A Picture, An Announcement, and A Tool I Can Use!

The Picture

I totally picture some sluff sleeping on the job at one of those pill separator contraptions. I don't mind a busted up pill, but please include BOTH HALVES!

The Announcement

Gina over at DTF asked me to spread the word on a very cool chat they have scheduled for this approaching Sunday evening. Dr. Robert Elliot will be the special guest and he will be talking about Porcine Cell Transplantation. Please do go check out the details at http://www.diabetestalkfest.com/!

The Tool

There's this little website called Calorie King. You may not have heard of it before. That is unless you (or a loved one) lives with diabetes!! Calorie King is, by far, the best resource I have found for carbohydrate counts on almost any food item you can think of. It is a fantastic website that you can search for a food item that you want details on (carb grams for example). It rocks.

Very cool. Unless you are out and about with no computer. I've actually got a few of their small and portable books stashed in strategic locations - but I rarely have one with me when I need it. The other downside to the printed media is that when new foods hit the streets, they will not be in the book until the next edition. New foods appear in their main, web "searchable", database very quickly. Cheesy Tots (werd up) for example.

I've been pestering them for a couple years to update their very old and outdated pocket pc software, but they never acknowledged any real efforts to update it. Now I see why.

Enter "CalorieKing Mobile"! Yes - that's right MOBILE!! Now with any web enabled cell phone (or Pocket PC!) I can now search the vast (over 50,000 items) food database and get accurate carb counts on my food items. I just have to point my mobile browser at http://mobile.calorieking.com/ and I am presented with a screen that allows me to search the database. I can also log in to my member account (which I will now renew!) and use it to keep track of my total calorie balance (calories in / calories out) per day.

I'm personally very excited about this, and am glad that CalorieKing has made a tool that can keep us in charge of our foods where we most often need them most. Good stuff CK, good stuff.

Did I mention that searching the food database is completely free? How cool is that. They have the best database around, and everyone can use it completely free. There are charges to take advantage of their other helpful services (CK University, tracking daily nutrients, etc), but they are really well worth the price they are asking. Go check it out.

Short Term Memory?

Four thirty something on Friday. I'm at work. I rotate in my chair slightly to the left and do a test. I have the result in a few short seconds. I rotate back to center, move my mouse pointer on the computer into the appropriate cell in Kevin's logbook, and then ... nothing!

I could not remember what my blood sugar was! In the fraction of a second that it took me to read the result and position my mouse pointer on the computer, the number was gone. Vanished. Nowhere to be found in the vast space of empty that is sometimes called my brain.

I paused, thinking to myself "I couldn't possibly have forgotten that number so quickly". I was kind of disturbed and worried.

I actually had to turn back to the meter and pull the number out of the memory!

149 mg/dl.

Our lives are so full of numbers that sometimes a few of them fall through the cracks I guess.