Instructions Not Included

Back in December, I was lucky enough to learn a bit of poi juggling at work, for part of the Christmas carol service at York Minster. For those of you not familiar with poi, think juggling balls, but with long strings attached, which you fit to your fingers. It's great fun, and looks beautiful when you do it right. But if you don't? Well, you'll end up whacking yourself all over the place. Especially when you're learning. Which hurts a lot of the time. 

At the moment, things really aren't that dissimilar. I've been somewhat distant from a lot of things that I'm normally so engaged with. Forums, twitter, blogging here, and it's not because I don't love being invovled with social media - if it were up to me, I'd be able to devote a lot more time to it - thoughts of whether I could actually find work doing diabetes advocacy has crossed my mind more than once, believe me. But the problem is that I'm torn between all my commitments. I know that I'm not the only one - we all lead unbelievably hectic lives these days, and I know we'd appreciate the chance to just press the pause button for a few days, and slow the pace down. 

I work full time. I study part time for a Master's degree, which means time on campus, as well as all the work outside of classroom time that goes with it. I'm part of the university's Dancesport society, which means I have lessons, and team practice for competitions. And of course, D always has to have its say on everything.

I'm extremely lucky, in that my work are very understanding about my MA. I've been allowed to rearrange my hours to allow me time to take my lectures, which all fall within the working day. Of course, when I'm not there, I'm in the office. Which means that time to use the library, etc, is all in the evenings. Despite the ridiculous price of it, I do own a  bus pass, so I can get the bus to and from university. On foot, it would take me about an hour to walk between my flat and campus, and then obviously another hour back. So I get the bus. But because buses stop being frequent after a certain time, if I miss one, I have to wait another half hour. And they only go into town, which means I still have to walk half an hour back to my flat, usually with a stack of books. 

So what's a girl to do? If I go to the library after work, the earliest I'll get home is about 20:30, but it's usually more like 22:00 or later. Trust me, by that point, I'm hungry! I've still not really got the hang of reducing my basal rates, and since I'm high an awful lot of the time, I'm not 100% comfortable with reducing them anyway, as I'd probably carry on being even higher.

I knew that when I signed up for the MA it was going to be a lot of work. I'm not complaining about that, because I knew it was part and parcel. Trading off things in order to not completely burn out though? That's a bit more difficult. I'm glad I chose to do this part time, because there's no way I could manage it full time. 

I'll be completely honest. My control has not been great at the moment. My 14 day average on my meter is way higher than I would like it. I'm probably not paying as much attention to things at the moment as I should be, and that is unsettling me a little bit. I don't like taking my eye off the ball, but giving myself some slack in one place is the only way I can think of handling things at the moment. At the end of April, all my assignments for the year will be handed in, and I can think of other things as well. 

Until then, I guess I'm just going to have to try and avoid hitting myself with the various balls in the air.

I don't like February. I really don't. It seems somewhat odd to have negative feelings towards a month, but I do. It's not because I'm some screaming anti-Valentine's Day sort. I generally couldn't give a toss about Valentine's Day, but that's mostly because I find the idea that we shouldn't show our love to others on the remaining 364 days of the year slightly abhorrent. No, that's not my problem. So what is it? What could I possibly have against February?

It's beige. It really is. It's such a blah month, which I generally find nothing happens in. Nothing good, at any rate. When I say beige, I mean beige in the paint term, when you paint a room beige (or magnolia, to shake things up) to keep it plain and inoffensive. But I tell you for nothing, it's dull. 

I can get on board with January. It's the first month of the year, and all that jazz, and I can usually find cheap presents in the sale at Boots (yes, I am that person). I also like March - it has my birthday, and usually the first signs of spring making an appearance. But I find the shortest month of the year generally has very little going for it. 

I tell a lie to some extent - I did compete in my first ballroom competition this month, i went down to London to see a friend I've not seen in a couple of years, and I had a very nice night out having dinner with friends this weekend. But all the same, I will be very happy when this month is over and done with.

Anneka and I have been having something of a tumultuous relationship over the past couple of weeks. I've changed my insulin:carb ratios, and that seems to have made something of a difference, but I'm still running far too high for my liking for most of the time. Changed my site out this morning, and found I had a kink in my cannula as well. Fun times. I'm not complaining, mind you - I still love my girl, and I've had some interesting times figuring out where to hide her as of late, but it's not all peaches and cream. As with everything D related, I'm certain it never will be. As always, it's all a learning curve.

