Salt?

 When I was young I salted most things. I couldn't stand oatmeal without salt. I salted the crap out of soup that my mom made. I salted my baked potato and butter. I salted my eggs. I salted most things one would normally salt.

Not so much the last 20 years or more. Now only one thing do I salt or add salt to, when cooking or eating: I salt a beef steak when I fry it. Everything else, like the popcorn my wife prepares, which she has to salt, I just really do not notice a difference any more. So I don't use it. Why eat  it if you don't notice the difference? So I don't. 

I don't notice a difference between salted and not salted butter. So I ask h e r to buy unsalted. But she always goes back to getting it salted.

I get my Iodide in the oligo-fructose multivitamin I take  each morning.

My brother for years had a thing against salt, which made him cough. He ended up with a thyroid problem for lack of iodide.

I have no medical or physical reason at all for avoiding salt. Just don't need it or want it except on my steak, which I have about once every 10 years. So far. Watch me start having it every week.

Millet Anew

 It has been a long time, if ever, since I prepared and ate millet the way I do rice - steamed till the water is gone, and the berries just ready to burst, no more, with no other grain or ingredient.  Ten years ago, I was mixing it with other grains and preparing it in a rice cooker, and calling that "grollet."

I have been eating steamed millet for a week or two now, plain, and I like it more than I ever did before.  Much more.  More than rice, depending on my mood and menu.

Breakfast Today

 One 1/2-lb carrot

1/2 C popcorn with lots of butter

1 lb  ricotta

1 Jonathan apple (we scored some good ones this year)

2 Bartlett pears

Glass of apple cider

Glass of milk

4 oz baked chicken 

New Lows

 June 2020, which marked my 4th anniversary since eating sugar for  the last time, I began for the first time recording my blood sugar test results.  I had  always thought  I was one of the few who were in good control but now I was realizing I could do better and should, and that in reality, I didn't even really know how well I was doing.  So I started testing frequently and recording it.  I would test right after each meal and again after things settled, and so forth, striving to keep even my spikes under 150 mg/dL.

I seemed to be doing very well in June, July not quite as good, and then August was a little disappointing.  But I kept at it, and achieved what I felt were mixed results in Sep-Oct.  I had wanted to have my A1C tested at the end of August but the pandemic indirectly discouraged me from going in.  I went in the third week of October, and the result was 6.3, 0.3 higher than my goal had been in June.  I had never been that low before.

Then winter, always the challenge and the killer, came.  Would this winter be different?  Would I be able for the first time to keep the control I enjoyed all summer?  It started out as a Yes on Thanksgiving day.  After the festive feast, I was 117 or something.  I felt I came off victor.  Trouble was, I had not learned yet about how the food in you can keep on giving, and the sugar can climb after you thought it was stable.  

So a little later, not having eaten anything, I spiked the first of many winter spikes through January.  This winter was no doubt better than most but I was still searching for my way to a perfect summer-like winter.

Third week of January, I went in for my A1C.  I expected it to be worse than 6.3 but I didn't care how much worse it would be, because it would have little relevance to how I was going to be, once I found the answers and could do as well all year as I had done in June.

Then on February 1, 2021, I had the worst spike of all.  Since June or before, I had not broken 300 mg/dL.  Now I was reading 383.

So I pulled out all the stops.  All the tricks from my bag.  Lined up all the guns.  I had achieved the ability to never again eat sugar, now I was ready to permanently institute my evening fast.  From then on, I would finish my eating for the day between 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm, even if it meant skipping supper or only having a light snack.  From then on, my sugar would be settled by bedtime, and I would not have to worry anymore about checking my sugar and meteing out a bed-time shot of fast-acting insulin to get me trajected (hopefully) through the night.  There would be many benefits.

My sugar would be lower and more stable during the night.  This could be huge for my A1C.  Imagine, night after night, suppose I was sleeping along for 7 hours at 102 mg/dL instead of 117 mg/dL, what effect that could have on my A1C.

So I started doing it along with all the other tricks I know.  It was easy.  I felt content evenings.  I was waking up with sugars like 105 mg/dL.  It was great.  Now I really really didn't care what my last A1C result would turn out to be.

The doctor's office just called.  5.8.

5.0, here we come.

Since the 383 spike a week ago, I have not really spiked at all.  I got up to 165 a couple of times is all - and that was right after meals.  My wake-up sugars were 110, 131, 105, 101, 122, 146, 130.  Which could be better, and hopefully will be, but as an entire week's record, at this stage, coming off many weeks of crazy spikes, ain't bad at all.  As a statistic, I count bad days.  Defined as days I broke through 180 mg/dL at least once.  Ain't had a bad day since last Monday, when I spiked at not only 383 mg/dL, but 240 mg/dL just hours before.

