Yow!

This thermometer was left behind on the porch by the previous owner of our house. We've been using it this week to determine when to open the windows -- it's silly to let air in while the outside temps are higher than what the thermostat reads indoors. But I wondered if the thermometer was working, especially given what it was reporting in the shade this afternoon (see photo).

Well, it apparently isn't off by much. At my last check, weather.com was reporting a current temperature of 104 degrees with a heat index of 109.

We're managing -- lots of caprese salads, cucumbers and hummus, fresh berries, and of course, water. The air conditioner in our bedroom is keeping us comfortable at night, and we try to do as much work around the house as possible during the cooler parts of the day. And that works quite well for two people in our space.

The forecast is not inspiring confidence for next week, however, when Troubadour Mom and Dad are slated to arrive. This heat wave was supposed to crest somewhere in the vicinity of yesterday and ease its way out of the area, leaving behind temperatures in the low 80s. At this moment, I'm seeing reports of much less comfortable highs all the way into Monday. Troubadour Mom and Dad land on Tuesday.

We'll take a few days in Vancouver in an air-conditioned hotel (Troubadour Dad needs his authentic Chinese-style seafood fix), probably returning Thursday night. May the weather gods be merciful by then -- I have no idea how I'm going to magically procure climate-controlled sleeping quarters for everyone.

Unpacking

This weekend, D and I tackled the piles of boxes we'd stuck in the room that will eventually become D's office. Since our arrival, the space has essentially been an extra-large walk-in closet for us, but now that my parents and Newly Graduated Sis are coming to visit in a week, we're inclined to get it somewhat tidied -- so it can fit the boxes that have spilled over into the guest bedroom.

We got through the majority of D's stuff by Sunday night, which leaves the rest of this week for me to figure out what I want to do with mine. Much of it is memorabilia from school that needs to be organized so it can be sifted through more easily should I ever need to access anything from a specific time, and being on the point of starting to write this thesis has made me reluctant to toss things that provide potentially useful information about my past. Not the best mindset to be in when you're trying to make space!

It doesn't help that the texts I've been looking at as possible models for my work all incorporate the use of personal documents and other such things to really interesting effect. In the last few weeks, I've managed to steal enough time (mostly on planes) to finish three books that do this.

The first is Five Thousand Days Like This One by Jane Brox. Her memoir is one part a collection of family stories passed down to her by her father and the other part a history of New England farm life. Both portions of the work use old records to reanimate scenes from the past in Brox's poetic style. I don't think it's a style I would follow -- sometimes the way the records are quoted into the larger narrative feels a bit choppy against the original language of the writer; the two just don't blend -- but it's striking how much those records help Brox situate her father's apple farm in the culture of American commerce when industry arrives. Context is everything.

The second book that makes great use of personal documents is Honor Moore's The Bishop's Daughter. In a way, the work relies almost too heavily on these -- primarily letters between Moore's parents in their dating years as well as letters between father and daughter and mother and daughter. The goal of incorporating all of this correspondence is to aid in creating a portrait of the family's private life while its members navigate a very public existence (Paul Moore was the 13th Episcopal Bishop of New York). I love how much access the narrator has to all of these rich primary sources -- I certainly don't have that volume to work with! On occasion, though, the specificity of each piece of evidence meant to illustrate some detail makes it difficult to see the big picture that the narrator is painting. It overwhelms, to a degree.

The most recent book I've finished is Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex. This one isn't actually a memoir, but it reads very much like one and situates its narrative over three generations of a Greek family adapting to life in America between the 1920s and 1970s (which includes Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement ...). It is extremely clear that the author has researched the influences of these six decades on Detroit -- the city where most of the narrative takes place -- and he weaves that information into the background of the story in a way that doesn't detract from the focus on the protagonist, a girl coming of age in that third generation of her family. Her coming of age is complicated by biological factors that have their own story, and this narrative thread's ability to hold its own as a driving force in the novel against such a tumultuous historical backdrop is what really amazes me. The two elements work in sync with each other to even greater effect.

