Time to get creative

For those of you wondering where the pretty card in my last post came from, it's actually handmade. My sister (the one heading into her last semester of college) is amazing with scissors and paper, and she put together all of the cards she gave to the family. A few more examples of her work:




I think my favorite is the snowman, but the scarf, hat, and mittens on the card below it run a close second.

D's side of the family was hard at work on an art project too during the week before Christmas. As I mentioned while writing from his parents' place, D engineered a gingerbread cathedral -- one that took almost an entire week to construct. The results were quite solid:




There wasn't enough time to decorate the walls completely, but D and his brothers did manage to create the "stained glass" by melting down crushed bits of Jolly Rancher candy in greased cookie molds. Lighted from inside the cathedral, the windows really do suggest the real thing. The roof shingles are made from cut-up Twizzlers.

Before we took off on our road trip, D's brothers planned to finish off the decor with gargoyles made from gummy bears and Swedish Fish. Guess I'll find out how far the project got when I return to pick up my car in a little over a week. I suspect many of the would-be adornments will have met a different fate!

So where have I been applying my creative energies, you ask? Well, most of it has gone primarily toward sprucing up our apartment in the last day or two, by which I mean finding more storage and organizational space than truly exists. Goodwill, here we come! I'm giving up on selling much more on Amazon and Craigslist (another project from last summer that yielded a few successes but not enough to help us reclaim that much square footage). I think I'm trying to prepare for what may be a stay of indeterminate length in our sweet but small place while we wait for the housing market to turn up a potential home for us. Prices are looking better, but they're still ridiculously high compared to what people paid five years ago. In this economy, we're not biting. Yet.

The rest of my creativity is being channeled toward the kitchen -- namely, how to rework my diet. No, this is not one of those "new year, new you" fads. I finally got some answers as to why I was so tired last semester: I'm prediabetic. This is such a weird term -- "So you're not diabetic, what's the big deal?" you might ask. Well, it means my body can't handle sugar well, and if I don't make changes in my diet, full-blown diabetes will be right around the corner. (There's more to it than that, obviously, but I'll leave the scientific explanation to my other sister, the one in medical school.) It's especially frustrating because I exercise every day, eat balanced meals most of the time, and maintain a healthful weight. There's no arguing with genetics sometimes, though, the main culprit in this instance.

The good news is that since cutting out refined sugars from my diet, I've been feeling much, much better. I'm also getting pretty adept at doing finger sticks to test my blood glucose levels. The one thing I haven't figured out, however, is how to work fresh fruits into meals. They cause my readings to skyrocket, even in tiny portions, and I miss them terribly.

D has been great about all of this. In a sort of ironic fashion, he's a reactive hypoglycemic (at the opposite end of the sugar-problem spectrum), so he's familiar with the testing and diet restrictions. We're working on finding low-carb recipes to try out before I go back to school. Any suggestions are very, very welcome! The more, the better. I'd like some variety in my new regimen of eggs, nuts, and meats ...