Final NaNo Excerpt: A Long Distance Argument

26
Nov

I must concede NaNo this year. Yes, the same way I conceded last year. Don’t rub it in. There’s just no way for me to make up the difference in four days between where I am and 50,000. Not unless I totally cheat, which I’m trying not to do since it won’t really feel good to hit that 50k mark and know that it isn’t all new material generated during this month. Maybe I’m being a stickler but that’s how imma gonna do it. Then when I DO win, sometime in the future, I’ll know it was fair and square.

P.S. Why on earth do they organize this thing during the month of November? Why not a month with no national holidays, or some throw-away winter month when it’s way too awful outside to do anything so everyone’s holed up indoors? Maybe this is how they weed out the wanna-be’s from the truly committed. Well if I had made time to win, the rest of my life would have suffered so I had to let it go. It wasn’t easy, and there’s definitely a sense of losing rather than winning. But isn’t that a funny game I’m playing with myself? I don’t actually WIN something if I hit 50k. They don’t give out winning treasure boxes with trinkets inside, or anything more than a badge you can use on your website to say you “won.”

Even though I’m a loser (in the NaNo sense) I still want to put up a final excerpt from the WIP. This will be my last one for November, so I’m going to leave you with a scene between two characters who are trying to navigate a long distance friendship-with-potential…and finding it challenging. Have a wonderful evening, and as always, thanks for reading.

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Abby heard the phone ringing in her dorm room just as she stepped onto her floor. She ran down the hall, silently praying her roommate hadn’t been her normal vigilant self and locked the door again. She got into the room and snatched up the receiver on the clunky school-issued phone.

“Hello, hello?” she practically yelled.

“Whoa, hello to you too. That’s the angriest greeting I’ve ever heard. ”

She let her backpack slide to the floor and she pulled out the hard wooden chair from the desk. “Sorry, I just barely made it to answer the phone. I’m not mad.”

Jay chuckled on the other end of the line. “I know you’re not. Unless you are, but I think I’m starting to be able to pick up on that over the phone even. It’s easy to tell when we’re in person.”

“It is not.”

“Oh really? So you can see yourself when that vein puffs out on your forehead?”

“It does? I never knew that.”

“See? One more reason to keep me around: self discovery.”

Abby smiled into the phone. “Okay, I guess I’ll keep you. But I’m not even keeping you around ‘cause you’re never around.”

“This long distance thing is starting to get on my nerves, too,” he agreed. “Bur think of it as being the best of both worlds. You have a devoted admirer who is extremely understanding of your long study hours and the way you go out with your friends. If I was closer I might not be so easy to live with.”

“You do like to play more than I do. Well, not more,” she corrected herself, “But more than I’m able to play. This study load is heavy and I don’t even know exactly how well I’m doing.”

“You did great on your last test, didn’t you?”

“Sure but that was a pretty limited scope. I know how to study, but it’s different than knowing your overall grade.”

“You’re too picky. You think you should get 100% on all your tests, but Abby, nobody gets that.”

She picked up a pen and started doodling. “I know.”

“But you don’t really know. You still think you should be able to. Maybe you should talk to some of your professors and see what they say? Not about the grade on a test, but overall how you’re doing. They’ve got to be able to tell if someone’s cut out for nursing.”

She doodled a stethoscope and he waited.

“What would I do if I asked and they said I’m not cut out for it? I don’t know what I would do. It’s the only thing I’ve ever pictured myself doing. I don’t have a plan B.”

“You won’t need one. You’re the studyingest person I ever saw, and you’re definitely putting in the time. It was only a suggestion. You already know it’s what you want to do. If you talked to them, they’d probably just tell you to let up a little, go have some fun with that cute guy who keeps calling you.”

“Which one?” she quipped.

“Ouch.”

“I’m joking,” she said . “Youre the only cute one. The others are just muscle-y.”

“Not funny.”

“Although there was that one with the convertible. That was fun.”

“Okay, that’s it. I’m coming down there.”

She smiled. “You can’t come down here. You’ve got to do your thing and I’ve got to do mine. Remember? That’s what we decided. Don’t make this harder than it has to be. Don’t make this an issue, ‘cause things are good. We’re good. We’re friends, we date once in a while, that’s working for us, isn’t it?”

“Is it working for you?” Jay asked.

Abby paused, unsure how to — “I’m so busy, Jay. It’s so busy and there’s so much studying. It’s an unreal amount of studying. I don’t know how I’m gonna do it. And if you were here, it would just be another distraction. A good one,” she hurried to add, “But it would make me feel guilty and I hate feeling guilty.”