All right, enough pseudo-book-reviewing from me. I know I've been behind on updating my reading list for the summer, so there you go (see the full list in the sidebar). Also, for those of you keeping track, I've got six more nominations left for the One Lovely Blog award, so if you like reading about what other people are reading, here are some blogs I've discovered recently:

• Books and Cooks, written by Tara
• Breaking the Fourth Wall, written by Lisa
• Tripping Toward Lucidity: Estella's Revenge, written by Andi
• Incurable Logophilia (author unnamed)
• Writing Under a Pseudonym, written by Jade Park.

And yes, the final nominee will be forthcoming soon.

A lot of hot air

... is coming our way.

It's been creeping toward us all week and promises to descend into the Pacific Northwest by Sunday. I'm more than a little freaked out -- five straight days of 90-degree highs (as weather.com says).

Now I'm decently hardy; I used to play tennis in this kind of heat for my high school team (typical temps for the start of the school year in the Midwest) and I spent two years in Texas, where it was still this hot in November (try getting in the mood to do your holiday shopping when people are wearing clothes more appropriate for beach barbecues than winter wonderlands). In both locations, though, you are pretty much guaranteed an air conditioner in your house if it was built after 1990 -- no builder would design something without one. Our place, on the other hand, does not have this luxury; most homes in Seattle don't, and in the recent near 90-degree days we've had, getting work done at home has been feasible but miserable.

So yesterday, I headed to Home Depot right after the store opened to pick up a portable air conditioner (we would have gone with a cheaper window unit except that the homeowners' association for our neighborhood forbids them and will fine us more than the cost of said appliance if they catch us with one). When I called beforehand to make sure Home Depot actually had the model I wanted in stock, the person who answered the phone told me that there were 96 of them on the premises at the beginning of the previous day, and that more than half had gone out the door by closing time. So I'm glad I went when I did; today's chances of getting anything look grim.

At the same time, we really didn't want to have to buy a single-room unit as we already have central heating and could have a full-sized air conditioner hooked up to the system, which over time is a better investment. But that would require around $2,000 up front, summer is halfway over, and we'll probably have only one more heat wave before it cools down for good. Plus the likelihood of getting the job done in time for the imminent broiling is very low.

So I guess all this is to say that I'm feeling rather ambivalent about our purchase -- it was certainly justifiable and it was the best solution after D and I did the cost-benefit analysis (a fine on the cheaper window unit would end up putting us over the cost of the portable one), but I still wish it felt less like we were having unnecessary money wrung from our sweaty hands. Whoever prices portable air conditioners must be in cahoots with our homeowners' association.

Would you tough it out sans climate control? Apparently these folks have tried it. They have my admiration, but I just can't bring myself to follow in their footsteps.

Change is good

Especially when it adds up to $30.50! D and I had been putting off rolling our coin stash for quite some time, but the giant cocoa container we'd been throwing pennies into in the car kept tipping over and spilling the contents everywhere when we were driving (the snap-on lid was nothing against the force of all that metal battering it from underneath). So we emptied the piggy bank over the weekend and went to work.

When we were doing the long-distance thing in college, D and I used to save our pennies to pool when we saw each other. Once we'd saved enough, we'd go, like eager children, to the nearest Ben & Jerry's for ice cream cones. It was something to look forward to, and it gave us a sense of progress toward a goal smaller than reaching the end of commuting (it was also unclear at what point that would happen). I don't think we'll be spending all of this windfall in the same way, but maybe we'll hit a Ben & Jerry's for a (sugar-free) treat as a little reminder of that time. Haven't really thought about how else to use the money yet.

