It is Sunday, December 14 and there are only 11 days until Christmas!  It’s hard to believe that we are that close and I have not started baking yet.  Fortunately, I have already stocked up on preservatives like guar gum, so I will still be able to eat my cookies in February.  Today we remember the birthdays of Nostradamus, Richard Batka and Lee Remick.  On this day in 872, John VIII began his reign as Catholic Pope, in 1819 Alabama was admitted as the 22^nd state and in 1955 the Tappan Zee Bridge in New York opened to traffic.  In El Salvador it is Revolution Day, in Turkey it is the Festival of Mevlana-Jeladdin Rumi and in Alabama it is Admission Day.

We took a few days to go visit our friend Pat down the shore, recently.  It was great to see her, as always and we had a great time, as always.  On the way home, we were passed by a county sheriff car that stated that it was part of the Criminalistic Investigation Unit.  I had never heard of the word criminalistic and assumed it was an error.  I reasoned that since the word linguistics meant the study of human language, criminalistic meant the study of criminals.  That meant that criminalistic investigation was from the Department of Redundancy Department and was the investigation of the study of criminals. 

The lovely Elaine and I had a great time deriding the person who developed the title.  It turns out I was wrong.  Criminalistic is a real word which means the application of scientific techniques in collecting and analyzing physical evidence in criminal cases.  So you see that you can learn new things every day if you are open to the opportunity.

Last week I mentioned the baked goods of the season and the problems I had dealing with them as a diabetic.  I thought I might go a little further into the subject, just to give you an idea of the difficulties the average person has in dealing with this problem.  Both the lovely Elaine and I are type 2 diabetics.  When we were first diagnosed, we went to a nutritionist who gave us some good advice on how to handle our eating habits so we could keep the problem under control.  She gave us good guidance on what we could and could not eat.  We could not eat many of the foods we liked, we had to limit the amounts of the ones we could eat and we could not eat anything that resembled tasty.  We were basically limited to cardboard and celery.

We tried like crazy to adapt to the new regimen and were successful for some time.  Through careful monitoring of our diet, the lovely Elaine was able to control her sugar numbers without using medication and I was able to keep my numbers in check using only one medication.  I stopped using sugar in my coffee and switched to an artificial sweetener.  We were good about eating salads and avoiding what our doctor referred to as “white food” – white rice, white bread, pasta, etc.  We were careful to create menus that afforded us the nutritional benefits we needed, while giving us the illusion that we were enjoying the food we were eating.  The problem is that you can only eat chicken so many ways before you decide that you have had it.

What makes everything more difficult is that for every solution that one “expert” comes up with, there is another one who tells you that what you are doing is wrong and you should be doing something different.  Our original nutritionist said that the big thing was to watch our intake of carbs, because they convert to sugar.  We also read that you should count the net carbs – that is the number of carbs minus the ones from fiber.  We read more recently that you need to consider all the carbs and not deduct the fiber.  The lovely Elaine tried another nutritionist, recently, who told her that you didn’t need to be so conscious of carbs.

I read a number of articles that have told me that I should not be using the artificial sweetener that I have been using because it has adverse affects on your health and can actually raise your sugar numbers.  The nutritionist said that if you are not using that much (less than eight packets a day) it is not a problem.  What makes things even more confusing is that you really have no idea who to listen to or what to do.

Recently, our doctor had us do a test that monitored our glucose over a four day period.  We were supposed to test ourselves four times a day – prior to each meal and just before going to bed.  We were also supposed to list what we had to eat at each meal.  I am not sure what the value of that was.  I could see testing myself after a meal to see how what I ate affected my sugar.  But I did not see what the value was of testing before eating if I wasn’t testing again just after eating.  What makes this whole thing even more interesting is that a couple times I tested myself just before going to bed; then I tested in the morning before breakfast and found that my number was higher – without having had anything to eat after testing at night.  Go figure!

What it comes down to is that no one really has any solutions to the problem.  I am taking three different medications for my diabetes.  I have altered, somewhat, what I am eating in an effort to control my sugar intake.  My numbers continue to fluctuate and depending on which expert I choose to read this week I am doing or not doing the right things.  I try to watch sodium intake, because someone said that was good, someone else said it is bad to limit sodium too much.  I have eaten white rice and not seen any major jump in my number and have seen an increase after eating grilled chicken salad and brown rice.

So what it comes down to is that I am going to eat the cookies and candy and other goodies this Christmas and will see what happens.  My guess is that I will continue to have issues, will continue to take my medications and will continue to be befuddled by all the expert opinions that are out there.

This week our fact tells us that, at one time, the Romans used urine to whiten their teeth.  It supposedly worked.  I guess this was what necessitated the invention of mouthwash.  I also imagine this was originally where the phrase “potty mouth” came from.