In other, non-beige related news, I was thrilled to receive my copy of my lovely friend Ginger's new book - Your Diabetes Science Experiment. I'm in the midst of reading it at the moment, and I'm planning to have a review of it up for you all soon. So far, I highly suggest getting your hands on a copy if you haven't already!

 I hear tell sometimes of women who can take hours to get ready to go out of a morning, or if they're going out at night. Not me. It's not my way. Of a morning, I'm up, shower, wash my hair, dress and dry my hair. Brush it, and as far as grooming goes, that's pretty much it for me, really. I don't wear makeup - I'd much rather have the extra 15 minutes in bed. 

You've probably heard me mention before that I take part in Dancesport. If you've not come across the term before, Dancesport is competitive ballroom and latin dancing. Think Strictly Come Dancing (the original Dancing with the Stars if you're of a US persuasion). I've been taking lessons since Autumn of 2009. Seriously, I love it. And between February and March, I'm going to be doing my first two competitions. That means several things: dresses, fake tan, hair and LOTS of makeup. 

Oh dear.

Dresses? Hey, I can get on board with that - I love a bit of dressing up now and then, and I've managed to find myself a really nice ballroom dress for an absolute steal in one the January sales. Quids in. Hair? Oh that'll drive me crazy, but I'll just about cope, if I can find someone to help me. 

Fake tan? Ah, now that's where the fun starts. You need to have at least some colour, so I'm told. Now, I don't tan. I'm pale and proud of it - you need to roll with what you've got, and that's what God gave me. So I bought myself some of that body lotion with tan in it. I got given some really good advice about it. EXFOLIATE for a few days before applying so it doesn't go all blotchy. OK, fair enough. Exfoliate I shall.

Exfoliate, exfoliate, exfoliate. Hmmm....let's break my 'no moisturising in the daytime' rule. Oh, set change time. Here we go. Oooooh, look! No bubbles! 

OK, why won't this stick? Oh yes. That would be the body lotion. There's no way anything's sticking to that now. Alcohol wipes or something like that would be useful right now. Do I have any? Of course not. What do I have? Nail varnish remover. And of course, my skin loves that. So, Tegaderm. That looks sexy. 

At least on the plus side - no bubbles. But I can't wait until I actually start using this tanning moisturiser. That should be a whole other state of affairs. And people wonder why I don't do the whole 'beauty regime' thing.

So a few posts back, I told you that I had named my pump Anneka. I also said that I would explain why. So here goes.

I don't know if you guys in the US had anything like this, but back in the late 80's to mid 90's, we had a TV show called 'Challenge Anneka'. Wikipedia seems to think you had something called Challenge America, but dammit, we had it first! 

The premise of the show, if you're not familiar with it, is that the charming all-action heroine, Anneka Rice, would fix some terrible crisis, whilst wearing a blue jumpsuit. She also had a mobile phone, which was a really big deal in those days. The best part of the whole show though, when you were young, was the little animated hedgehogs in the opening credits. Seriously, I always thought they were adorable!

It always seemed that Anneka Rice could handle anything. So that was part of my reasoning behind calling my lovely Animas pump that. But after a number of Borg and robot related jokes, it's also a partial nod to the human name of Seven of Nine from Star Trek Voyager, which was Annika Hansen. Yes, I loved Star Trek as a teenager. No, I'm not really ashamed! But she was always calm, collected, and fiercely intelligent.

So my hope rather was that whichever Anneka/Annika she was taking after would be a good omen. At least they both had jumpsuits in common. Shame that so far, it's been a bit more of a challenge than anything Anneka Rice ever took on. 

I always remembered her building orphanages, and youth centres and the like. Seems that though she did this, she also did some far more bizarre things - 

and of course, my personal favourite:

As for me, I'm hoping not to have to challenge my Anneka to do any of these things. However, I have been dealing with an absolutely rotten cold for the past week, which has been making things much more of a challenge. I did mention that I'd been struggling with high scores. After seeing my team on the 6th, we'd made alterations to my basals in an attempt to try and sort things out. Of course the next day, this absolute beast of a cold makes an appearance. 

This is the first time I've been properly ill since my DX, so I wasn't sure what to really expect, bg wise. They've carried on being high despite corrections, putting on temp basals, and such. Thankfully no ketones have appeared. But the problem of course is that I don't want to make any huge changes, because when this cold has gone, it'd be hard to tell whether I'd made too many. So I think I'm just going to have to hang on in there, until it clears up, and make my changes then. 