Just so you know, I normally would be using Lantus as well as humalog but it was keeping me from strenuous abilities during the day.  I needed a way to maintain at night that would not prevent me from charging up a big hill on my bicycle, lifting heavy logs, or participating in wrestling during the day.  So that's why, above, I speak of getting through the night some other way.  You should also know that over the past 6 months, I have put on more weight and muscle than I had done since when I was 19 years old, which was my former record.  So you need not suspect that I am just starving myself, or anything like that.  I am 6 ft tall and weigh 160 lb, whereas, through my 20s, 30s, 40s, I was 140 lb.  In my 50s, I was closer to 160 lb, at least the late 50s, when I started working out and wrestling again.

An unrelated note, that I may not have mentioned, so I will just tack it on here - a lot of know-it-all people who think they can advise me on everything diabetes because they read an article or two, or because their grampa had diabetes, have insisted to me that I have type II diabetes.  Well, my doctor confirmed I am type I.  He also confirmed something I have come to realize - it isn't always a clear and definite case of type I or II.

Teeccino

I might as well tell you about a beverage I have really been enjoying.  My base is fresh whole cow's milk, so if you only have junk from the store, and you try this, your results may vary.

I mix pure cocoa powder into just  a little bit of milk till I have a smooth paste, then add the rest of the milk and finish mixing but also add like I dunno maybe a 1/4 ts of Teeccino brand Hazelnut Medium Roast granules and let them start working.

This is all done cold.

Then you drink it.  It's really good.

You don't worry about the grounds of Teeccino.  You just chew em and enjoy em because unlike coffee grounds or any other kind of whatever, they are tender and delicious.

The unadulterated milk and the Teeccino combine to sweeten the cocoa to the perfect degree.

I do a similar thing with herbal teas in general, usually with tea bags, where I just let them work cold, and I often do it with milk but other times water.  Peppermint tea in cold milk may be my favorite of those.

18L20

For breakfast today, I cooked down some baby kale (about 2 C) with a little butter and onion in a small fry pan we use to scramble eggs, added a little cayenne, scrambled in 2 eggs, and served mixed with plain sesame seeds roasted in the same pan.

My son had thinned his garden kale and saved what he pulled.  I had separated the above-ground portions from the roots and dirt clods and grit.

The kale didn't actually 'cook down' but remained gnuarley and snarly (kept its height and springiness), and when I scrambled in the eggs, they disappeared!  They appeared largely to be gone but I found that the mess required longer cooking than I normally would observe, because raw egg kept forming in the pan.

Anyway, that was after the customary raw carrot, and with a nice drink of water.  Quite different and quite good.

I am now pretty much lock stock and barrel about not eating carbs other than the carrot and seeds before Noon.  Sugar just jumps otherwise.  But in the pm, I usually get away with eating all the fruit and grain and what not I want.

By the way, I have never had A1C results < 6.5 or so; I am shooting now to break the 6.0 floor barrier.  Have actively and carefully controlled my sugar this past month more than ever before, and had a pretty easy time of it.  I have been getting about 3-5 undesirable level spikes per week, with a maximum of 229.  Undesirable level is defined as > 150.  I test pronto, any time I am not absolutely certain it's good, and record the number in a spreadsheet.  So the spreadsheet does not show test results according to a consistent schedule but rather shows the general times during the day and the results of all 'peaks.'  My average peak for June was 122; for July, it is running 135 right now.  But this says nothing about the fact that I am testing pronto like never before and correcting quickly the climbing levels that do occur, and it says nothing about what my average level is, only the average peak (sometimes when I am not certain, and I test, it can be quite low, and that is why the average "peak" is so low).

Nokia 3310

My personal observations regarding the Nokia 3310

I have been using this phone for about a year.  It has served me very well.  I am selling it only because, largely due to the pandemic of COVID-19, I never use it for much, and decided to go back to the good ol days when there were no cell phones, and I never had to have one, let alone carry one around or pay for one.

I'm home most of the time nowdays, and when I leave, I will be really gone.  So just call my home phone.

The battery is great.  Much longer life per charge than typical.  Never runs out if you charge it about every day, always has plenty to spare.

The settings on this pup, though limited, are not too mysterious to master.  But then, mysterious and ridiculously complex control settings is mostly a smart phone thing, I think.

I like the small size but it bugs me that it isn't as small as they used to make them before touch screens were in vogue.

It has Snake if you know what that is.  I don't.

It is supposed to have multimedia text and internet browsing capability but none of that has ever worked at all.  Not that I wanted it to.

