PAgent’s Progress

After getting the news that my blood glucose was elevated, I spent the last several months working at getting more exercise. I’m pleased to say that this has been more or less effective at bringing my blood glucose levels down. Unfortunately, while I was riding my bike, and going to the gym, my eating habits went straight to hell. This is particularly true when I’ve been stressed out, which is when I’m most likely to snack on things that I should not eat, and consume vast amounts of calories right before bedtime. In addition, even when I started eating crap again, since I was exercising this didn’t bump my blood glucose overly high, but it of course increased my caloric input.

So, at my last doctor’s appointment, my blood pressure was great, and my A1C level was in the ‘normal’ range. But I’ve actually gained weight. And, as always, my lipids are horribly high. It seems like I can only manage to work on one aspect of my lifestyle at a time.

So, starting today, I’m going to try and get back to a better diet.

***

Today is my daughter’s birthday. She is eleven years old. She is also five-foot-three. Next year, she will be in middle school. It’s hard to believe.

We are going to actively try and get her enrolled in the the Arts and Communication Magnet Academy next year. We think she would do well there. I honestly don’t know if we would have been as comfortable trying to send her to ACMA if she hadn’t gone on her medication. It seems to have really improved a lot of her in-class behavior problems.

Happy Birthday Sweetie.

Just another day in the zoo for the polar bears.

If you are a fan of CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery), then you know that some things are insanely difficult to model accurately. One of the hardest things to animate convincingly is water. Recent films (Perfect Storm, Cast Away) have demonstrated significant improvements, but I’ve never seen anything like this:

Scanline VFX is a German FX studio, that used their Flowline software to create hydrodynamic effects for the film Poseidon. Simply amazing.

Things came to a head this week regarding the dog we had wanted to adopt. By Thursday the wife and I were still thinking about him, and I called the shelter and confirmed that he was still there. So, he had been in a cage nearly a week, which was making me actually pretty ill. The wife couldn’t seem to move on, either. So Thursday night we were engaged in another round of ‘what if’. What if we adopt him, and our daughter loses her friendship with the previous owner? What if the girl’s mother can never forgive us? Lots of what ifs.

Nevertheless, when I woke up on Friday, I was ready to say ’screw it’ and just go get the dog. Unfortunately, the shelter was not just on the other side of town, but a couple of towns over. And you had to start the adoption process by 5:30 pm. I conferred with the wife, and she wanted to check with our daughter before we made the decision. And then we wanted to check with the former owner. And we had to find someone to watch our son, if I was going to be on the other side of the county and my wife was going to be tied up with a girl scout overnight trip.

Finally, we got all our ducks in a row, and I left work early and headed west. I stopped by a friend’s house to confirm that she would be able to watch the boy, then got back on the road. By now I was in rush hour traffic, and it seemed like I was crawling. The clock kept ticking, faster and faster, and it seemed like I would never get there.

Finally, I pulled into the parking lot of the shelter, and leapt out of the car. There was an older couple with a little girl loading a couple of dogs into a pickup truck, a Husky and a chihuahua.

A chihuahua? Couldn’t be.

I hurried on into the adoption center, and went back to look at the dogs. He wasn’t there. I came back to the front desk, and gave the attendant the dog’s serial number.

“Oh! I’m sorry. He just got adopted.”

Yup. I drove all the way across the county just in time to see him get adopted by someone else. Sucks to be me.

The fallout from this week of complete stress has been evident. I was utterly depressed last night, and didn’t sleep well at all. I’m tense and irritated. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I’ve spent the last twenty years bottling up my love of dogs, because I knew I couldn’t get one of my own. I’ve never even allowed myself to consider the possibility of getting a dog, because it simply wasn’t practical. But over the last week, I succeeded in talking myself into believing that we could get a dog. That I could have a dog to play with again, a dog to curl up against me in the evenings, a dog to chase tennis balls. Now that I’ve opened up all that emotion, I’m having trouble putting it away.

Which is a problem. Although I am theoretically free to look at shelter listings for another dog, my wife is not what you would call a dog person. Her criteria for consideration of an acceptable canine companion are sufficiently narrow that I have little discretion in any actual dog selection. I’m not entirely sure that her criteria even overlap with my own. Or to be perfectly honest, that my criteria are even reasonable given where we are in our lives.

But I want one now.

Fleetwood Mac – Tusk

Stevie Nicks – Stand Back

Christine McVie – Love Will Show Us How

Lindsay Buckingham – Go Insane

I usually stay away from discussing news stories. There are a million places to read the news online, who needs to hear my opinion? But I can’t let this one go by unremarked.

Sheik Taj Aldin al Hilali is Australia’s leading Muslim cleric. Last month, while discussing the causes of sexual assault, Hilali pretty much singlehandedly set the image of Islam in Australia back about 100 years. As reported in this news article:

“If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside … without cover, and the cats come to eat it … whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat’s?” Sheik Taj Aldin al Hilali was quoted as saying in a sermon to some 500 worshippers in Sydney last month.

“The uncovered meat is the problem,” he was quoted as saying in The Australian newspaper.

“If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred,” he said, referring to the headdress worn by some Muslim women.

Hilali also criticized women who “sway suggestively” and wear cosmetic makeup, implying they attracted sexual attack.

“Then you get a judge without mercy… and gives you 65 years,” he added.

You see? It’s all so simple. If you women would just stay in your homes and wear a veil and headscarf, you wouldn’t be enticing those poor helpless men to rape you. It’s clearly all your fault.

I’m not so naive as to believe that Hilali represents all of Islam, or even a majority of muslims. But I do think that Islam needs to decide if this is the image they want to present to the world, and act accordingly.