The Good, the Bad and the . . . Kinky??

The Good?  Well, that's easy.  The Good is a vacation trip to Cape May, NJ to celebrate our 6th wedding anniversary.  AND stopping along the way for lunch and a few hours walking around town with an awesome D-OC friend!!

Kelly and me in Ocean City!!

Don't let me forget to mention the Nutella crepe was shared for dessert.  That was beyond Good!

How about the Bad?  Well, as you can see in the picture above, the Bad is what happens to my hair when I walk around all day in temperatures that would have Beelzebub turning on the air conditioner.  My poor hair is flatter than the crepes we ate for lunch!

Want more of the Bad?  How about the drinks Pete and I ordered during Sunday lunch in Cape May?

My banana daiquiri and his Hurricane!

Seriously, drinking at lunch on Sunday?  Bad!  But the drinks were oh so Good.  And my blood sugars handled the afternoon drinking quite well with the help of a long stroll around town after lunch.

Unfortunately, those blood sugars got really Bad on our long long ride home from Cape May.  We stopped for lunch, where I bought a $7(!!!) tuna fish sandwich and then found my blood sugar was way too high to even think about eating.  Correction after correction did nothing to bring me down.  It was the worst feeling in the world to realize I was stuck on a 5 - 6 hour car trip with insulin that had gone bad from the heat.  I wasn't even able to eat a thing all day.

As it turns out, my insulin wasn't Bad.  Nope, the highs were actually Kinky.

A cannula should not resemble a backwards letter r!!

I know I haven't even been pumping for three years yet, but I've never seen a cannula kinked like this!  It caused quite a panic when I realized I had taken 12 units of insulin by injection - thinking that the insulin was barely working.  Of course, I didn't discover that my careful handling of the insulin bottles had actually protected them from the heat until after I had thrown them (both) away.  (One was brand new and one had only been opened during my site change that morning.)

So the moral of the story is - don't assume it's Bad . . . . because it might just be Kinky!!

Not enough Kinky in this post for you?  Well, okay.  Take a look at this blog (LINK IS NOT FAMILY FRIENDLY THOUGH!!!!) that someone (who I won't call out here) Tweeted a link to recently.  Then look at this smokestack we saw on our drive and tell me what you see . . .

How to spot a bad blogger . . .

Well, she would be the one who blogs more when she's away on vacation than she does when she's at home!

That's right.  My last three posts were brought to you by the magic of Blogger's Advanced Scheduling.  The posts were pre-written, and published themselves while Pea and I were off on a fabulous cruise for our anniversary!

 

Yes, I did take that picture!!  Click on it if you'd like to see the rest of our vacation photos.

It was relaxing.  It was sunny.  It was so much fun.  We ate great food.  We drank yummy drinks.  We swam in the pool.  We gambled in the casino. We went to the gym almost every day - to try and compensate for some of the food and drink.  My blood sugars didn't misbehave too much, aside from a few highs and a few lows here and there.  And I even got a little bit of knitting in.

But now that we've been back for a week, I guess I can't use the Getting-Caught-Up-From-Vacation excuse anymore.  This bad blogger had better start writing some posts again!

Sweet, Sweet San Diego . . .

So as it turns out, Pea got sent to San Diego for work last week.  I decided to tag along, and we managed to fit some play time in too.

San Diego is the sweetest city I've ever seen.  The weather is sweet.  The beach is sweet.

It was about 80 degrees and I got a bit sunburned, and I loved it.  I can now say I've touched the Pacific Ocean as well as the Atlantic.  And wwwaaaayyy out there?  It wasn't Long Island, like when I look out at home.  It was Mexico.  Wow.

The Trolley Tour was sweet.  We saw Old Town, where we ate the best Mexican food ever.

Yup, Mexican two days in a row. Poor Dual Wave feature really got a work out.

We saw the sweet Gas Lamp district, where we had many an awesome breakfast at Richard Walkers and found those incredible cupcakes from my last post.  And we hopped around sweet Seaport Village to see the sights and browse the shops.

 

We found a sweet spot in Balboa Park to enjoy some southern California scenery.

But by far, the sweetest thing about San Diego was the fact that I was going to be meeting up with the D-OC's own Ninjabetic, George!!!  Even sweeter was that he had a little surprise for me.  He brought Scott with him!!  OH. MY. GOODNESS.  Could my smile have been any bigger?

It was a bit surreal and I was a wee bit confused when George said he brought a friend.  I knew it was Scott the minute I saw him, but I knew Scott doesn't live in California and it took my brain a minute or so to work the whole thing out.  I would have loved to have seen the look on my face.  (Guys, did I look like I didn't know what the heck was going on?)

We had a wonderful dinner at Denny's where we ate, talked, laughed and cried.  Not to worry, we only cried because we were laughing so hard.  We had the best waitress ever.  Scott had some fun by convincing her that we travel around the country eating at as many Denny's as we could find.  She was an incredibly good sport though.  Of course, she won George over when she brought him a whole carafe of Diet Coke.  See it in the front of the picture?  (It's empty, of course!) 

And yes, that's my infamous sunburn. In February. A SUNBURN IN FEBRUARY!! YEE HAA!

Our meet-up was over far too soon, but we had  to be up at 3am catch an early flight out.  And now, we are home, sadly, where it is barely above freezing and there are no Ninjabetics or Surprise Scotts.  But for them, the adventure continues.  Pop on over and hear about it here.

Good to be away, good to be home.

Well, vacation is officially over. We spend a fun week in Colonial Williamsburg for a Family Reunion with my mother's side of the family. I was sure I had gotten a shot of the 25ish of us all posing together, but I guess my camera was hidden away when the picture was taken. Hopefully some relatives will upload their copies soon! The best I can do is a picture of me and my brother at Jamestown, with my aunt and uncle in the back.


How can you tell that's me, and that we are related? Why, by the way we are both desperately trying to ignore the camera (and Pea) in the hopes of not getting our picture taken!! Our conversation probably went something like this:
"Is he gone yet?"
"Nope, still there."
"Well for goodness sake, don't look - and certainly don't smile!"
"Why doesn't he just go take a shot of the scenery?"

As great as vacation is, it's good to be home. Am I the only one who loves to go away, but maybe loves to come home even more? It's always so nice to be back in my own house, sleeping in my own bed and using my own clean bathroom where everything is accessible and not stuffed in a travel case. If it weren't for the empty fridge and piles of dirty laundry, coming home just might be perfect.

Another nice thing about coming home is cooking my meals own again. Now, I love a good meal out as much as the next person, but it's always a bit of a challenge. Trying to resist the less-healthy menu options (and in my case, usually ordering them anyway), playing Guess the Carb Count, and punching in S.W.A.G. boluses with the hopes of covering the mystery carbs just right. After a full week of eating every meal this way, it feels good to come back home to food whose carb count I am 100% sure of.

But as vacations go, things went pretty smoothly Diabetes-Wise. Well, okay, I did get my first ever non-delivery message at breakfast on Monday, which caused a near freak-out. But I caught it when my blood sugar was only in the low 200's, and since I had put in a new site a few hours earlier I knew to just change it out. By mid-morning I was back where I should be. Oh, and there was the night I accidentally gave my site a good whack. It seemed fine, but I woke up a 2 am in the high 200's. Not normal for me. Again, I changed out the site, stayed up for an hour to make sure my blood sugar was heading back down, and woke for good at 7 am with a reading of 72. Crisis averted. The very hot weather and all of the walking we did while sight seeing even afforded me a few treats along the way. (Mmm, fudge, how I've missed you!) All in all, not a bad vacation.

But it's still good to be home.