Speaking of change, I've been thinking a lot about the week in Canada with the family Troubadour (both sides of it), and I'm really struck by how my relationship with different members of the family has shifted. When I was very little, we used to go to Toronto at least once each summer, so my aunts and uncles got to know me as a kid reasonably well. Then we stopped going up as regularly for several years -- Dad's job, summer sports, etc., got in the way. By the time I reached high school, we were only visiting for weddings and funerals, which were highly focused events where everyone was busy with the ceremonial tasks at hand (obviously) and no one had time to visit, per se. As a result, I lost touch with my aunts and uncles, and their primary knowledge about me became fairly dated, somewhere in the range of the awkward early teens.

Now fast-forward more than a decade. In the last few summers, I've managed to make it to Toronto to spend time with my grandmother (my only remaining grandparent), so I've been able to catch up with my mom's family somewhat. While we were in town this month, Troubadour Mom, her older sister, and I stayed up into the wee hours talking and talking, which was nice. When I was in that awkward stage, I would still opt to listen to the adults chattering away instead of running around with my cousins -- they were quite a bit older and Troubadour Dad wasn't inclined to have me out of easy retrieval range. This time, though, I was actually included in the conversation. Heavy conversation. Discussions about money (trying to make ends meet), marriage (its challenges), long-standing friction between some of my mother's siblings (the fallout), and the decisions some of those siblings made regarding the health care of their aging parents (possibly dubious). I didn't have anything to say regarding the last two topics, of course, as it wasn't my place, but the fact that my aunt felt comfortable talking about such sensitive things in my presence marked the difference in how she looked at me. Perhaps it was because I'm married (that seems to carry a certain weight with most relatives when it comes to their regard); perhaps it was because I've seen my aunt at least once a year in the last three years and she's had the chance to reacquaint herself with who I am. Whatever it was, I appreciated the change.

Then there are those relatives who, regardless of my marital status or how often they see me, will consider me a child to the day they join their ancestors. One of these people is actually Troubadour Dad, and that bothers me -- not so much because of how he acts toward me when he's on his own, but because of how he acts toward me in front of his family. For some reason, when they're around, Troubadour Dad gets especially sensitive about his image, and if any one of his children does or says anything that threatens to make him lose face (at least, in his own mind), he swiftly invokes the use of public humiliation.

I never thought it was an effective tool when I was a kid, and I really don't think it's appropriate to use on adults. Imagine being told, for reasons unclear, that "you'd better behave" -- while your aunts, uncles, and their grown children are standing right next to you. I won't even try to describe the circumstances under which this occurred while I was in Newfoundland as that will only mire this post in further discussion of convoluted family politics and a debate on whether any wrongs had actually been committed (suffice it to say, for the purpose of scene painting, that we were waiting for a table at a restaurant). My point here: wouldn't you be far more likely to get a desirable response from a grown man or woman by taking the person aside and raising your concerns privately rather than chastising that person as you would a small child, especially given the sizable audience? I'm not sure if the language or the wagging index finger (I kid you not) was more degrading.

But enough about that. Sigh -- I think the trip to Ben & Jerry's is definite. At least the experience there will allow me to feel like a kid again in a good way.

47° 31' 17" N, 52° 37' 24" W

That is where the easternmost point in North America is located.

I knew before I arrived in Newfoundland that if there was anything I wanted to do, it was to go there since it was no more than a 20-minute drive from our hotel in St. John's. Why travel almost all the way across the continent and then stop a few degrees short of the entire distance? (Okay, I guess I'd have to be coming from the westernmost point in Alaska in order to say that I'd really covered the requisite mileage, but I think you understand what I'm getting at here.)

We had one day for sightseeing, so getting to this destination, formally known as Cape Spear, was at the top of the list for a lot of the family members who attended my cousin's wedding. So we went caravan-style in various rental cars, obligatory cameras at our sides. If the locals hadn't already gotten to see a stereotypical Asian tourist group, we definitely provided the proper visual ...

