We have a guestroom in our house that we call the Chautauqua Room. We have a sink in this guestroom. People say it’s just like homes in the Chautauqua Institution. So we kind of decided to stick with that theme.
A while ago, Muzenews‘ mom picked up a medicine cabinet at a yard sale or while she was scavenging. It fits perfect with the room, so I finally put it up over the sink today.
The medicine chest and the tools of the trade.
Sink area of the guestroom.
Installed cabinet.
Well…my blog has died. Can’t find the inspiration. Can’t find the time. Can’t find the…the…um…the…
Damn. I think about you every day. You. The reader. The person who does me a favor and checks me out. Even if your RSS feed hasn’t dropped my blog name in a while.
As a matter of fact. That bowel movement you were going to take this morning. I know it came with a little force because you had to crap yourself after seeing that Makkaio actually updated his blog.
But…then…you just sat there. You stewed in it because you realized it was just another post about Makkaio not posting.
I will redesign. I will come up with a fresh take on this whole blogging world. I will…um…um…um….
Well…what would you kinda sorta supposedly kinda maybe possibly really want to see…or…read?
We weren’t actively looking for a cat. McKinley just happened. Kind of like the love you never expect to find…and then you turn that corner.
A couple of days ago, I took our black labs, Buddy and Zak, to the vet to update their vaccines so they could be boarded this summer. Nothing out of the ordinary. Pretty routine.
When I got there, I left the boys in the car so I could go in and get some guidance on the easiest way to proceed with their appointments. In the lobby was a woman with a little black Cocker Spaniel, and another woman with a cat in a crate. I let the Spaniel sniff my hand and nodded hello to the woman with the crate. Then…across the room…in a cage on a table…sat a cat named Cameo…meowing at everyone. So I walked over to the cage…
At this point, I have to say that my wife Julia and I have talked over the years about getting a cat. But we never actively looked for one outside of stopping into an adoption center at the mall. Oh…we joked with family and friends here and there. But most of the time, alone, we would just throw out ideas of what we would require if we were to take a feline into our home. We set the bar pretty high…mostly to stave off actually getting another animal. Julia wanted an orange cat with interesting markings. She wanted a cat that would snuggle. For me…the cat had to get along with Buddy and Zak. Well, not just get along. The cat had to be active with the dogs. Snuggle, play, torture…things like that. The cat had to have a personality…be interesting…and be a part of our home.
Hmmmm…Cameo…orange with tiger striping and cool orange and white stripes on its tail. He meowed. I stuck my fingers in the cage. He nuzzled them and walked away, making sure that my finger tips scratched the entire side of his body. Crap. I took out my cell phone…shot a picture…then sent it to Julia. The reply text: I hate you.
I went out and brought Buddy into the vet’s office to have his heart-worm test done. I took Buddy back out to the car and brought Zak in for his test. Then Zak and I waited for his exam and kennel cough shot.
Zak didn’t really pay attention to Cameo, but the cat sure knew Zak was there. Cameo meowed at Zak once in a while. Then the cat started to eat. In between bites, he would turn and look at Zak…mindful of his presence. Here and there he would let out a meow. So finally…I brought Zak over to the cage. What the hell, right? I prompted Zak to look at the cat…so he stuck is nose up to the cage. Cameo didn’t flinch and didn’t hiss. He calmly leaned down and sniffed the end of Zak’s nose. That was it. Zak turned around and went back to waiting for his appointment. Cameo was satisfied he’d met and conquered another dog.
Then it was Buddy’s turn. I exchanged the dogs and immediately brought Buddy into the vet for his appointment. After the routine of being checked over and having the vaccine sprayed down his snout…we exited to the lobby. I almost took Buddy back to the car, but thought, why not introduce him to Cameo? No harm…right? It’s at this point I’ve receive a text or two from Julia trying to remain rationale about why we can’t get a cat. I hadn’t even said we should get him, so I knew she’d been smitten after seeing just the one picture.
So I bring Buddy…lover of all things…up to Cameo’s cage. Bud stretched his head up to the cage and drew in large sniffs. Cameo looked at Bud…meowed…then did a full-body snuggle against Buddy’s wet snout. You have got to be kidding me.
Now…during this whole process…I’ve been asking a friend who works in the office about the cat. Standard stuff. Fixed? Check. Litter trained? Check. Vaccines? Check. But the cat is being adopted out of the vet’s office…so what’s wrong?