“Why would you feel guilty? I wouldn’t come if I didn’t want to.”

“I know, but I’d feel guilty that you’d come all this way only to be practically ignored. And you wouldn’t be happy here,” she continued. “You’d be wandering around waiting for me to get done with class, but when I get done with class, I go to the library or the lab or a study group. We wouldn’t see each other much more than we do now.”

“So we wait.”

“I think so,” she answered quietly.

There was a long pause on the line. Abby spoke up. “Jay?”

Pause.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for wanting to be here.”

“Mm-hmm,” he said.

“Jay?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for being my friend.”

“I love being friends with you, Windy Gail. But you want to know something?”

“What?”

Jay steeled himself. “When the time is finally right, I don’t want us to be friends anymore.”

Abby felt the blood drain from her head. “What do you mean? You don’t want to be friends. There’s an expiration date on being friends?”

“Nope, that’s not what I mean.”

Even though she could barely hear the sound coming from the phone anymore, her ears were ringing so much, she had to ask. “What do you mean?”

“I think we’d be even better friends if we were more than friends.”

“Jay, I can’t even think about that right now…”

He stopped her. “I know. And like I said, I love being friends. That’s good enough for now. But that won’t always be good enough. I think we’re made for more than being just friends. And I’m willing to wait it out to see what that looks like.”

She felt her voice get stuck behind her teeth and couldn’t will it loose.

“Are you still there?” he asked after a long minute.

“Yeah. But Jay? Don’t take this the wrong way.”

“What?” he demanded.

“See? You’re already getting mad. Just listen for a second.”

“I’m listening.”

“It’s just that I don’t want you hanging on for something that may or may not happen.”

He asked slowly, “What do you mean?”

She hesitated. “I don’t know if I can be what you want me to be.”

“I don’t want you to be anything you’re not.”

“Maybe you do.”

Jay huffed into the phone. “Listen, I haven’t asked for anything from you. I don’t expect you to call me, which is good because you don’t. I don’t expect you to come home any more than you do to see your family, I don’t expect to get any extra time at Christmas. I haven’t asked for anything from you. How can you say that?”

“I feel it.”

“You feel it?” he virtually shouted into the phone. “You feel it? Since when did you become all feely? You’ve hardly ever said anything about how you feel before.”

“I’m trying something new,” she shot back.

“You could have tried it before we’re having this conversation.”

“What conversation is that? The one where you tell me what my life is going to look like, according to your plans for it? You don’t get to make sweeping edicts, Jay. You’re not the god of camp over here. People may follow you blindly over there, but that’s not real life. That’s not how we’re going to work. Ever.

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End of excerpt.

Whew, that was intense. I’m going to go decompress. You have a good night, and I hope to see you here in the future.

NaNoWriMo Week Three

19
Nov

Grand plans are so fun to make, aren’t they? We dream about what our life will be like, we schedule events and make arrangements around our calendars. And then some monkey comes along with a basket of wrenches and starts chucking them at us, totally messing up all the work we did.

Thus is posting about Nano on a weekly basis.

I seem to be missing a week.

And the thing is only a month long, so missing one week pretty much assures me of a failing grade.

But here I am, a girl with a work in progress, standing in front of you, asking you to love what she wrote.

I will inform you that I have indeed been working on the novel, and have been making s l o w progress. Any progress still counts as progress. And we’ve learned more about our antagonist, though we still need to dig deeper there. I did promise an excerpt, so I’ll include that if you promise not to judge me too harshly for typos, run-on sentences or thoughts that trail off. Once in a while I type with the letters turned white, just for a short burst of 15 minutes or so and in those times it is revealed how many spelling mistakes (amongst other mistakes) I make on a regular basis.

I’m stalling now, aren’t I?

Okay, with no more preamble allowed, here’s this week’s excerpt, where we get to spend a little time with Daryl, our antagonist.

DeathtoStock_SlowDown4[1]

About four hours south on I-35, Darryl Johnson sipped a latte in his kitchen while he cooled off from his jog around Lake of the Isles. He had his laptop open on the marble countertop of the center island, and stretched his quads while he checked stocks. Next to his computer, there was a newspaper laid open to a center, full page advertisement. Advertisement wasn’t exactly right, but that’s who he’d worked with to get it in the Grand Rapid Gazette. He had thought about simply putting it in the smaller county paper, but that served about 10 townships and while it would certainly be read by the people he was targeting, it didn’t carry the same psychological punch he was going for.