But in the meantime, I suppose we could terrorise children with monkeys?

I didn't really see it coming. Honestly, I didn't! I'd really enjoyed being part of the whole competition, but never saw myself actually winning. Not only were there really strong entries from some wonderful people,  I also don't win things - it never works out like that. 

But being as life is stranger than fiction - I did win. It was announced on twitter and the website today.

I've not been anywhere beyond a long weekend to see a friend in Belfast since I was seven. So a chance to go and see something of the world? Somewhere I'd probably never go otherwise? Whilst helping raise money for some amazing charities? Well hey, that works for me.

If any of the other people who entered into the final stage of the competition are reading this, then I want to say thank you to them. Thank you for caring enough about the project, about charity and about the state of the world to want to be involved. That makes me so happy to know that people still care about things.

So I'm thrilled. I'm so excited since I wasns't thinking I'd be able to go ANYWHERE till around 2012/13, and even then would be pushing it. I can't wait to go to Rio. I've been looking at the Lonely Planet website and there are so many things that look like I should see them!

So a HUGE thank you to 7 Wonders team, and to each of you who helped with the video! You're all wonderful. 

And now a question - Do we have anyone in the DOC in Brazil who fancies a meet? ;) Or does anyone know Rio and know somewhere I absolutely HAVE to go - first time traveller here, so any and all advice is welcome! 

I'm going to Rio, baby! :D

I've got something today which is a little bit different. I'm so excited, because I'm now one of the last 9 people in the running to join the 7 Wonders in 7 Days trip. The adventure is aiming to raise money for 7 amazing charities - including Diabetes UK. 

If I join the trip, I'll get to go the Rio de Janiro to see Christ the Redeemer. As someone who never goes anywhere, having the chance to go halfway across the world, as part of this amazing adventure would just be undescribable. Especially in aid of so many great causes. Some of these are charities that I hadn't come across previously, and I'm so pleased to have heard about them now. 

So we have been asked to say what our dream donation would be. After thinking about this for a while, I decided to make a short video to sum this up. Yesterday, I spoke to a LOT of people about this, and had help off everyone who took pictures, let me film them, or told me about their dreams. Thank you to all of you. So here's the video. It was an interesting experience putting it together, so I hope it's interesting to watch.

I'm pretty sure I've made it clear in the past that I have a bit of an issue with the whole New Year thing. If I haven't, well then, I do. New Year's Eve? An anticlimax if ever there was one. New Year's Day? Well that's when the pressure starts. 

A New Year, a new you! How many times have you heard that, or seen it on promotions? If you're anything like me, then it's far too many. Lose weight, get fit, stop smoking, eat healthily, start a new career, make every day count. Ugh, come on. Let's be honest here. This month's star buy diet book, or fitness DVD is March's bargain basement fodder.

I don't do New Year's resolutions. I believe I brought this up last year, but I made one a few years back that I've managed to stick to really, really well. It was not to make any more New Year's resolutions. Ha, ha, very funny, I hear you go. Well, I mean it. I used to do them, but when it got to a week or two in, and something had gone horribly wrong? The sense of guilt and failure. It's because there's far too much pressure associated with the whole 'resolution' madness. You're setting yourself up for a fall 99% of the time, and why do that to yourself? 

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for trying to make changes in your life. I just don't like the whole label of 'resolution'. I mean, by day four of January, I got to work and realised I had my knickers on inside out. That's a low point, right there. What hope have I got of managing to keep something that has the pressure of 'resolution' attached to it?

So there are lots of things I'd like to do, to change, to achieve. But how to go about it without the stress, without punishing myself if it doesn't all go as well as I'd like? Well, as it happens, my attention was drawn to a tweet by the lovely Jenni Prokopy of Chronic Babe, in which she was linking to a post by Dannette of FibroHaven. What was it about? Well, that's what I mean by 'going camping'. 

It's about living with intent.

I have Basil Brush going 'Boom, Boom!' in my head. Yes, I know it's a truly terrible pun, but it makes me smile. It's like a really bad joke from a cracker. But I do think this is brilliant, and as of Monday, I'm going to be keeping a notebook to write down my intentions. 

This is better than resolutions. This can be flexible, and fit with where you are day to day. It's realistic. Each day you make and write down and intention, which is right for you on that day. Make it more ambitious when things are going well. Keep it relaxed and manageable when they're not.

A way of making changes that is actually do-able? I know I'm in. What about you? Fancy coming camping?