Living the Life

“Time” to Read

/ Jeff Hora / Leave a comment
Graphic by CoPilot AI – Deep into the world of the grey cells and imagination

I was given a gift of time today. My wife and daughter were heading to workshop/event at the new Cookware-ish store in town. It was all about grinding and blending your own spices. My daughter does this quite a bit already, and my wife was interested. I got to tag along into town, although not to the event. I pulled into a coffee shop only about a block and a half from cookware store, ordered myself a green tea and piece of blueberry cake (YUM!). The place was pretty busy, but I found a good place to sit and read until they came to get me to go to lunch.

Now, it’s not really unusual for me to at least TRY to block chunks of time for reading and writing, but it’s usually in my Office/Man Cave at home and there is always something to distract me, not the least my computer. However, now there was no computer….just me and my Kindle. And an hour and a half of open time to read. What a treat! I’d been looking forward to this as much I was looking forward to going out to lunch afterwards.

Even though it was a little noisy there (it is a coffee shop after all, and is by definition a community space and place to chat.), I found it very easy to take on longer chunks of certain books that I find consume more of my cognitive energy than some. The book that I made the most headway in is “The Hidden Reality” by Brian Greene. At a high level, this book goes into the thought, math, physics, and philosophy in much of quantum science, multiverse theories, and theories of perception and reality. Greene is very good writer. I believe this is the fourth book of his that I’ve read. Quantum science and physics have fascinated me for a long time, despite the fact that the math behind it all is many light-years beyond what I can get. Greene doesn’t really dwell on the math, though, which is kind of him. He works hard at explaining in a way that allows me to “tag along” in my understanding. This is a good model for me.

Normally I can only get though about 5 to 10 pages of this before I get distracted or overwhelmed by the subject. NOT TODAY! Thanks to the less distracted block of time and the power of green tea and cake(!), I ploughed through about 40 – 45 pages of multiverse models, and philosophical approaches to the different impacts these models may have on our perception of reality, not to mention what reality might actually be. Fun Stuff!

I reached a good place to pause in quantum science for the moment and switched to some fiction. I’m in the third book of a large story arc by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter entitled “First Born”. I’m closing in on the end of the book (about 80 or so pages left) so things are accelerating to a close and I’m caught up in the story’s momentum. Then my daughter and wife showed up to get me so we could all head to lunch. That kind of yanked me out of the fiction world suddenly, but I knew I would have time later in the day to return to it and find a decent landing spot to pause; I’d either land there or charge through to the end.

I’d forgotten how satisfying being able to do this is…

Good Food(s) and Such

/ Jeff Hora / Leave a comment
Graphic by CoPilot AI

I’ve been diagnosed as a Type 2 diabetic for about eight and a half years now. As this has settled into the regularity of what I have to learn about both the disease itself and my particular response to it, the evolution of what works for me and what doesn’t work so well has taken and continues to take place.

At the first there was the “Holy Crap!” realization of the diagnosis. The internalization of what I needed right away and some of the changes I needed to make in my lifestyle. Fortunately, I am married to someone who has a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology, and knew a LOT more about food, etc. than I did (and still do….). The first several months saw some draconian changes in what and how much I ate, how much I exercised, and medical changes….including needing to inject myself with insulin every day. THAT took some “getting used to”, although I never REALLY got used to it.

Several years ago I got a new physician who led me through some more changes. For me (please, if you have diabetes and are working every day with it, don’t make changes to what you’re doing without consulting your doctor…I’m lucky..I’ve got a Real Peach!), the changes consisted of:

  1. stopping insulin,
  2. changing the number of times per day that I eat from 3 to 2, and
  3. discovering, mostly on my own, the things that I eat that have horrific effects on my blood sugar and others that have little effect, although there have been a couple of surprises.

So….

(1) I take some other medications for the diabetes, but I’m working a lot harder on managing it with diet (including weight loss…) and exercise. I have truly appreciated not having to stab myself every day with insulin. I wear a Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) monitor now, which really helps me stay relatively honest.

(2) I was brought up in Iowa and I ate three meals a day. That was the rule. Honed over the years in the military and in corporate, I ate regularly, and if someone was kind enough to bring in goodies, well, I didn’t want to hurt their feelings by not joining in the frenzy. Changing from the lifestyle of three meals a day to two meals (and minimal not-so-good-for-me goodies) meant I needed to analyze what I ate at each meal, balancing protein, sugars, carbs and calories. I had to look hard at WHEN I ate, giving my body a chance to work with what I was giving it to best metabolize effectively. Fortunately, again I had the solid advice and guidance of both my doctor and that Ph.D. who lives with me.

(3) This has meant that I have had to completely give up a couple of things that I loved (particularly pastries…..especially big ol’ glazed donuts!), and cut WAY back on several others (I’m a card-carrying choco-holic [if we actually HAD cards, that is…]). I still allow myself teensy treats of dark chocolate very occasionally , but not the way I used to.

The real surprises I have come across include:

  • I can eat cheese! I love cheese, man! I don’t go nuts with it, but it is included in my regular diet as a good source of protein, which is something I need to watch.
  • I can eat ice cream! Ice cream has an almost negligible impact on my blood sugar. Granted I need to stay away from the ice creams that have a lot of candy in them, and toppings are mostly right out, but just being able to enjoy ice cream is good enough for me.
  • I can eat pizza!…at least particular kinds of pizza. I went through a phase where I tried (I really did…) to like what I term “Faux Pizza”. You may know the kinds that I’m speaking of – interestingly concocted crusts, tweaked toppings, simulated cheese product sprinkled lightly. These did NOT cut the mustard, so to speak. Then I discovered, totally by accident, that there is a brand of pizza (I’ll not disclose the brand, but the stores are everywhere….) that I can order their double-crust pizza and it has little peak effect on my blood sugar. My usual strategy is to buy one, bake it, slice it into six pieces, and then I get one per week (invariably on Saturday night…), freezing the other pieces for subsequent Saturdays until I’m out and it is time to go and get another one.

So, WOO-HOO for cheese, ice cream and pizza!. I may sound like a little kid here, but way in there someplace is a twelve-year-old that needs placating, or life gets too gray-colored and I have to up my anti-depressants. Not something I want to do, for sure.

Anyway, I guess the point here is that this diagnosis was a real turn from healthy to not-so-healthy (as I perceived myself at the time…), but I feel that my lifestyle is much more healthy in a lot of ways now.

And THAT is a gift and a good thing!