One should always go for the psychological punch when there was one available. His many years in court had taught him that.

His wife entered the kitchen and gave him a glancing kiss as she headed to the refrigerator.

“Are you going into the office after you clean up?” she asked as she placed kale, rice milk, strawberries and chia seeds on the counter. “I’ll have time to get your shirts from the cleaners. I’ll be stopping at the dry cleaners if you have anything over there. But I won’t be coming back straight from there, so if you need them for something today, you’ll need to go over there. If you do, ask for my things as well, and let me know so I don’t waste a trip.”

She put the ingredients into a small processor and churned them up. Darryl waited to answer.

Once she had blended her smoothie she poured it into a tall glass and Darryl told her he wouldn’t need the shirts.

“I’m headed up north today, I think,” he mentioned.

She arched an eyebrow. “Oh really? Are you staying overnight? We have plans tomorrow night, you know.”

“No, I’m just going up for the day. I want to meet with a couple people on the homeowner’s association board. They’ll want to gloat over the ad and plan next steps. Then there’s the county to meet with as well. I’ve got a couple appointments with different people there. I probably won’t be back until late.”

“I have my yoga class after work and tonight’s my wine and book club. I think we’re pairing different white wine with a Jane Austen book, I don’t remember which. So I’ll be out anyway.”

She leaned over to the newspaper that lay open next to Darryl.

“What are you scheming now?” she asked mildly.

“It’s not scheming, Lisa. It’s just knowing what you want and seeing the steps it will take to accomplish that goal. Scheming sounds underhanded. This is actually noble. Save the earth and all that.”

“Mmm-hmm,” she answered, straw in her mouth as she sipped her smoothie.

Darryl returned to another quad stretch by bending his knee so he could grab his foot behind him and pulling it towards his back. He wasn’t very limber so this one always hurt a bit.

“Well, you go save the earth, if that’s what gets the job done. And don’t forget we were going to go car shopping soon. It’s time to get rid of that old Audi you call a vehicle. You can’t keep driving a car until it rusts out around you.”

“There’s no rust,” he grunted.

“No rust,” Lisa scoffed. “You just won’t see it. In your mind, that car looks exactly the same as it did when you got it in law school. Trust me, there’s rust. You don’t have to really get rid of it, but you need something that’s a little more suitable for the position you have, the position you’ve had, I should remind you, for a while now. It looks shoddy, and what do clients think when their big-shot lawyer shows up in that rust bucket?”

“Well, since you’re from California, you might not get this, but here in Minnesota, people would probably think I was a down-to-earth guy, someone who wasn’t ‘too big for my britches’, they’d think.”

“Ahh, I see. The whole “successful but grounded” idea? What is it with Midwesterners that they can’t allow themselves to enjoy success?”

Darryl held out his hand for the smoothie and she handed it to him. He stirred it with her straw and answered, “They think it’s arrogant, and probably think God’s going to punish them or something. There are a lot of church folks here, you know.”

“Oh I know. Give me back my smoothie.”

He finished his sip, pulled a face and handed it back to her. “How can you drink that sludge?”

“This, my dear, is the perfect blend of nutrients, gut healthy bacteria, and antioxidents. If I keep drinking this, I’ll never age another day.”

“Maybe, if you don’t keel over from the taste.”

“You get used to it,” she said. “Now I have to get going. You can finish what’s left in the blender, then throw it in the dishwasher would you? Thanks,” she called over her shoulder as she walked down the hall.

***

Not the most pivotal moment, but we get to hear a little about the antagonist and a couple things that inform his perspective. I think it’s good when there’s a part of an antagonist you can relate to. What do you like in a good villain?

A Constantly Moving Target: Type 1 Diabetes and Blood Glucose Management

16
Nov

It’s late at night as I’m writing this.

The reason I’m up is because of Type 1 Diabetes. One of our kids has it, and we have to check her blood sugar (or blood glucose — the terms are pretty interchangeable unless you’re working to educated someone that no, there’s not granulated sugar inside someone’s veins) at a certain time tonight.

The reason we have to check it is because she has insulin in her system right now and we have to make sure that her blood glucose is at a good over-night level and won’t dip low while she’s sleeping. Having low blood glucose can be dangerous, and we want to avoid that.

The reason she has insulin in her system is because as we were getting into jammies and reading bedtime books, her blood glucose (BG for short) was not in her target range — it was too high. That required an injection (we use syringes and are just now beginning to look into the insulin pump system of delivering insulin) of fast acting insulin. That insulin stays active a certain amount of time, and we have to make sure she’s at a certain BG so she’s safe from experiencing lows overnight.

