Quote of the Day

"Honestly, I think the only difference between depression and disappointment is your level of commitment."
- via Stephanie, who heard it on "some show."

Time

"Funky Things You Discover While Living in Africa"

Yup.

Fires in CA

From here.

"You Too, Mother?"

The one line that beautifully illustrates my undying love for Rome.

Midnight Madness

One of the ways I control my sugar when it's been out of hand over several days or when I eat something I don't generally eat for dinner is, I set my alarm clock for midnight and do a midnight sugar check.

What this allows me to do is adjust my sugar to keep it from rollercoastering too high overnight. If I was eating something that's got a weird rate of absorption, the numbers usually shoot up between my bedtime test at 9 or 10 and my midnight correction (unless I did a heavy exercise/kickboxing session the night before, in which case it spikes downward). This is why I tend to eat low carb and stick to certain types of foods. When I don't, I start to rollercoaster, and when you rollercoaster, you have to work fucking hard for about three days in a row with midnight testing and watching what you eat just to get back to your happy numbers.

The funny thing is, that even if I'm eating all right, I will, without fail, jump at least forty points between midnight and 5:45 am when I get out of bed. It's just how it is. I tested one midnight at 56, another at 68, and I resisted the urge to overcorrect (I did once, and woke up at 140). If I didn't correct, I'd wake up at 90 or 100 instead of 140.

So, why do a midnight correction if the difference is between 90 and 140? No big deal, right? Well, if I don't do a midnight correction and I have Chipotle for dinner, I could go to bed at 90 and wake up at 200. Big, big difference.

And yes, I learned all this through trial and error, and every diabetic is different. Your mileage may vary.

The last couple of weeks have been a little stressful, and I've been eating crap - going out and eating onion rings and chicken strips, waaaay too many Chipotle burritos (there is a direct correlation between Chipotle burrito consumption and my stress level), and chicken wings and breakfast scramble wraps here at work. Too much weird food, and it triggers a rollercoaster sugar ride, which then affects my mood. Extreme highs and lows wear me out. I feel like dirt. Quite literally, like dirt.

So this week I'm working at recovering from last week's rollercoaster. I realized I'd taken things too far yesterday, when I was so exhausted and bitchy that all I wanted to do was go home and sleep for ten hours because I found the idea of interacting with people - including my roomies and the boyfriend - really exhausting and annoying.

People find it very funny that I take such crazy control of my sugar, that I work so hard at it, but you know - I'm not a fun person to be around when my sugar sucks. I physically feel really, really bad. If I'm too low, I want to claw people's faces off. If I'm too high, I'm tired and bitchy all the time and too exhausted to speak to people, who then thing that it's them who's done something wrong, when in fact, it's all about me.

If rollercoastering goes on too long, some of those bad feelings are going to get out, and I'll start to lash out at the people around me who I love and care about. And after what happened back in Chicago, after knowing just how badly things can go if I'm not running at 100%, I'm committed to taking care of myself to reduce if not eliminate the possibility of me hurting people like that. I hate hurting people. If you can take better care of yourself so that you *and* the people around you benefit, wonderful. To do otherwise isn't just self-destructive: it's selfish.

Sure, if you want to be a hermit in a cave and not have anybody care about you, that's one thing, but if you want to invite people into your life, you must do your best to respect them. You can start by respecting yourself.

And yes, it's fucking hard.

Things to Say When Someone Has Broken Up With You

HAHA ah HAHA AHaha ahaha HA ahahA

Recommended Reading

I've been spending the vast majority of my time reading about ADD, Islam, and copywriting. Yes, it's an eclectic, informative, but incredibly non-relaxing cornucopia of nonfiction. I seriously need a break.

Any recommendations for fat fantasy that doesn't suck? I may pick up the new Daniel Abraham book, I couldn't stand the Lies of Locke Lamora book and so have no interest in the sequel, and Song of Ice and Fire 4 and Kushiel 4 have both gotten so long-winded that I can't stand the idea of picking them up again even to finish wading through them. I even tried to read Kathryn Harrison's non-genre Envy. I love a couple of her other books, but her self-absorbed characters are starting to annoy me.

