have reinstalled most of the software, including the OED and all of the data that I recovered from my external hard drive. Now I need to redo a number of things that did not survive but can be remade--perhaps better. In the recovery process I discovered that I have a version of Corel Painter and was happy to find this. So things will come back to normal soon, I hope.