In true Give-a-mouse-a-cookie form, we’ve got reasons all over the place up there but none of them can tell us why exactly her levels were high or, for that matter, why our daughter even has T1D.

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Instagram: tclmn

Many people learn to discern when they are having a low. Some people are irritable, some feel shaky, others get super hungry or tired. These are things our daughter is learning to recognize, but it’s pretty hard to tell when you’re asleep.

The thing is, there was every indicator to believe that tonight our daughter would have a lower BG at bedtime than on some other nights since she had a bath. [‘Once a month whether you need it or not’ my dad used to joke.] Baths tend to send her low. So when we checked her and discovered she was high, it put us in a tricky spot.

Based on prior experience and information we know baths send her BG low.
She still had active insulin in her system when she had the bath. In theory, this should have sent her lower rather than higher.
Now that’s she’s high, if we give her insulin, will it hit all at once and send her low?
If we don’t give her insulin, will her BG stay at this high level or even climb higher overnight?
Can we cheat and just give her a little bit and check on her when it wears off and give her more if she needs it?

Lots of factors in that one decision.

What I’m learning is that this is the nature of the beast when it comes to T1D. We can follow the guidelines and ratios exactly two days in a row and get different results on each of those days. People’s BGs are so variable for so many reasons, many of which are unseen, that it feels like being at that tea party in the Alice in Wonderland story, constantly swapping seats and people shouting out new rules and then changing them or not following along. This doesn’t mean we’re doing anything wrong, even though it’s easy to second guess every decision you make when you’re managing someone’s T1D. The stakes feel very high. Every decision feels like it carries implications for her overall health and welfare. I already felt that pressure as a parent before our diagnosis. It’s only amplified now.

Knowing that we can do what we can do when it comes to managing Type 1 Diabetes helps release me from its grip. Knowing that we can never completely factor in stress, growth spurts, hormone changes, outdoor temperatures, excitement, activity lets me realize that I’ve placed unrealistic expectations on myself. We can keep her safe, we can be as prepared as possible, but we’re not going to stay within that target BG range constantly. That’s just the way it is with BG, with T1D. It doesn’t mean we’ve done anything wrong, or overlooked something we should have caught.

It’s just the way it is.

Food and Type 1 Diabetes

8
Nov

People need food to survive. People thrive when they have healthy food and their bodies have the capacity to process that food. Food contains important stuff in it, like calories, minerals, vitamins (do I sound like a cereal commercial yet?), proteins and carbohydrates. Yes, carbohydrates are important, just like calories are. We’re so used to the verbiage of “counting calories” or “low-carb diets” that we have negative associations around those terms.

However, for a person to function, they need calories, and they need carbs. When they don’t get enough, their body slowly begins to shut down, even consume every last thing it had stored away.

People with Type 1 Diabetes don’t produce the magical substance needed to access the carbs in their food. The carbs turn to sugars in their blood and just sit there accumulating. Meanwhile, the person with T1D isn’t getting what they need to be healthy. Prolonged high blood sugars are really really bad for you, like put you in a coma bad. The body doesn’t have a way to get rid of the excess sugars except to try and flush them out (pardon the pun) through giving the person a powerful thirst and hoping to get rid of the sugars by urinating them out.

The only thing that can get rid of the excess sugar in the blood, and allow the person to use those carbs for energy?

Insulin.

Every carb, every time.

Instagram: tclmn

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It’s not that carb-rich foods are bad. At our house, we try to use the term “free” foods vs. a food that has carbs, rather than a “good” food or a “bad” food. There really aren’t any “bad” foods, it’s just that for someone with T1D, any food that has carbs requires them to receive insulin. There are definitely foods that are “extra” foods, ones that are not required for healthy living, but we were using that term even before our diagnosis.

Type 1 Diabetes doesn’t happen because a person ate too many carbs. Early in our diagnosis, our daughter was invited to a classmate’s birthday party. I had to explain that I’d have to come along because with her having T1D, she’d need a shot before she ate. The gentleman hosting the party joked, “Too many hamburgers, huh?”

No. Not too many hamburgers, sir.

It was so surprising, I didn’t have time to be offended…until later.

No, she didn’t develop T1D because she ate too many hamburgers, or ate too many anything-elses. She just developed it. The medical community doesn’t even know exactly why it happens.