Got any recommendations?

Faith, Love & Death

"Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."

And this:

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

Yes.


Read the rest.

Artificial Sky

Because it's more useful here than in Vegas.

Trust me. I know.

One of Those Nights

It occurs to me that I don't handle stress as well as I used to. That, or I was just never in a position where I had to balance so many different aspects of my life - and the lives of others - all at once.

It's a challenge. I'm up for it, but it's a challenge.

My sugar has sucked since I started with the new monitor and insulin pens. The pens are fucking great, but for some reason even when I hold the button down for the full ten seconds, there's still at least half a unit of insulin that I never get, so I've had to dose myself one extra unit every time. That, paired with the fact that I've switched to an electronic monitor that records my numbers instead of recording them myself, means I don't view all of my numbers daily. Whoever made the OneTouch software program made it stupid and clunky. It's so useless at displaying the numbers in a way I find helpful that I just avoid loading numbers for weeks at a time. I have only a vague idea of where I've been at, and it hasn't been all that great. OK, Ok, probably it's got me running 130-180, which isn't the end of the world, but it certainly fucking isn't at those lovely 70-120 numbers that I so adored.

I need to get back on that, and I'm kind of pissed that it looks like what I have to do to kick my ass for that is go back to manually recording all of my numbers so I can SEE exactly how my sugar is trending overall. It's too easy to just throw out a bad number when you don't have to look at it three times a day when you enter your other readings into your spreadsheet.

So that's something I need to balance back in. I was really fucking proud of my 5.9 A1C, and I have a feeling I'm going to be closer to 6.5 or something (under 7 is still good for a t1, but 6 and under is the A1C of a non-diabetic) when I see my endo next month if I don't get my shit together. We'll see.

In any case, it's one of those nights.

But at least I'm not eating Tom.

My YouTube Debut

OK, our web developer put it up on YouTube, so it's not my fault.

I won't identify the whole team here, but I'm the last person on the far left. We're missing about three team members here (they're hard at work in the adjoining room), but these are the folks I spend my day with, for the most part.

Yes, every day is like this.

I love my job.

Updated Website

My website is very pretty now, and has been updated.

My Weekend

Was up at 6am on Saturday to prep for the franchise convention. Headed down to the hotel and worked with our tech guys to synch up my asshatted computer with the projector so my PowerPoint presentation displayed correctly. Ran through a mock-up of the presentation with the slide transitions, then attended the general session, presented two 45-min sessions about our new intranet portal and its features, lunched, and presented two more 45-min sessions to another two groups of franchisees.

I had a guy come up to me at lunch and say, "You're one of the most incredibly confident, determined, passionate people your age I've ever met."

How this came across during a 45-minute presentation about our intranet portal, I don't know. I can turn on my funny, confident, outgoing self for short presentations, and I know that a lot of the love for my job, what I do, the free health insurance, my affection for the team I work with, came out during my talk.

"Well," I said. "It's not that complicated. I just know what I want."

"Exactly," he said. "You have no idea how rare that is. Most of us still have no idea."

And me? Man, I've worked hard to get to where I am, and I'm still just renting a room at my friends' place. I certainly have a lot right now, and I'm incredibly blessed and happy to be where I am, but I have a long way to go. And I know exactly where I'd like to be. Maybe that is pretty rare these days.

It was a really good convention, in any case. This company has a fantastic group of great franchisees. They were a lot of fun to talk to. I've done theater, and spoken at writing conventions before, so the actual doing wasn't tough: it was just all the buildup that was stressful. This week has been insane getting this convention put together. I had a blast, but was ready to collapse come 4pm. I didn't bother staying for dinner (our programming was done at 3:15; after that was general sessions led by the exec staff), and went home and put in some napping and movie watching time with the boyfriend.

Besides the convention, I've been putting together the synopsis for the third book in the God's War series, Babylon. It's why I was up until 11pm at the Books & Co. down the street on Friday, and perpetually sleep deprived this week. Convention madness + personal writing deadlines + addiction to boyfriend time = sleep deprivation.