“Nothing. But someone brought him in after finding him in a field. He had been shot. It shattered a bone in his leg. We fixed him up and are looking for a good home for him.” I was stunned.
Orange? Check.
Interesting markings? Check.
Gets along with the dogs? Check.
Snuggles with the dogs? Check.
Plays with the dogs? Check.
Tortures the dogs? To be determined.
Personality? Check.
Interesting story? Check.
Damn. Long story short. Julia didn’t even meet Cameo until he was home and getting acclimated that night. She had trusted my judgement like she had with both our dogs (although she did get to meet both of them before they came home with us). Julia actually agreed to getting Cameo over lunch that day.
Oh yeah…I called the cat “McKinley” at the beginning of the post. Yes. We renamed Cameo to McKinley, after the president who had been shot. We wrestled with various names of famous people who had been shot…but went with McKinley because his happened in Buffalo. And McKinley actually survived his shooting, dying from infection several days later. So, that was good enough for me.
McKinley it is.
I decided to change up my site a bit and created a “hub” for my home page. Since I’ve been branching out into some freelance web programming and solutions, as well as landing a writing gig with Bright Hub, I decided I needed a little different direction with makkaio.com.
So…The Fickle Corebear is going to truly be my gaming-only blog. I’m going to create another blog where I will write about everything else. As soon as that is set up I will post it on my hub page and here. That way readers can follow whichever they want, as I know some people could care less about one topic or the other or both.
So there you have it. My RSS for the gaming blog should not have been harmed during this process. If you have me on RSS and it seems broken, please let me know.
Chat with you later!
Some changes are coming to my site and blog for the new year. Stay tuned.
It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Up by 6:30 a.m. In the gym 15 minutes later. The workout was good. Focused on the chest today. That’s the area that gives me the most problems due to my neck injury. We’ll see how I feel tomorrow. Could only lift 60% of what I could before. I figure I’ll recover quickly despite the injury. I think I can get used to doing this. Now my whole day is free and I don’t have the guilt of not working out.
(Disclaimer: Through this post, Don and Rob are actually two punk rock girls I knew back in high school and regret deeply for losing contact with them over the years…until now. Their names have been changed to protect the innocent. Innocent? Who the hell am I kidding?)
If you would have said to me a year ago, “You’re going to hang out with a couple of friends you haven’t seen in almost 20 years and it will be at a Jane’s Addiction concert.” There is no way I would have believed you. Especially the two friends it would turn out to be…and come on…Jane’s Addiction playing together again WITH Eric Avery? Please. Even Chip Coffey couldn’t predict that. And he’s pretty damn good.
As Don danced to my left and Rob danced to my right through nearly half of Jane’s Addiction’s set at the PNC Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey, this past Saturday…I just kept thinking of what a surreal world it has become. Luckily I have some pictures, expenses from toll streets in and around New York and Jersey, a ticket stub and a hotel key to prove that everything was very real.
It Started 18…Or Maybe…19 Years Ago
I was a skater. And somehow, back then, one acquaintance with a skater led to another aquaintance with a skater until a whole group of us skaters was formed. I don’t actually know the sequence of events because I joined somewhere in the middle. I was drafted by Big Red and Little Red. After spending some time with my compadres, I recruited a couple people to the group. One of those people was one of my best friends…Rustin.
The epicenter of all of this was Sick’s house. He had a half pipe in the back and a wide open bank parking lot to skate. For the next couple of years, it would be my life.
Well. One day. A couple of girls walked through the parking lot. It was Don and Rob (thought I would point that out if you weren’t following along). I noticed them, but just kept skating. I had broken up with my girlfriend recently and really didn’t give a crap about girls at that point. So, I skated a little bit, but turned around well before they could have made it across the parking lot and had this feeling they seemed to have disappeared into thin air. I shrugged and skated more.
It was then that I noticed Sick standing by the front of my car. So I skated over. When I came around the back of the red Ford Fairmount station wagon, I saw the two girls sitting on the pavement leaning on the front tire of the car. First of all…they were girls and they were sitting on the pavement. Cool. But second…”WTF are you doing leaning on my car?” I thought it, but didn’t say it. I think I mustered a “Hey.” Then I just kept skating. I think this was when Sick and Don were – or had – just started dating.
Soon after that was when I started bringing Rustin around. Since Big Red and Little Red knew Rustin too, he fit in alright. And, as the time line of things would have it, Rustin and Rob developed a thing for each other and started dating. They were a great fit….at first.