Another comment was made recently about how our daughter “didn’t do anything bad, like eating too many cupcakes.” This type of comment was mentioned more than once by this person. While I understand they were trying to affirm that my daughter did not play an active role in promoting the onset of the diabetes, I feel uncomfortable with that verbage. Eating too many cupcakes isn’t “bad” and it doesn’t make you a bad person. I think we need to be careful how we stigmatize people who develop any kind of diabetes, whether that’s a result of less-than-optimum diet and lack of exercise, heredity, being pregnant, or because their pancreas quit doing its job.

While there are differences in the control some people might have in the onset of diabetes, there are also a lot of factors at play, and one of those factors is privilege. Some communities have better access to healthy food options, and some have fewer realistic options.

I have a car and easy access to at least three different grocery stores with a wide variety of foods available to me.
I also get to decide what I spend my money on when I’m at the grocery store.
Time is also not an issue for us, because if we need to run out for something at the grocery store, my husband or I can stay with the kids while the other one does that run.
My husband and I each work one job.

Not everyone has these privileges. People are working multiple jobs, spending a long time on a bus or train, having to stretch their dollars, having little time to cook homemade meals, or not even having good grocery options available. So let’s not stigmatize anyone. Diabetes is not an easy road. *end soapbox moment*

Food doesn’t cause diabetes. Food in and of itself is neutral. We anthromophoricize (<– spelling nightmare) food, giving it feelings or motives. Food’s just food. It’s not out to get us. Those with T1D can eat anything they want, they just have to know how many carbs are in it so they can give themselves the right dose of insulin to process the carbs contained in that food.

There are few other factors at work when deciding how much insulin is needed, but we’ll talk about those another time.

Next week we’ll hear more about what it looks like to be an elementary-age child with T1D. Hope to see you back here!

Do you know anyone with any form of diabetes? What impressions have you had of their diabetes? Have you silently had some ideas about how they manage their diabetes? How can you be a support to them?

National Novel Writing Month, Week One

5
Nov

Until a few years ago, I had never heard of National Novel Writing Month, and when I did hear about it, I thought it sounded a bit like Chess Club in high school used to be, or a sort of niche activity for people who were almost too interested in one thing.

Turns out I’m also almost too interested in one thing.

The online community around National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo or NaNo for short) is all about writing a bazillion words in one month, just cranking out an absurd word count each day and not laboring over every single syllable. There are virtual write-ins, real life write-ins, challenges to write in shorter chunks of time, and just general word generation support.

It’s really helpful.

Writing is such a solitary thing in so many ways; it’s great to be working towards a big goal while knowing others understand and are working towards a similar goal of their own.

Writing in the wee hours of the morning

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In the spirit of being brave and since ultimately the goal of writing a novel is to *ahem* get it published, I’m going to try and share excerpts from the novel I’m working on. I’ve been working on this for a couple years, pecking away at it bit by bit. I really like it, so I really want to finish it this month, like reallllly want to finish it.

You’ll have to tell me how it works to put the excerpt in italics. I’m not sure if that will make it harder to read or set it off from the rest of the post (as intended). There may be a couple typos so be gentle in your critique okay?

In this scene, we get to see our main character pull a prank with his best friend. Their target? The camp kitchen staff, and especially Pearl, the head cook.

***

Pearl was the target of Jay and Marshall’s most disruptive plan, and also the one that cemented their position in camp folklore.

On the morning they were to leave camp Pearl always scheduled a breakfast that had most of the prep work done the day before. Huge cinnamon rolls, orange slices, scrambled eggs and Malt-o-Meal. The rest of her day didn’t include the usual two additional meals, since staff would be released to have some time off before the next wave of campers arrived. She planned a lunch then, that didn’t need constant supervision, since she knew her kitchen crew would be itching to start their time off as quickly as possible. She covered their work with a large sheet dedicated to this one purpose, the protector of the advanced work.

Pearl arrived at the door to the kitchen just as her sleepwalking staff did. Most mornings, she watched them shuffle across the courtyard from her post inside. She was glad she didn’t usually arrive with them; she like having time to get things moving in the kitchen before the comatose staff got there.

They all walked through the door together and immediately a sheet fell on them from the ceiling, and tiny bits of paper fluttered all around them.