Actually, we sort of dispersed a bit once we got there, which I appreciated. Reunions with all of the extended family are fun, but it also means resurrecting certain tensions born of complicated family politics, and since this was the day after the wedding, there had been enough time for some of that to surface. That'll keep for another post, though.

Before going to the cape, we stopped at Signal Hill, which was also a lovely place to take pictures. The hiking paths were steep at certain points along the way, but they gave us beautiful views of St. John's. Signal Hill was apparently a defensive stronghold from the 18th century to World War II, and there are cannons still guarding the narrows leading into the city's harbor. Newly Graduated Sis and I had fun climbing around on them to get interesting shots. Here's one of hers:


And here are some different perspectives on the narrows as they open toward the Atlantic. Cannon-view:


NG Sis-view (rather, the narrows with NG Sis):


And Troubadour-view:


Cape Spear offered even more to see, I thought. We happened to be there at the time of year when wild irises are in bloom, so I took several pictures for D (they're his favorite flower).













Clover also covers the grassy slopes leading out to the ocean.


NG Sis and I were so absorbed in our own explorations that we got quite a bit behind the main group, as you can see:


We caught up with them just as one of our uncles ventured off the path (despite several warning signs against it!) to check out the boulders at the ocean's edge.


Apparently a good number of people have been swept off these rocks by the giant waves that can surge up quite suddenly. Fortunately, none appeared while our uncle was poking around.


The obligatory picture of the sign marking our location, latitude and longitude included (click on the photo for a closer look):


And then a leisurely climb to the lighthouse.



It's definitely worth going back -- I'd want to take D as it's the kind of place he would love. When we'll have time for an extended trip together, though, is uncertain. Perhaps when he gets more vacation time (not until he's been with his employer for five years). But by then we'll likely have little Troubadours to take with us ...

Hmm, maybe this'll have to wait till they can handle 15 hours of cross-country travel. Yes.

Only connect ...

Even though I was gone for only a week and a day, this most recent trip felt much longer because so much happened during that time.

From Tuesday through Friday, I was in Toronto with Troubadour Mom and Newly Graduated Sis, staying with my aunt (the same one who put me up last August). The primary goal of the visit was to spend time with my grandmother, who has been in a nursing home since 2004 for Alzheimer’s.

Last time we saw her, Nga Po was still fairly responsive and could speak, albeit in short, repetitive phrases. She was fuzzier in the morning from the antidepressants she was put on, apparently because she would hit the caregivers when she didn’t want to do what they asked (take other medications, allow them to move her, etc.). But by her noon meal, she was reasonably alert, and just after her afternoon nap, she was most present. She would even laugh occasionally and could recognize some of her children.

This time, she seemed to have lost a great deal of her ability to speak, and the effort of trying to communicate in even nonverbal ways was exhausting for her. Every few minutes, her head would drop down and she would close her eyes like someone trying not to succumb to sleep. Feeding her was more challenging as well, as she seemed to be more prone to choking, and she often forgot she had something in her mouth (especially when she nodded off between bites) and then didn’t swallow. She is mostly on puréed foods, but she can still eat one of her favorite desserts, egg custard tart (see photo above), which we picked up specially at a bakery to see if we could whet her appetite. She seemed to like that. I have no idea what the plan is once she loses the ability to eat and requires tube feeding -- I don’t believe she has any kind of living will, but I also don’t know how the health care and legal systems in Canada govern her end-of-life care.

