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This House Had Windows is a book published in 1966. It's an autobiographical account by a man who lost his sight and apparently wanted to share the stories of his life from when he had sight. Some of the book is also about how he lost his sight and the horribleness of the way he was treated in the hospital and the butchery done with the attempts at saving his sight. He lost one eye to random retinal detachment as a teenager, and the second eye to a cataract. In both cases, medicine should've saved the eye, and didn't. It's interesting to read about a boy growing up in a small town in England in the 1920s. I think Blackhall was born in 1912. | | |
| ResearchI've been playing with the idea of writing a children's book featuring various mammals (and maybe birds) with diabetes. Interviewing diabetics and owners of diabetics, getting a good camera, and putting it together as a book. So I went to the library, thinking I'd research diabetes in animals. I looked through the books about dogs and cats and horses and geckos and everything, finding no more than one paragraph about diabetes in each book. Those one paragraph mentions tended to say things like, dogs sometimes develop diabetes. This leads to coma and death. And that would be it.  I asked the librarian for help in finding something better. What we found was The Merck Veterinary Manual, 9th edition, which talks at some length about pancreatitis and at lesser length about endocrine diabetes. So if I do write a book about mammals with diabetes, I'll REALLY be cornering the market. I'm thinking it should be the sort of book with large print telling the basic story and smaller print boxes with more details for older readers. | | |
| My Brother is SixteenHis birthday was yesterday, and I wasn't thinking about it until the day before, when my parents were calling his classmates to see if anybody wanted to come to our house for the party. That meant I hadn't bought him any presents. He told me he wanted candy, soda, and pretzels. Fine. After work yesterday, I went and bought nine dollars worth of twizzlers (variety bag), pretzels, fruit slices candy, and strawberry bars. Had to really wrestle with myself not to eat it on the way home; I have a huge sweet tooth and I was really wishing it was me I was buying that junk for. Got home and my brothers and parents and one of my brother's classmates were sitting and eating pizza. Another classmate joined us, and we ate lots of pizza and watermelon and root beer and called it a party. The birthday brother attempted to give my present to him to my baby brother. The birthday brother spends a lot of time and effort attempting to wooing the baby brother. My mother locked up the candy and pretzels and said my birthday brother can eat it some other time. After the party, my blood sugar was a wonderful 95, but I went and ruined it with a bedtime snack and spent all night with a blood sugar close to 200. Yuck. My brother is less excited by his birthday than expected. He spent most of the party a) talking about his extreme fondness for a certain rabbi, b) repeating the statement that six million Jews died in the holocaust, and c) eating one large pizza with every restaurant topping plus cucumber, lettuce, radishes and I'm not sure what else. | | |
| I'm feeling down today, which is appropriate for a fast day, I guess. My blood sugar is holding up, I think; I've tested it thrice today, and it came in 95, 96 and 100. My father tested his and came in 104. Since I want him to get better at this blood letting business and since he's been seriously bruising up my fingers, we thought maybe he should practice on his own fingers. I just got mad at some parents in the diabetes community who are being ignorant about diabetes types with long onsets. GRRRRRRRRRRRR. Part of why I was so mistreated early on diabetes wise was because of the conception even among those who ought to know better that t1 diabetes has a quick onset and t2 happens to inactive people. And there I was, throwing up weekly from March through August, walking to and from school (seven miles each way) all summer, getting sicker and sicker and sicker. I'm also upset because the summer school course I was scheduled to start on Tuesday just got cancelled because of low enrollment, and I either need to find another class in the same time slot, reschedule my other committments, or not go to summer school. I might take economics instead. Unfortunately, that would mean going downtown instead of merely Lincoln Park, and I am not doing that walk ten times, no sireebob. Today's featured question is how I feel about vegetarianism. I have been a vegetarian for ten and a half years, and a vegan for eight and a half years. I am not grossed out by people who eat meat, or by meat itself, I just don't want to. My iron levels are healthy. I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too! | | |
| Online Comic Strips I read This is a comic strip about Hazel, who is a twentysomething writer who drinks a lot in bars and babysits and has a cactus that talks to her when she's drunk. It can be kinda sexual. www.girlswithslingshots.com
 www.qwantz.com every panel has the same illustration, same three characters (plus sometimes God and the Devil), with sort of existentialist conversations.
 Written by an FtM about his and other transfolk's experiences. Not currently updated often, but with a largish archive. www.transe-generation.com
 www.Shabot6000.com I hadn't actually read in a while but anyways: it's a weekly strip about an irreverent nominally Orthodox Jew and his robot.
 www.sheldoncomics.com A silly strip about a ten year old boy who is a billionaire and who also programmed a duck so it could talk. The duck is father to a lizard, and yeah. Read the archives.
 http://www.unshelved.com/ is a comic strip about a library and the librarians and patrons who hang out there.
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