One thing I had hoped to do a month ago was to clear out a bunch of the things I had in mind to post. I posted roughly half of them. Yay! This dispatch aims to tidy up some loose ends. It will probably be long, and it might be rambling. Beware! If anything turns out to be just a bit too long or important, I’ll break it out into its own post.

It’s a good time to clear the decks. Lisa is out for the evening, I’m streaming a concert by Cœur de Pirate (mp3), and I’m in the mood to write. In fact, I’m in the mood to do just about anything to take my mind off the fact that I’m basal testing and have to skip dinner. Fortunately, at lunch I had some of the very delicious Comté cheese that we bought in Montréal last weekend; I hope that it will fortify me for another four-or-so hours when I can eat a very late (10PM) dinner.

Oh, one more thing before I get going with the things I had intended to write about. I’ve been listening to (and loving) the new album by Caracol. Unfortunately, it isn’t available in the US yet. (Next year, she hopes.) But you can stream the tracks from the web site. It’s so good! In my book, it’s one of my Top 5 for 2011. Go check it out and tell me what you think and what albums/CDs/whatever you really liked this year.

On with the show.

Basal Testing: I hate basal testing. I don’t think anybody who uses an insulin pump likes to do it. Why would we? It involves eating a normal meal, waiting at least three hours since the last insulin bolus, skipping the next meal, waiting 4-6 hours after the normal meal time to eat again, and recording blood glucose every two hours (or so). And that’s just during the daytime. At night, the requirement is to go to bed without a snack and then wake up at 1:00 and 4:00 (for example) to test.

Ideally, you see an awesome, tight range of numbers that make you feel confident that your basal (background) insulin rates are correct. But if there’s too much movement one way or another, you have to stop. This means you get to eat early, but it also means that you have to make an adjustment in the pattern and then run the test again on another day. Plus, who actually does a basal test when everything is going right? No one except crazy people. No, you only do a test to figure out what is going wrong.

But in October I decided to bit the bullet and get my all my basal rates as correct as they can be. I was noticing a lot of trends in my CGM graphs and decided against just making changes willy-nilly. I still suspect that most of my problem is under-bolusing for meals, but I can never know without checking that the basals are correct first.

One big problem with basal testing is each day is a big ole cycle that leads straight into the next. Where do you start? Some people say, “Overnight. Get that right and then you can start your march through the day.” Maybe for them. My evenings are cray-cray, going high after my after-work training and then bouncing around after dinner before I give myself my final “well, I’ve messed up today pretty good” insulin and/or snack before bedtime. That makes overnight testing difficult.

For me, it’s been easiest to find a few mornings that seemed designed for testing—in-range BGs, flat/normal CGM graphs overnight—and skip breakfast. Then I tested my breakfast bolus ratio and timing. Then I skipped lunch for an afternoon basal test, followed by the lunch bolus test. And now here we are at dinnertime without dinner. Once I’m done here I can figure out a rubric for my afternoon/evening workouts and test that before taking a stab at dinner and (finally) the overnight basal.

One hard question I’ve had to answer is whether to exercise on days when I do basal testing. Since I train 5-6 days each week, I feel okay skipping one for the greater good. But then there’s the admonition that you should do what you normally do, which for me means exercise. Today I skipped a bike session in the basement, which is “okay” since I swam this morning, but it’s also torture because I really, really want to ride my new bike. Greater good.

By the way, to any CDEs, endos, etc., who might be reading this, please note: I’ve been on the pump for over ten years, and this will (hopefully) be the first time that my basal rates and bolus ratios are correct/proven. If you’re going to put someone on the pump, you need to (a) make sure y’all work together to get the settings locked down from the start, and (b) work on all of the behavioral issues that come along with multiple daily injection (MDI) therapy. Just saying.

I just hope that when I get through with this process, I’ll be able to translate all of this hunger into a baseline for making amazing observations about exercise+insulin+food.

Three hours to go.

Organized Bike Touring: I was asked several times right after my trip (photos) whether I would do another organized bicycle trip. Most of the people on the tour had done several already and were talking about which one they would do next. I always played coy. “Maybe.”

I enjoyed myself quite a lot. The scenery was great. I really enjoyed spending time with Mom in France. My fellow travelers were wonderful. The tour leaders were fantastic people. It was terrific having so many details taken care of; all I had to do was get on my bike and ride. And there was plenty of time to do things other than cycling.

But two things brought me down. (1) I wish there had been more actual riding. I could easily have gone an extra 20-30 miles most days, and I wouldn’t have minded a slightly faster pace. I certainly wasn’t expecting a race or even a hard ride each day, but I think the tour company we used was aiming at a more casual riding experience . . . which is totally cool, if that’s what you’re after. No judgement from me. Honest. And (2) Lisa wasn’t with me. I was having a great time doing and seeing interesting things, eating delicious food, and going to beautiful places that she would have also loved . . . just without the bike.