Until Rustin asked me to date Rob…um….as her fake boyfriend. Apparently Rob’s mom and dad developed a dislike of Rustin…but…they liked me. Go figure. So…Rustin and Rob “broke up” and I was there to help Rob through the pain. I placed calls…her parents bought it. We went on dates…and her parents bought it. Or so we thought. Her parents claim they didn’t…but if they didn’t…they wouldn’t have let her do half the stuff she did. I think they had an idea…but no proof to back it up.
So…one night…my fake girlfriend called. In a round about way she got to: “Don wants to know if you will go to homecoming with her?”
I responded, “Um…isn’t she dating Pete?” (I only claimed to protect the innocent.)
“Yeah, but he can’t go.”
More arm twisting. Yeah, right. I was in well before that.
“Okay…sure…I’ll go.”
(To be continued…)
That’s the technical term for it. It seems a lot of people have it or know someone who does. Seems like too many people for a condition that is labeled as “rare”. My glucose tolerance tests came back and everything was within acceptable range. So…no diabetes. Phew!
In a normal person, when they eat a meal, their body tells their endocrine system to release a certain amount of insulin to deliver the glucose in their blood stream to the cells in their body.
In my body, when I eat a meal, my body freaks out and over-produces insulin. That causes the glucose in my blood to be rushed to my cells a lot faster. When the glucose leaves my blood so quickly, it causes my body to then trigger the panic button to tell me to eat.
A side by side comparison I read on the Internet makes sense. I’m lucky to have the ability to somewhat monitor my blood glucose level using a relative’s monitor.
In a normal person, their blood glucose reading would be in the normal range of 90 – 120. They eat a meal and their blood glucose would rise during the next hour. At the two-hour mark a normal person would show a glucose reading between 140 and 180.
In my system, taken from my actual readings, when I wake up in the morning my body has done its job to keep my glucose even at about 95. I eat breakfast a little later in the morning. Within the first hour, my reading is generally around 110. Not terrible.
But here’s what happens to me. My body somewhere in that second hour overreacts and produces more insulin than I need. So instead of my glucose going up to between 140 to 180…my tests at the two-hour mark have been around 75. At that point I’m already getting symptoms that my sugar is dropping. If I don’t do something about it, my glucose gets down to below 60 within the next half hour to an hour.
So yes. I have to eat about every two hours. Well, I don’t really. I choose to eat every two hours because that’s the healthy way to do it. Why? I can go to McDonald’s and eat a 1000-calorie bunch of crap and be okay for more than two hours. But in the long run, that’s just not good at all.
Went in this morning for a four-hour blood test to check my blood glucose tollerance. Fun times. An orange drink with 100 grams of sugar in it, five blood draws, and five pisses into a little cup…we’ll see what the numbers are like when the doctor calls in the next couple days. I actually started to feel a little crashy an hour or so after drinking the orange stuff.
My testing was relatively short compared to others. Some people have gone through six to eight hours of the test. The doctor prescribed a four hour test because my crashes seem to come anytime between two to three hours after eating. I’m not worried. It all comes down to diet anyway.
I take people too literally. Maybe a fault of mine. But when my doctor and others tell me that I need to eliminate things from my diet they don’t mean necessarily right that second. They mean gradually.
My sense of taking people literally has gotten me into trouble lately when it comes to my blood sugar. When my doctor told me to change my diet, eat less, exercise, eliminate simple sugars and cut way back on drinking. Well, she didn’t mean to do it all at once. She meant to change my lifestyle gradually.
Thinking back on the last year and a half, I can definitely say that I’ve had a lot of symptoms of low blood sugar that I’ve missed or blamed on other things. The good news is finally recognizing what is wrong, because it has sucked.
The bad thing is…my symptoms of low blood sugar and crashing happen to be the same symptoms my body throws at me for everything. I get anxiety attacks. So everything is a big vicious cycle. Only now I recognize that if I’m getting anxiety attacks for no good reason at all…it’s probably my blood sugar dropping.
So…I’ve hyperasskicked myself. Changed my entire lifestyle seemingly overnight. Of course there are going to be side effects to that. You can’t expect there not to be.
I also have to learn patience. I didn’t get out of shape and good health quickly and I’m not going to get back in shape and good health quickly. It’s going to be a process. And there will be bumps in the road, just like this low blood sugar thing.
So…my hypoglycemia will fade in time…just like my body weight and high blood pressure has. I just need to eat more and make adjustments to my diet…stop worrying…and be patient.