It is 3g.  3g works very well these days as long as you are somewhere besides my house.  But I usually get a good enough signal if I go upstairs.  With this phone, I started out with ATT as my carrier.  I was blown away by the bad customer service and more so by the way I was treated as a major corporation as a customer, one with infinitely deep pockets.  And the signal coverage wasn't ideal.  So I tried Mint Mobile.  Phone worked great if I went caddy corner from my house to a parking lot, didn't have any signal whatsoever if I was on my own property.  It worked great as long as I was anywhere but home.  Then I tried Consumer Cellular because they operate on dual carriers, ATT and some other.  I presumed this meant whatever was optimal would automatically carry the signal for me but as it turned out, no.   It meant I had to go to Target and deal with associates whose common sense had been washed from their brains and replaced by store algorithm, till I finally got my phone switched from the default "other" carrier to ATT.  After that, life has been fine.

This has no touch screen, as you probably know.  It is a dumb phone, and there are some pretty stupid things about it.

Some things are acutely stupid.  Not enough that I would not rate it 4 stars out of 5, but if I were a company like Nokia, I would be embarrassed to market a product that had not 5 stars for professionalism and attention to detail.  It's still a pretty good phone though.

The remainder of this review is negative only.  Please keep in mind, I like this phone.  It meets my expectations.  You might like it even more.  But now I will list the acutely stupid things and some minor negatives as well; I will let the reader decide which are which:

Very slippery.  If your hands are dry, you will drop it.  Fortunately, this phone is very destruction-resistant.  But the battery will pop out; you will have 3 pieces to gather up and reassemble.

The flashlight, which I never ever use, turns on while the phone is in my pocket.  Does it fairly regularly, drains the battery quite a lot by the time I notice, but has never left me high and dry.  I don't know whether it is a pure electronic anomaly, or by designed key shortcut.  But I sure was not able to find a shortcut for turning it off.  Not in the manual, not on the web.  I intended to take it to my drill press and carefully drill out the LED but never got round to it.  And I cannot say what ill ramifications might have been had I done it.

It has a square ring for up, down, left, right menu buttons.  Quite tricky and difficult to use.  Also hard to intentionally hit the center button.

Has a hang up button.  Hit twice to end call.  Really would give me that extra little narcotic satisfaction if I could end the call with a single push.

Comes with radio and headphones.  This would be a real plus for me, being the one network data feature that works, and I do like a small radio and phones to listen to, but since it isn't really a radio, just an internet thing, I get charged tremendous $$ to listen for a very short time.

If your screen goes off as timed, or if you happen to accidentally turn it off, and you try to go back in to continue what you were doing, too bad, you are locked out.  You must press unlock and then press * to get in.  This includes going in to turn off your flashlight.  So however the light gets turned on accidentally, I must assume it does it without having to get in by unlocking it.  But to turn it off, you must unlock it.  And then use the tricky buttons to get way down the menu to the flashlight, etc.

Similarly, the phone does not require your pocket knife or car keys to unlock the phone before entering an infinitely long and random phone number, while the phone is in your pocket, that you must delete one character at a time before you can use your phone - but only after you unlock the phone to get in yourself.

One must ask, if the things are not prevented, that phone locking was designed to prevent, and if I must unlock the phone to undo them, what is the point of locking the phone?  Is it to piss me off?

What kind of manufacturer, what kind of engineer, would produce a product that would not at least present the option to turn off locking?

I read that the phone has a number of keyboard shortcuts.  No one knows this number.  I was not able to find any that were of use to me.  To find any, you do not consult your manual.  Please consult Ask.com, flybynite.com, or any other random place to find out stuff.

No redial.  I wouldn't know if that's a thing with cell phones.

This used to bug me but I don't care anymore.  Vibrators.  Phones vary in what you can do to keep them from vibrating and using up juice, but in my experience, you can never simply turn it off completely.  I once successfully removed the shaft with the eccentric weight from one of my phones, but that is not often recommended.

It will show you a count of unread emails and junk like that.  Too bad it's inaccurate and only resets when you empty your inbox or threads or whatever completely.

If there can be such a thing as extremely or very mediocre, the camera on this pup is it.  I have had a lot of different cell phones over the years, some cheaper than others, and they all had pretty great cameras.  Not the case here.

All I want for Christmas is a quality cell phone that doesn't lock, has no touch screen, has a good battery, has an on/off button, a screen that glares brightly with no adjustment that you can see in any light, is the smallest and lightest phone ever made, makes calls, texts, has a clock and all the usual clock features, and has and does absolutely nothing else.  And no secret shortcuts or tricks.  And no vibrator.