If only there were a way to bring Lisa, a noncyclist, along on a trip that involves some (longer distance or more intense) bicycling. Oh wait, maybe there is! Clearly it involves bringing a larger group of friends to France, some of whom ride and some who don’t. We’ll see what happens in a couple years. :^)

Two and a half hours . . .

Occupy This! will be posted tomorrow.

Two hours to go.

iOS v. Android: I have an iPod Touch. It’s great. I have all sorts of useful apps, and I use it all the time. It syncs with my Mac apps, including iTunes. It doesn’t make phone calls.

I have a Google Nexus One phone. It has a nicer-than-the-iPod’s input editor coupled with its not-quite-as-nice touchscreen keyboard. It has a couple of apps that I used when I was in France, only one of which was not already on my iPod. It kind of plays music. It shares data with “useful” Google apps on the web. It makes phone calls, is unlocked, and accepts normal SIM cards like the one I bought in France that let me call home at 4¢/min. (No shit! 15€ gave Mom and me so much talk time over two weeks that we had a bunch left over when we returned home.)

I wish I had a mythical, nonexistent, unlocked iPhone that supports pay-as-you-go and takes regular SIM cards. That would be perfect.

Are we there yet?

Before There Was Facebook: A Short, Subjective, Incomplete Insider’s History of PlanetAll will be posted Friday.

Almost there! By the time I write one more and then proofread, it should be “dinner time.”

Cyclocross: Early in the month I had thought about writing about how I was considering cyclocross as an off-season pursuit. But then I saw one and decided that it looked painful (and not in a fun kind of way). Although this did make me laugh.

Yay! I made it! I did my proofreading, took one more BG test, and had dinner while chatting with Lisa, who just arrived home. The results are mostly good news: I was incredibly stable until 9:00, at which time I started to drop slowly but steadily. That happens to be just an hour after my basal rate kicks up from 0.4 u/hr to 0.7 u/hr. That hardly seems like a coincidence.

Last Thursday, the first day of September, kinda got to me in a way that nothing else has recently. Earlier in the week Lisa and I had the “It’s probably best not to listen to Emmylou Harris or The Rising until after D Day and 9/11 pass to prevent as much melancholy as possible in the coming days” conversation. I was totally on board. The anniversary of my diagnosis (which is this coming Thursday) often makes me moody, and my memories of September 11 (even though I was fortunately at a far remove from the actual events) still make me quite sad. The combination of a lackluster diabetes year and a round-number anniversary of the attacks were boding ill.

Strange as it sounds, listening to sad music usually cheers me up. I have my hour-or-so when I listen to Emmylou or Tracy Chapman or Gillian Welch, and I emote, and it’s done. I see that I’m not alone in sadness, that it’s possible to find a kind of beauty in transcending it, and that there’s a limit. I feel the flame of sorrow, remember that I’m alive and have no real reason to be unhappy now, and get on with living my life. I’m not much for having a cleansing cry; coming up to the brink, getting misty while knowing I could go over if I wanted to, and pulling myself back, that’s usually a good enough stand-in for the real thing on those rare times when it strikes me that I could cry.

But I’m wise enough to know this about the blues: Sometimes when you got ‘em, there ain’t no bottom, there ain’t no end. Hence my Emmylou moratorium until (at least) the 12th. Real pain—the knowledge that my sorrow from the sudden loss of my stepfather was mirrored and magnified for tens of thousands of people in one day on 9/11—is not something to toy with. It’s why I never watched any of the news footage on the day of the attacks and why I am trying to avoid all of the memorial shows that are planned for TV in the coming days. Grieving—for me, at least—is never truly over. It’s never the same or as intense as at the outset, but it’s still a powerful, occasionally overwhelming force.

What I should have known was that Patty Griffin would touch the same nerve in me as my other favorite singers. There it was, that one particular song, starting to play just before I drove into the office complex at 7:00AM, the one that usually stands my hair on end because of its beauty and power and unfolding tragedy. Any other day would probably have been fine, but something about Thursday the First was different. I listened about fifteen seconds longer than I should have, and in the space between when I turned off the car and when I arrived at the first landing in the stairs, I wondered whether I was going to make it to my office before tears started.

I just barely did, but I don’t think I would have fooled anyone walking by who saw me staring out my open blinds that I was (or had been) doing anything other than wiping away fat teardrops and trying to hold in the heaves of sorrow that were ready to burst out. It was like nothing I had felt in more than a decade, as if I had been transported back to an earlier part of my life. As if a package of grief had gotten lost and shown up years late without losing any of its power.

It was the damnedest thing.

The Tour de France is over, which means three things:

1. Congratulations to Cadel Evans. I was kind of pulling for Andy Schleck at the outset, but then Thomas Voeckler won me over, and I was sad to see him lose the yellow jersey on the 19th stage. But Cadel threw down and rode the most consistent race and really deserved to win. So, well done there.
2. I finally can make some real progress on reading what those of y’all with blogs have been writing. I confess that I’m a bit afraid of the Internet during the 23 days of the TdF, lest my evening of watching be spoiled by a stray post or headline. But now that it’s over I can read up. Only 1,712 unread posts left to go.
3. I now have a bit more free time to write here. You’d think that there would be plenty of time to write every day during the three to five hours of Tour coverage, but no.