Finished up the synopsis today and got it off to my agent (MY AGENT!!!!!) and started printing out the old synopses for my old series. I have stuff for The Dragon's War and Over Burning Cities that I'll be revising and putting back together again, writing up pitch paragraphs for the rest of the series, et al.

Things at work won't be as stressful this week, and I'm thinking of taking Friday off since I worked Saturday. This will give me some time to get my Ohio driver's license and maybe go to Columbus this weekend and hang out: me, the boyfriend, Steph, and the Old Man. Might be fun.

Yes, I'm busy. It's damn fine busy, but it explains the lack of posting. I'm going to need to find some kind of balance for all of this stuff pretty soon here. I think some weeks will just be easier than other.

Tra-la

There's Nothing More Fun...

... than freaking out about the recovery of a completely fucked corrupted file at eleven o'clock at night when you have to be up at 6am the next day to present four hours worth of breakout sessions at a franchise convention.

Yuuuuummmmmmmmmmmy.

Well, It's Official

I was waiting for her to publicly post it first.... so now it's really true!

For those that didn't read it in the locked LJ post, me and God's War and all the rest are now being represented by Jennifer Jackson of the Donald Maass Literary agency.

I'm uber-super-thrilled about this. She was my first pick from the start (years and years ago when I was trying to sell The Dragon's War), and I'm still sort of stunned.

I couldn't be happier.

And yeah, the amount of work I need to do, writing-wise, just shot up.

But I couldn't be happier about that, either.

My Peeps

But waaaaaaaaaaaait a minute... I tied with the Serenity crew and Deep Space Nine?

Oh well. B5 isn't so bad when the actors pretend to act and the monologuing is kept to a minimum. But really: I'd prefer the Serenity graphic.

Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) The universe is erupting into war and your government picks the wrong side. How much worse could things get? It doesn’t matter, because no matter what you have your friends and you'll do the right thing. In the end that will be all that matters. Now if only the Psi Cops would leave you alone. Serenity (Firefly) 75% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 75% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 75% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 69% Moya (Farscape) 63% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 63% SG-1 (Stargate) 50% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 50% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 50% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 44% Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) 44% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 38% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 25%

Heavenly Health Insurance

We had a big meeting today at work because our health benefits will change Nov. 1st. I'd known this was coming since I signed with the company, so I was nervous and busy doing math and looking up tiered drugs and in-network providers and going through all the paperwork and thinking, wait a minute, this can't be right...

But when we went into the meeting, we found out that yes, in fact the paperwork was right.

Our new plan requires a $100 individual deductible, and then it pays 100% of in-network costs. 100% of prescriptions. 80% of out-of-network if you really want to stick with another doctor.

No, no: seriously.

100% of prescriptions and no doctor co-pay in-network.

This means, not only do I no longer pay my $15 co-pay that I thought was so fucking sweet, but I no longer pay the $70 per month in diabetic supplies.

I will no longer be paying healthcare costs of any kind except for the $10 per month the company takes out of my paycheck (so long as I stay in network, and yes, my endo is in-network).

Me and one of my work buddies went over the math some more afterwards. He has high drug costs as well, and we both just sort of looked at each other and went, "Holy fuck no shit this can't fucking be true."

It's like fucking socialized medicine.

IT'S LIKE LIVING IN A CIVILIZED COUNTRY...

LIKE CANADA.

Fucking Christmas.

No idea how long this will last (at least through next year), but living in Dayton just got a lot sweeter. I might make less than I did in Chicago, but add in the huge amount I'm saving on drugs and medical costs, and I'm easily making more than I did there.

We gave the HR Director a round of applause.

Sleeeeeeep

Seriously, all I want to do right now is sleep. We've got a franchisee convention coming up this weekend and we are crazy-busy putting together tons of materials and presentations and slides for that, and I've got a ton of novel writing work to get done when work hours end.

So I'm off to Chipotle for a burrito and diet Coke and then it's Books & Co. for another night of banging-head-against-novel.

I should chop somebody's head off next chapter just for kicks.

Seriously, I Need to Get Some Sleep

It's like being 17 again, only with professional success, self-esteem, and no curfew.

But I really need to catch up on my sleep.

And get a lot of fucking writing done.

And... but first:

Sleep.