We didn’t expect her to recognize any of us this time, given her deterioration, but we came armed with things to help her reconnect with us. One of those things was stories she used to tell Troubadour Mom. NG Sis and I have heard them many times -- the ones about Nga Po running from the Japanese when Hong Kong was invaded during World War II, her husband spending their last $500 on fireworks when the news of the Japanese defeat came, running the family upholstery business and sewing curtains for the entire Peninsula Hotel, and on and on and on. Troubadour Mom did the retelling this time to jog Nga Po’s memory, and whenever she got stuck thinking of what to talk about next, NG Sis and I prompted her with other things we remembered Troubadour Mom telling us. Nga Po didn’t respond very much, but she did nod occasionally and let us massage her neck and back and hold her hands. When Troubadour Mom touched Nga Po’s face with her palm, Nga Po would lean into Mom’s hand and close her eyes like a kitten nuzzling into a soft blanket. It was so hard not to just enfold her in all of our arms as she seemed so starved for physical contact, but she probably wouldn’t have liked that, given that we weren’t familiar to her.

On the second afternoon we spent with her, she seemed to remember us from the previous day’s visit, but we were still pretty sure she didn’t know who we were. Since she seemed more responsive, we decided to show her some photos of Troubadour Mom and her siblings when they were children, using my laptop screen to enlarge them for easier viewing. She looked quite intently at the images while Troubadour Mom named each of the people pictured, which seemed to pierce through some of the fog in Nga Po’s memory. But then she pushed the laptop away. We figured she was tired or bored.

As soon as we put the laptop away, though, she reached for Troubadour Mom’s hand and began to massage it with her fingers -- just as we had been doing to her neck and back the day before. We could tell that she wanted to say something, but she couldn’t access the words, which was heartbreaking. I sort of lost it at that point and started to tear up, which set us all off. There we were, NG Sis and I with a hand stroking Nga Po’s arm or leg and the other scrabbling for tissues in our purses. What a mess.

Then, Nga Po very deliberately took my hand from her shoulder and placed it on top of NG Sis’s hand. Next, she took Troubadour Mom’s hand and placed it on top of mine. And then she went to work on my hand with her fingers, rubbing and kneading, all the while looking from one face to another very intently. It was as if she was trying to comfort us, telling us to comfort one another too and that it was going to be okay. I think we were so stunned that we forgot about crying and just gazed back at her, letting her understand that we were listening to what she couldn’t say.

We didn’t know what to hope for on the next day, our last with her, given the unpredictability of her mood, so we started off again just talking to her. Troubadour Mom fed her dinner, and then we took her back to the sitting area where we had shown her photos before.

She seemed less engaged with us, but we thought we’d try a different set of pictures on the laptop -- a collection NG Sis and Troubadour Mom had put together from a web search for images of the Hong Kong neighborhood where Troubadour Mom grew up. Somehow, they were even able to locate a picture of the apartment building she and her siblings had spent most of Troubadour Mom’s childhood in (the oldest was seventeen when she was born, so he wasn’t really a kid anymore).

Instead of telling Nga Po’s stories, Troubadour Mom gave a sort of running commentary on what the photos reminded her of: her secondary school, being picked up by Nga Po there, buying school supplies at the shop on the first floor of the apartment building, going for tea every afternoon. Nga Po began nodding with each photo, clearly remembering.

She was also nodding off between photos, worn out from the effort of looking, it seemed, even though she very obviously wanted to stay awake, so we put the laptop away again. When it seemed that we should take her back to her room so she could rest, though, she suddenly looked at me and remarked that I had gotten so tall -- the same words she’d used on my previous visit when she first spoke to me then. Again, we were completely stunned.

Then Nga Po began talking in earnest -- she seemed to know who we were -- and called my mother by her childhood nickname. It was as if a different person had been reawakened. Luckily, NG Sis had her camera, which takes great video, so we filled her memory card three times with footage of Nga Po and Troubadour Mom’s conversation (downloading the clips to my laptop each time it ran out of space). The content wouldn’t seem to have much significance to anyone outside the family, I imagine, but the person my grandmother was before she became more or less mute came back for a good hour, and that’s what we were all so thrilled to have in the recording. The connection to Nga Po, too, was more than we could have ever hoped to achieve in our brief visit.