I’ve queued up a few topics. Stay tuned!

Oh, by the way, I rode out to Sharon today to recon the triathlon bike course. The whole ride was great—even though it did rain for about two of the four hours—and I have a good feeling about the triathlon.

You’ve all been warned.

And in one evening, I checked off five items from my 101 Things in 1001 Days list. Score!

I need the transmogrifier from Calvin and Hobbes.

Update: I’m not whining or making excuses or anything. Life is choices, and lately my choices have been heavy on the reading/watching/exercising side and light on writing or creating. I just need to move the fulcrum for that balance and choose to come back here more often. See you soon!

It wasn’t an awful experience. It did help keep me posting photographs and whatnot, but it doesn’t seem that I set aside enough time to write some of the longer articles that I hoped to create. In fact, I often found myself remembering right at the end of the day that I needed to write something. Now that the month is over, I’ll keep going with the occasional posting — with more substantial content, I hope.

See you back here real soon.

. . . I guess there’s no time like the present to write a bit more and say that I got an iPod Touch for an early Christmas present. (Thanks, Mom and Miles!) I like it very much as a media device — navigating playlists and moving around the interface is just much more awesome than my old 6th generation “classic” iPod — and I’m starting to look around at some of the apps for it.

Let’s see here, there’s Twitter and Facebook and the New York Times reader and Netflix and Skype and the ESPN app which I’m sure will be useful once baseball season starts again. (It has rugby, but no Australian scores. Go Rabbitohs!) And I’ve just started looking for things that could help me out with diabetes and exercise.

Here’s where I need your advice.

What are your favorite iPhone / iPod Touch apps? What do you use to help you manage your diabetes? What should I download just for fun or because no properly decked out Apple gizmo is complete without it?

“But, Jeff, there’s nothing to do at work in the days leading up to American Thanksgiving. Entertain me!” Oh, okay. Here are some wonderful, fun sites I discovered recently:

• Bookshelf Porn
• Forgotten Bookmarks
• Secrets of Paris
• The Oatmeal

Enjoy your pre-Thanksgiving TSA pat-down.

I had hoped to share my impressions of our first Blurb book, but it looks like it won’t arrive until at least tomorrow. (It’s currently at a FedEx facility in Connecticut.)

When the book didn’t arrive today, I had briefly contemplated writing about something that Christopher Hitchens said about burning the candle at both ends and how he might not actually change anything since it had given him a fair bit of enjoyment (and most likely esophageal cancer). It’s made me think about diabetes and the choices that we make — when we abstain and how we choose to indulge — but I just don’t feel like giving in to that line of thought on such a gray and gloomy day.

For a while I thought I might have to tell you about ending my daily exercise streak. I’m being very careful not to overdo it. So when I felt a twinge in my right knee a few minutes after I hopped on the treadmill after work today, I promptly stopped, walked across the basement, and did a free-weight/core workout. Let’s just say, doing crunches on the stability ball kicked my abs, though not as bad as the forearm plank. (My right knee has always felt a bit tight, and I’ve injured it before, so I’m trying to be reasonable in what I ask from it.) Anyway, the streak continues at 18 days.

I don’t really have much that I’m ready to write about today. So here is something from Wired magazine that I came across in my notes: Why it’s so hard to learn from failure, and how we can do it. (“Accepting Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up”) It’s quite a good article and includes this stand-out section.

The reason we’re so resistant to anomalous information — the real reason researchers automatically assume that every unexpected result is a stupid mistake — is rooted in the way the human brain works. Over the past few decades, psychologists have dismantled the myth of objectivity. The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories. The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored.

In order to take lessons from failure:

1. Check your assumptions.
2. Seek out the ignorant. Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment.
3. Encourage diversity. Seek out people with different sets of assumptions.
4. Beware of failure blindness.

In case you missed it, last year diabetes emerged as a big topic here. I had been reluctant to write much about it before then — perhaps not realizing how much it would help me work through my own issues and that it might help other people with diabetes (PWDs) — and I’m still not going to give over a whole month to it, though I had contemplated doing so. I don’t feel like a “diabetes blogger,” after all. I would much rather write about more exciting things like travel and books and awesome outdoor adventures, but in the absence of those things, diabetes emerges as one of the two parts of my life that most consistently takes up mental space when I’m not at work. (You’re still tops, Lisa!) And I do think there’s a never-ending opportunity to help build part of a vibrant online diabetes community, so you can expect to see more about the “Big D” here over the next 30 days . . . just not every day.

I won’t go too far out on a limb with what else you might expect to see here this month. After all, this post is mainly here to plant a stake in the ground. I do have a few ideas already lined up, but like last year there are bound to be posts that just sneak up out of nowhere. It will be an adventure for everyone.