Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

I'm still here, kicking a little less, fighting some stupidity...  I guess. Back in 2008, I was hospitalized for over a week.  I had a significant amount of pain in my leg, went to see the doctor, and got an antibiotic shot.  And i was told to come back if my foot got "redder".  Two days later I was told to go to the ER.  They ran me through a bunch of tests, and a surgeon opened up my left shin and dug out a lot of infected tissue.   I guess I was lucky to keep the leg, the next 90 days were about as difficult as they've been lately.  i learned a great deal about managing my diabetes.  And I learned a little more about the world.  Which was, aside from my wife and kids, not too many people gave a great deal of crap about me.  Sure, I have friends, but when it comes to help solving problems, many of them land on me. Back in 2008, I came home with a stack of prescriptions.  A couple were for test strips, lancets, and a blood meter....

I recall an old "joke" I stumbled over a few years ago which is even more painful now than when I heard it originally. "If I knew I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself."   Not that I had any reason to believe I was going to die young.  I have managed to get myself past 58, where my father had a massive heart attack, and while I do have a pacemaker earlier than Dad got his, I do attribute that to better detection and knowing what we now know.  My father was having episodes where he would essentially faint and have what my mother called "shakes".  I was out of the house by this time, so the tales of what he went through were weird.   The doctors attached him to monitors in the office, and nothing stood out.  They sent him home with a monitor, which one of my sisters described as a "tricorder".  It hung on a strap from his shoulder, and was about the side of an old-style cassette recorder - maybe a foot long, three ...

 Been rough couple of weeks around here, but life keeps going.   From the top, no, the new job is still doing great.  I am settling into the role and getting back to comfortable with the process.  It's a little bit different than I had done for the previous seven years, but it works.  And the company is a good one, with great people.  I'm extremely fortunate in that regard.   In other areas, no, we haven't made it back out to the Renaissance Festival after our first visit two weeks ago.  And the chances don't look good, thanks to yours truly, doing stupid stuff again. There were also two losses that felt pretty big, to me.  I'm not going to share the names, because through most of the world, they will mean nothing.   To me, they were quite important people in small segments of my life.  The first was a high school associate, someone I knew, could say "hey, how's it going?" to him and get a grin and a response.  T...

 Yeah, I know, the kids these day call it "fusion".  I do think that perhaps they forgot the "con" that should be there.  But yes, I admit I've seen TV shows with things like this, my wife has an air fryer, and I need to eat low-carb thanks to diabetes.   So I've been experimenting, and yes, I know, your mileage may vary.  But here goes. INGREDIENTS: 2-3 pounds ground beef - leaner is better* Sliced American Cheese (or pick your favorite)** Onions*** Egg Roll Wrappers I brown my ground beef, seasoning as needed.  I usually use salt, pepper, onion powder, and Worcestershire sauce.  I've also used bullion.  But I brown the ground beef, sometimes *** adding chopped onions for flavor.  Once the ground beef was done, I set up my "roll" station.  I am not a professional, I'm using skills I haven't used in forty years.  But here we go.  *This is why leaner is better - more liquid makes the wraps less, well, structurally sound....

Yeah, I know, like everywhere else.  Today we're dealing with heat indicies over 100 - that is, once you combine the dewpoint, near 80, with the temperature, in the low 90s, so yeah, it's brutal.   Not sure how long our luck is going to hold out.  I live in the south metro of Minneapolis, and we have been pretty lucky for years.  Once, back shortly after we had kids, a large thunderstorm came right over our apartment, and damaged one of the fake chimneys.  The buildings had been set up to put large water tanks in these things to use gravity to power the sprinkler system - and so the destroyed chimney let loose a flood.  Fortunately, our apartment was not damaged, a few down the hall were - but we got lucky.   We have had some close calls, certainly, since then, but we have been lucky in that we have not seen any direct damage of any places we've lived.  We've seen plenty, but we have been lucky.   We are also fortunate in the p...

It's been one of those summers.   We've had a very wet spring - not as wet as some folks, but when compared to the last few years, we're pretty thoroughly soaked.  We've had regular waves of moderate storms roll through, some turn severe before or after hitting the local area, and we're, well, seeing lots of weeds.   The past few years have seen droughts, or very wet springs leading to flooding, followed by dry or very dry months.  We'll see what we see, but the continued rain is welcome, provided we get the dry weather to allow the crops to absorb the water and mature. The rest of my life is going pretty well.  I've found a real niche with my new employer, and having plenty of work keeps me busy.  There are challenges, which come typically from the nature of the work.  There's a limited number of people who can review requests for authorization, and there are quite a few people who need help, so I'm one part of the bottleneck.  I have t...