We were not going to be able to see Nga Po the next day as we had to get ready to fly to Newfoundland for the next part of our trip -- had to run various errands and do a wrap-up day with Troubadour Mom’s family (we wouldn’t be seeing them again). So it was especially hard, after such a breakthrough, to tell Nga Po that we had to leave. It seems to be this way each time we visit: we get just enough time to reconnect with her and then we’re yanked away. I know that if we were there on a regular basis, she would be able to hang on to her words and her memories so much more, though of course, further mental deterioration would still occur with the progression of the disease. We can’t ask others to do what we did -- visit for hours and help her perform what are essentially exercises in memory -- as the other family members in Toronto have their own lives to take care of, with some people working multiple jobs. It just seems horrifically sad, though, that this is the reality of the situation: unavoidable absence.

There’s much more from this trip to write about, but I think this seems to be a good stopping place. Some additional recommended reading if you're interested: an article that appeared in The New York Times last week on end-of-life considerations. Quite relevant, I thought.

En route encore

I'm writing from Halifax, Nova Scotia, during one of my layovers on the journey home -- I have one more in Toronto, where I'll go through customs. It's hard to believe that I left St. John's, Newfoundland, on the 9:30 a.m. flight and will be back in Seattle just before 8 p.m., which is really 12:30 a.m. in the time zone I've been in since Saturday. (Newfoundland is an extra half-hour ahead of its immediate western neighbors, hence the weird conversion.)

It's been a really wild week -- amazing ups and really frustrating downs involving some family circumstances, which I will get into in a future post (or two). For now, let me finish what I was in the process of writing about in my last entry: some timely discoveries for our third wedding anniversary celebration.

If there's one thing that D and I have missed enormously since both of us went on the low-carb diet, it's pasta (he has reactive hypoglycemia, which means we have similar dietary restrictions). So imagine our excitement when we found low-carb noodles at the grocery store while we were shopping for our anniversary weekend!

D has especially missed pad thai, and these turned out to be perfect in flavor and texture for it. The noodles themselves are made from tofu and yam flour, with only one gram of net carbohydrates per serving.


We also found that our grocery store carries an Italian-style dried pasta by a company called Dreamfields, which we will try when I get back home. It is also low in carbohydrates, though not quite as low as the Shirataki noodles.

I think these finds have probably been the most diet broadening ones in a while, so even if this seems like minor news, we're happy about it. And of course, it was a special treat for us to have these goodies to celebrate with. Noodles symbolize long life in Chinese culture -- hopefully this culinary discovery is not only a good addition to the list of foods we can eat, but a good omen too.

My flight's about to board. More news after I get home -- I have a huge backlog of things to post about! (I promise they're not all food-related.)

Three years

Next week, D and I will mark our third wedding anniversary -- but from opposite coasts of North America. He's going to be here working while I'm in Newfoundland for my cousin's wedding. How are we going to remedy missing this day together?

By celebrating during this entire holiday weekend, of course.

D got yesterday off, so we started the festivities by having a lunch date in the darling neighborhood called Queen Anne just north of downtown Seattle. D had been up there once or twice before but I hadn't had the chance to explore it.

First stop: The 5 Spot, a little diner off the main drag. The place was well recommended on various websites I'd peeked at. The interior looked quite busy when we arrived and was kind of noisy, but the menu promised tasty rewards. Imagine our delight when we got shown to a separate room at the rear of the restaurant away from the crowds with a view of a private patio garden!

The entire patio was surrounded by a brick wall, mounted with metal lamps at the top edge and a small birdbath below. The primary showpiece in the garden was a gorgeous Japanese maple, and the sunlight streaming through its leaves cast an especially soft light through the picture window next to our table -- a lovely filter for what's usually pretty strong sun at noon:



We took our time ordering, ultimately deciding on a steak sandwich with shoestring fries and a hearty stout for D and a smoked salmon and field greens salad with avocado, caramelized onions, lime vinaigrette, and herbed crostini for me. Everything was so good that we're going to try to reproduce both dishes in the near future (minus the beer -- we haven't tried out home-brewing yet).

