Nothing quite like having to skirt the edges of Death’s dread realm for your health.

Finally got my tired ass into the lab for my lactic acid test. This required me to fast for ten hours, which leading endocrinologists agree is “stupid” for a diabetic like me.

And I was okay up until around noon. I had the flutters and shakes but those I can love with as long as the end is near.

So to speak.

But around noon, I started to feel really, really cold. And not the normal kind of cold you feel when you are outside in the winter, oh no.

This was a creeping, oozing cold that slithered around in my body like my blood had frozen into slush and wasn’t so much flowing as sluicing around in my body.

And I thought about a fuck it and chuck it solution, but we were leaving at 12:30 pm so I made the rational adult decision to risk my life in order to not have to try again tomorrow or on Friday,.

Look, I wasn’t at my smartest, okay? And one thing I know about myself is that when all my other faculties are messed up, I fall back on my primary programming, which is to pursue whatever my current goal is with fanatic zeal.

Basically, my primal mode is stubbornness.

Luckily, when I got to the lab, it was empty. Not a single other patient there.

That may have saved my life.

Because by that point I was extremely cold all over and things were starting to dim. But I managed to give the receptionist my info and get myself seated in the little room and wait for the tech to come for my blood.

She seemed a little nervous, which made me a little nervous, but the whole thing went off without a hitch and she left with three tubes of my blood.

What can I say, I have always been a giving person.

Blood – it’s in you to give.

Once she told me I was free to go, I took the apple I had thought to bring out and ate it while we drove to 7-11.

The apple kept me going enough to get myself three 2L bottles of Diet Coke (gotta feed the addiction), three samosas, and a naughty dessert.

I can legit say that the sugar dessert is medically needed to boost my blood sugar.

I meant to get chicken strips instead of the samosas for the B12, but at the moment of truth I forgot and just got what I normally get.

There is no B12 in chickpeas. I just Googled it.

And I ate the last of my little turkey pot pies last night, so I am currently without a meaty entrée for tonight’s supper.

Oh well, I was probably going to order in anyway. Plus it give me an extra kick in the pants towards doing my meaty order from Sav-On or wherever.

Gonna get me some good quality hot dogs, some cold cuts, more little pot pies, some good all beef bologna, some chili and some meaty soups… it’s going to be a carnivore’s carnival up in this joint.

My fangs are dripping just thinking about it.

More after the break,

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Just posted this to Facebook :

Sure, I’m, the highest paid sculptor at Deer Park, but I’m the best there is, and that’s why I make the big bucks.

a witty fox

My only worry is that not everyone knows that “buck” is another word for “stag” and so some might not get the joke.

But there’s only one another animal called a “buck” and that’s a “broncing buck”, those horses they ride in rodeos, and even fewer know that.

Got me some pizza tonight. Got the Meat Lovers, because B12, and on a whim decided to try the “homestyle” crust.

So far, I quite like it.

But be warned, it is not radically different from the regular crust. It’s more or less the same, only softer, crustier, and more like bread.

Clearly they were going for something more like home made pizza, and they sort of succeeded. It’s not nearly as good as home made pizza when done right, but it’s closer than their usual crust.

I remember one time when my mother made a pizza that basically used biscuit dough as the crust, and OMG NOMF.

Anyhow, it’s pretty good.

Oh, but I must mention my recent social adventure.

I bought a piece of software called Tabletop Simulator. It lets you play any sort of tabletop game on your computer.

And here’s the thing : the games are (mostly) free, and there’s over one hundred thousand of them,

Not bad for eleven bucks!

My friend Maelkoth has been bugging me to get it for ages. He’s a big fan of it and so every time it went on sale (it’s normally twenty bucks plus), he would pester me to get it so we can play stuff together.

.This latest time, I realized that I really had no reason NOT to get it. It sounded like a lot of fun and I could certainly afford it,

And despite my bovine stubbornness, I am not immune to being nagged and prodded.

So I got it, and found it’s a lot more complicated than I thought. They take the “simulator” part very seriously, and that means I had to learn how to turn game pieces and roll dice and whatnot from a tutorial,

Seems absolutely pointless to me, But I am coming at it from the viewpoint of a gamer who is used video games, where the standards for efficiency in interfaces are very high.

In TTS, you have to do everything yourself. Turn cards, throw dice, move playing pieces, and so on.

In any video game version of a board game, the computer would do that shit.

So the learning curve has been rough. Makes me feel very old. And the fact that I know part of my resistance is my own stubborn objections to the interface makes it worse.

I can be such a locus of friction!

So the first two games I tried were too complicated for a tyro like me, I just stared blankly at the screen trying to figure out waddy fug.

So the third game I downloaded was Trivial Pursuit. Now THERE is a game that I know inside out, upside down, and rotated into non-Euclidean dimensions. My brother Dave and I played that game for hundreds of hours.

We got to point where it was pointless to play because we both knew all the answers to all the questions.

We basically finished Trivial Pursuit.

So I downloaded it and started a game of it, leaving it open for anyone to join.

Trivial Pursuit is really not a game you can play by yourself.

I ended up playing against a 24 year girl I will call Badger 1. And as soon as we started playing, I came to the sickening realization that the game had changed a lot when they relaunched it in 2006.

The new rules make the game play much faster. What were once the “roll again” spaces are now “random subject question” spaces – good riddance.

And the rule is now that when you land on a color square, you are stuck on that square until you answer a question of that topic correctly.

This is bad news for someone who is REALLY REALLY bad at one of the topics, but it makes getting the wedge in a topic WAY easier and WAY less annoying.

Oh, and one more thing : play always goes to the next player at the end of your turn. If you roll and land on a blue square, then that determines the topic of the question for the next time it’s your turn.

That’s the hardest thing for me to adapt to. But it means it avoids one of the deadliest board game sins : it taking forever for it to be your turn again.

Anyhow, I approve of the new rules, even if the crusty old phart in me is not fond of them and wants things to go back to “normal”.

More importantly, I played the entire game with a total stranger (who kicked my ass) and fended off at least six major panic attacks to do so.

So, chalk that up as a victory against my social anxiety.

Wow, this had gone long, Guess I better finish up.

So um….bye!