Pearl yanked the sheet off them as the girls behind her gave out gasps of surprise followed by giggles and laughter. She stormed forward through the hallway and shoved open the swinging door that led into the kitchen. The girls followed through the doors but bumped into Pearl, who had come to an abrupt stop. Before them lay a terrible mess of happy birthday balloons covering every square inch of the entire kitchen floor. There was a disco ball strung in the center of the room. Pearl flicked on all the lights and the disco ball came to life. It had been positioned just right to catch the light from a repositioned spotlight over the serving line. The girls twittered and speculated who had done it, who it was for, and quickly started running through their prospective crushes to see which one was serious enough to merit this kind of attention.

Pearl stormed across the room, balloons flying everywhere. She kicked the balloons, tried to stomp a red one, only to have it squirt out from under her foot.

“When I get my hands on whoever did this…” she said to herself.

To the girls she barked, “Turn off those light – I can’t stand that blasted sequin ball. You’re just going to have to start working and push them aside as you go. We don’t have time to clean them up.”

The girls hopped to. One hit the switches until the disco ball stopped rotating. One slide her feet along as she went to the pantry, creating a fountain of balloons as she went. The others set about their work getting dishes set up, and cereal refilled. They continued to quietly giggle about the prank and smiled as they did their work.

Pearl took a broom from its resting place on the wall and tried to sweep a path to the back hall. She kept trying to stomp balloons on her way, the end was a comical goosestepping marching band leader.

From their positions in the front of the kitchen, the crew heard a sudden, “Auggg!”

They all looked up from their jobs and as part of a mindmeld that happens when people work in the same space for long enough, they all left their posts and dashed to the back hall.

They were greeted by the sight of Pearl’s tight perm covered in glitter and confetti. She had arrived at her destination, the walk-in refrigerator, and when she opened the door, the pouch of glitter from the craft hall had stretched open and dumped its contents on Pearl’s unlucky head.

“Bring me Jay and Marshall NOW!” she bellowed.

The rest of breakfast prep was used in trying to corral the balloons out of the kitchen, but the only place for them to go that wouldn’t cause trouble was down the stairs to the Bee Hive, basically the staff’s locker room area. When all the balloons were kicked, swept and blown down the stairs they covered the smaller area of the Bee Hive floor knee high.

Needless to say, Jay and Marshall were firmly established as camp legends.

***

End scene.

That’s it. I should mention that I have worked at multiple camps for multiple years and any similarities to any persons purely coincidental. I never want people to worry that they’re going to end up in a novel because really the way it works for me is that I might get a grain of an idea from real life but then that is expanded upon so much that it doesn’t represent anything more than just that one grain by the time I get done with it. That may mean that you recognize something familiar as you read this but it’s familiar – with a twist.

So now back to you with a question: would you ever pick up a novel set at a camp? What that appeal to you? Am I surveying a potential market? Yes, yes I am.

Thanks for sharing your perspective.

Living life alongside Type 1 Diabetes

2
Nov

November is Diabetes Awareness month. I’ve never known this before. I didn’t know this a year ago. But 11 months ago, one of our kids was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) and I now know things I never dreamed of knowing, such as how to give shots, how to analyze blood glucose numbers and insulin ratios, how to check for ketones, what ketones even are, and an abundance of worst-case-scenario preparedness measures.

It kind of sucks.

^^^

That’s true and it’s not.

I’m tempted to dismiss the hardness of T1D by saying it isn’t a fatal diagnosis, it isn’t some rare, exotic disease that no one knows how to treat. You can live with it, and one of the first things the ER doc said to us when we were in the initial throes of diagnosis, was that with all the advancements they’re making, it’s entirely possible it will be cured within our child’s lifetime.

That’s absolutely wonderful, encouraging information.

That doesn’t change the reality of living alongside T1D now.

Because it isn’t my diagnosis, I’m protective of sharing too much, protective of putting out there something that isn’t mine to talk about. I would never want any of our children to feel like we’d “talked out of turn” with information that was theirs. Therefore, I’m going to leave her name out of this. It’s important to me that you know I’ve talked to her about it, that I’ve asked and received her permission to talk about it, and my husband is also comfortable with me writing about it.

This month I’d like to try and share a little about what it’s like to have T1D, but I don’t have it. My child has it. So I’ll do the best I can to share what its like to support someone who has it, especially since you never grow out of T1D, the children who are diagnosed eventually become adults. And you will probably know someone with T1 at some point in your life.

This comes with us everywhere.

First off, Type 1 Diabetes means insulin dependent diabetes. It is different than Type 2 Diabetes/adult onset diabetes. An adult can have Type 1 but usually they were first diagnosed before they hit adulthood. I’m not even going to address Type 2, because I know so little about it — it’s very different from Type 1.

Type 1 is not managed by exercise or diet.