After the last bites were gone, we wandered the neighborhood, checking out the boutiques and the local market. The latter had lots of starter plants to give us ideas for our own patio garden. Perhaps some succulents or some herbs? Maybe even a strawberry patch for next summer? That will probably require a corner of the yard itself. We've been sampling the local produce, and there's no substitute for fresh-picked fruit -- the berries shipped from other places tend to be picked prematurely and gas-ripened, so they lack flavor. I have a feeling we're going to be spoiled by all the goodies in season during these warm months! We already have plans to go to the farmers' market in a different area today. Have to take advantage of it while it lasts ...

We also stopped at a store that had beautifully glazed pottery on display. I fell in love with a set of six salad bowls -- they were celadon green at the center, fading to ecru at the rim -- but we decided to wait to buy them; D pointed out that the color was only inside and would be prettier outside too. We have plans to go pottery painting as it is on Sunday (which we discovered during our first winter here), so now that we have some inspiration, we might try to do something similar in design.

Time to head out -- but stay tuned! We have more neat discoveries to share.

Number crunching

That's what today has been about.

I've actually been preparing for today for about six weeks (ever since my endocrinologist started me on that low-oxalate diet -- bleh -- at the end of May). I saw the doctor this morning and got the results of my latest lab tests. The good news: the numbers are coming down as we've hoped they would. The oxalate levels are now in the 60s, which is much closer to normal (under 30; my last reading was over 270) and the phosphorus levels are completely normal in the high 800s (previously over 2100). So cutting out spinach and (some) nuts and tea has worked enormously in my favor, which hopefully means no more kidney stones in the future. This also means I have to stay on this diet, but so far, I'm managing.

Of course, though, there's a new wrinkle: I have exocrine problems.

Because I was experiencing some GI unpleasantness in early May (I'll spare you the details) and inexplicable weight gain, I got a referral to another specialist who ordered some tests of his own. It's not definitive yet, but the early results indicate that I don't digest fats properly. The culprit behind this problem is most likely the pancreas (again!) -- but this time it's the part of the organ belonging to the exocrine system, i.e., the part responsible for getting fat-digesting enzymes where they need to go.

So I'm now taking these.


This is Pancrecarb, which basically delivers the enzymes I need in capsule form. I take one capsule with each meal, and the tiny pellets inside get released as their container breaks down. So far, this seems to be alleviating the GI symptoms extremely well. Unfortunately, the weight gain hasn't leveled off yet. (Granted, I've only been on the meds for a week, but ... ) While the upward creep of the numbers on the scale has been slow, it has been frustrating, especially since I've been increasing my workout time -- and all that's done is give me sugar lows more often.

The nurse at the GI doctor's office who gave me my test results said that my body may have been hanging on to extra weight because it wasn't getting enough dietary fat (a bit counterintuitive, but certainly possible, I guess) so my metabolism may need to readjust. If that's the case, I'm hoping that happens sooner rather than later. I'm fine with what I weigh now, but about seven years ago I was nearly 30 pounds heavier (out of the healthy range for my height and build) and I really don't want to go back to that. I've worked too hard to get fit only to have a pancreas on the fritz undo it all!

In the spirit of staying motivated, here are a few blogs I've been reading recently that I'd like to add to my list of nominees for the One Lovely Blog award:

• Cranky Fitness, written by Crabby McSlacker and Merry Sunshine
• Refuse to Regain, written by Barbara Berkeley and Lynn Haraldson-Bering
• Back in Skinny Jeans, written by Stephanie Quilao
• PastaQueen, written by Jennette Fulda
  

So there's some inspiration to fight the good fight without losing total perspective on why we do it. I am not just a bunch of numbers, I know, even if my doctors tend to rely on them to keep me well. Maybe remind me of that the next time I have to step on the scale ...