Found a Job!

Wow!  Where does the time go?  Oh, I know where it goes :).  A person gets busy!

I found a part-time job at the local Home Depot.  I love rambling around in the store and just looking.  It's a DIYer's paradise, with all kinds of cool stuff.  It takes me back to my childhood when Dad would take my brother and me to the hardware store to browse.  It is a good place to just look because when you need to do some work around the house, if you know what they have, then it can give you good ideas of ways to do the job.

I've been thinking about going back to school to take some practical skill, like Locksmithing :)  With people being more security conscious these days, it seems to be an in-demand skill.  ICS has the least expensive tuition that I've found.  I'll have to figure out if it's doable.

Scored 3 cartons of jars (about 6 dozen) for $6.00 of all different sizes, so I am scouting around for lids at a decent price.  It's too bad that my idea of decent is not the same as big biz's!

I've been doing research on dealing with diabetes as I won't have medical coverage for a while, and Metformin is expensive.  I learned that if I very carefully control my diet, I can keep my blood sugar down, and can get by with less Metformin.  I have gotten my A1C (3 month blood sugar average) down from 11% to 6.5% since January.  Yay, me!

The dietary recommendations for diabetics are to have 3 portions of carb at each meal (1 portion being 15 grams of carb).  What I have been doing is have 2 portions of carb for breakfast, and every other day, 2 portions of carb for the evening meal.  My favorite new breakfast is multi grain crackers (enough to make approximately 30 grams of carb), 2-3 oz of cheese or 2 hard boiled edgs, and 1 small fruit (apple, pear, strawberries), and a handful of almonds, walnuts or pumpkin seeds.

I can have a sandwich, as each slice of bread is one portion of carb, so that makes two portions of carb. What goes inside of a sandwich can vary wildly. I particularly like a veggie sandwich with cheese, cucumber, tomatoes, lettuce and some ranch dressing.  Or a roast beef sandwich.

I have discovered that bananas, my favorite fruit, are really starchy, so if I have one, it's my entire carb allowance for the meal, and at that, I can only have a small one, or half a large one.

In terms of treatment, I have discovered White Mulberry formulated for diabetics at my local drug store as well as the health food store.  The stuff from the drug store is a bit cheaper than the health food store.  I got a jar on sale for $6.99 (a one month supply).  So, when the Metformin runs out, I hope to be good to go!

In spite of the terrible apple crops back east, we have had fairly good crops locally, and apples were available for 67c per pound last week.  Yay!  I canned up some apples, and have some apples that want cooking down to make applesauce.

I am waiting for a big sale on pumpkins so that I can do up some pumpkin chucks and pumpkin seeds.  I remember back when I was a kid, every class at school would get a pumpkin to carve for Halloween, and my best friend and I would go and carry off the seeds so that we could clean them up and roast them.  Yum, yum!

We cleared out the tomato and pepper plants (those left after the depradations of the deer), and gathered the last of the herbs (again those left after the deer were chomping on them).  It was a pretty discouraging year. I have never seen the deer so aggressively present in the yard before.  Because the creek in back is so low or even non-existent, a new path has been trodden from the fields in back of our place with a bee-line to the garden.  Grr!

Anyhoo, that's a small update on doings up my way!