Type 1 is not caused by poor diet or lack of exercise.

Type 1 is considered an autoimmune disorder.

When you have T1D, the pancreas quits making insulin. Everybody needs insulin. It is the key to working with the glucose (also called sugar) in our blood. A person with Type 1 has a pancreas that is not producing enough insulin and will eventually stop producing it at all. Without insulin, our bodies can’t unlock many of the nutrients needed from our food. People with Type 1 require insulin to be administered before taking in carbohydrates (which turn into glucose in the blood). This means every carb needs to be counted and the insulin must match the carbs, but every body is different and we aren’t static, so the amount of insulin it takes frequently changes. It can feel like a constantly changing target.

Next Monday I’ll write more about our story, what this looks like in real life. Our daughter is healthy and well, and coping marvelously with her diagnoses, which is more than I could say for myself for quite a while. More on that next week. See you then.

Do you know anyone with Type 1 Diabetes? How did you find out they had it? Are there any misconceptions you may have had before getting to know more about T1D?

Season of Words – Final Week

31
Oct

It’s Saturday and I was supposed to post on Thursday. I didn’t post on Thursday. My week just didn’t allow for it. I’m going to have to be okay with that. I’m trying to be okay with it.

It happens quite a bit, that whole “life’s demands requiring attention” that conflicts with the way I planned to use that time. It’s a constant dance of compromise and balance. I wonder when I’ll get it figured out, or if one is always in the active process of finding the way.

One of the prompts asked us about a favorite childhood story. I can’t remember how many times I’ve read this story. Can you tell from these pages what story it is?

The quotes I chose from the story are: “It’s quite all right. He’ll often drop in. Only you mustn’t press him. He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.” And another one: “Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

Yup, they’re from The Lion, the witch and the Wardrobe. (Just so I’m not getting more credit than I ought, the scene on the left hand side of the page was already in the book of fairy tales I am using for my altered book.)

The next batch of photos is showing how I put some extra paper in my book to build onto a page that already existed. My son came home with an example of a parfleche, or a type of Native American pouch, he’d made at school. It was the perfect way of including a different way of journaling. The drawings were part of the book, and I know the parfleche doesn’t exactly “go” with the page, but there’s so much going on already, I figured a little more wouldn’t hurt anything, and I out it in the right side because I couldn’t bear to cover up that fairy.

I found this quote and knew I had to use it. I had already put down a bunch of paint, so I simply wrote out the quote and stuck the words on the page. It seemed to round things out, even though I didn’t have the quote when I painted earlier. It’s fun to let the process take you wherever, to not resist and enjoy the unfolding.

My book is full. All the pages have been used and it’s been really fun to see it come together. For my final lage, I used a quote I saw on another Get Messy participant’s (Katie) page. I think it’s a great note to end on. Thanks for allowing me to share my pages here, and for your kind comments. For the month of November I’ll be doing National Novel Writing Month, and I’m trying to make myself share parts of my work in progress, so check back in November (or subscribe to this blog and have new posts delivered to your inbox) for a little portion of a story.

We are pieces of mosaics.

Pieces of light, love, history,

Stories glued together with magic and music and words.

~Anita Krizzan

It’s enough because it matters to You

23
Oct

There are times when I want to “make it” in a creative pursuit.

I want to get a novel published.

I want to write for magazines and websites.

I want to see on a wall in a public space paintings I’ve made.

Are you noticing the me-focus theme here?
For as lofty as these dreams are, you’d think I would have no problem putting action steps to my creative goals. However, many times when I invest time in writing, journaling, painting or trying to learn to draw something new, I hear a lot of chatter in my background.

Mostly it says I’m wasting my time and I ought to be using my energies elsewhere.

I have no problem admitting that there are many tasks I don’t enjoy, and I don’t generally get great fulfillment from crossing off things on a to-do list. But the chatter that comes up when I set aside time to make messes with paint, for example, that chatter is usually more about the unworthiness of what I’m working on. It speaks more to insecurity of not being excellent at something, or thinking I’m good at something when I’m not.

Because I haven’t published a novel or sold many paintings, it’s easy to think my creative attempts have little value.

That’s not true.

It all depends on how you define value.

If that definition is focused on external sources and validation, then until you gain affirmation from that external source, you’ll be left floundering.

If that definition is shifted, and the focus put in what I gain personally from my time spent getting my hands messy, then the whole story changes.

So here are a few art journal pages I’ve been working on this week. I hope you enjoy them, and it’s okay if you don’t. They were good for me to do.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for allowing me to share with you. It’s been good to try and post more journal pages more often, but in the next month I’ll probably shift into trying to write more. We’ll see…National Novel Writing Month is coming up in November after all…

Words, Bodies, and Fairy Magic

15
Oct

There’s a certain gratification in finding the right words to describe a situation or emotion. I’m working on finding those accurate words. Sometimes that means using the words of others (and attributing it to them, of course).

This week I’ve found some quotes I wanted to incorporate into my pages. Some of them are hard to read so I’ll try to write them beneath the page.

I don’t always want all my writing to show, so I often use flaps to conceal some of my journaling. This is the backside of a peekaboo page, so I pulled down one flap so eyes wouldn’t be exhausted after the first photo. I should have included a photo with both flaps closed, because the illustration on the backside of the pink is an active drawing of people on horses and it speaks to the struggles of the last couple years and contrasts with the word I was drawn to: resign.

Here’s the same page with the top flap open.

The next page uses a photo of one of my adorable nieces in fairy wings.

[“Funny how women are ashamed of their inner fairy whereas men are forever proudly displaying their inner cowboy or fireman.” ~Dawn French]

This is, obviously, a gross oversimplification but there are definitely bits of truth in it, primarily in regards to women not owning their inner magic, the way women tamp themselves down or “play nice” rather than speak their minds without apology.

…Which leads us to our next journal page, one that tries to examine the relationship between the feminine and God. It’s got a flap, but that’s mostly just to streamline the visual clutter.

Here’s the same page with the biggest circle flapped up.

[“Yet here we sit, with our souls tucked away in this marvelous luggage, mostly insensible to the ways in which every spiritual practice begins with the body.” ~Barbara Brown Taylor]

My own short journaling says My body is a temple — and that means ALL of my body, even the parts that make me female. I am a holy temple.

How’s that for some late-in-the-week pondering for a light mood on a Thursday? ?

That’s all for this week. There’s more but it’s not ready or not on theme right now. If you search Get Messy Art Journal you can see what other people are doing in response to some of the same prompts and challenges. They’re also on Instagram under the hashtag #getmessythursdays.

I’m taking a mini-course from Juliette Crane, which I’m loving but again, it’s not part of the Get Messy Art Journal community so I’m going to hold it for later. She’s amazing and I’m turning into a little bit of a super-fan. Here’s a preview of something inspired by one of the class lessons.

As always, thanks for being wonderful and playing along with me. We have MEA Break this week, so if you need me I’ll be outside with the kids, soaking up as much sun and fresh air as possible. Until next time!

Season of Words Week Three

8
Oct

I’m trying to post art journal pages here on Thursdays for six weeks or so. Thanks for being a supportive, positive place where I feel safe to share these, regardless of how unrefined or imperfect they might be. It’s fun to share them, even if only to know I tried to be bold and put them out in the world.

For the first page I’m sharing here, I incorporated black out poetry. Sometimes I fully black-out the words I don’t use, but I used a lighter hand here. The idea is to circle the words that jump out at you — words that shimmer — and thereby create a new poem. My new poem, from a Jane Kenyon poem called After the Hurricane read like this:

Acorns break from the oaks,

Drop,

Amber air ahead.

Snuffling water weeds,

Soft band,

A bar of sand,

Mica glinting tepid sun.

Kettles of water unused, drowsy.

The likeness of golden birch leaves

Stir away trouble.

Hemlock bough, peculiar author,

A sacrament of saying no.

For the next page we were challenged to do a peek-a-boo page (my term) by cutting a hole in a page. It could be planned or unplanned. I partially planned mine, because I wanted to leave a certain picture, but in doing so, I also ended up with a good situation on another page (that will come later).

The quote is one I found from Oscar Wilde. It says, “Yes I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”

This one was just a quote I loved from Mary Oliver, who writes poetry I love, on colors I love. I don’t love my handwriting, but it’s just the way it is and I have learned to let go of that.

The final page is in response to a challenge to splatter paint in our page. No problem – I love splattering paint! I took the opportunity to use my new Dina Wakely stamps, and I love her too. Hers was the first book I ever found about art journaling and it opened up a whole new world for me. She’s amazing.

That’s the fun for this week. It’s hard to find time to respond to the prompts and challenges since we get them on Monday and I’ve started working outside the home. It’s funny though, because having a job away from home is really revealing how much I enjoy and rely on paints and mess making. It feels good when you’ve found something that is fun and important to your overall health. Do you have something like that?