Time for food stuff and things.

PantherMediaSeller | Deposit Photos

It's the day after the time change here in the US; Americans lost an hour of sleep overnight. Our European friends are being sensible (as they are in so many other ways these days) and waiting until the end of the month, but the US government has seen fit to start this nonsense three weeks earlier than them. (Mama Google says DST always starts on the second Sunday in March here, but I am skeptical. It seems like there used to be only a week between us changing our clocks and folks across the pond doing the same.)

Then again, if Standard Time starts earlier and earlier and ends later and later, maybe eventually it'll just go away entirely, and we'll have Daylight Time all year long. Not that I'm a particular fan of Daylight Time. I just wish we'd pick one.

Anyway, I am muzzy-headed today. And as usual when I'm muzzy-headed, my thoughts turn to food.

*** 

Work has been slow since session ended, so people have been bringing in occasional treats, some of which I've never heard of. One thing a friend made is a Japanese fruit cake. Has anyone ever heard of such a thing? It is not Japanese, nor does it contain much fruit. It is apparently a Southern dessert that folks would make for Christmas: alternating layers of spice cake and yellow cake, with a filling, as opposed to a frosting, containing lemon juice, coconut, and puh-lenty of sugar. Raisins are also involved. It was insanely sweet. The co-worker she made it for proclaimed it was just like her mama used to make. Here's a recipe, although not the one my friend used; try it if you dare.

The other thing that turned up at the office was billed as shrimp cocktail. We were told that the staffer making it was cooking it in the break room. Puzzled, I envisioned her boiling up the shrimp on a hot plate, but no; it turned out to be Mexican shrimp cocktail, which I had never heard of but was delicious. Think gazpacho -- a chilled tomato-based vegetable soup -- with cooked shrimp mixed in. Here's a recipe I found online. I am 100 percent making this myself this summer.

***

I did not run across this one at work. Instead, it turned up in the recipe section of Apple News recently. It's called Buttery Irish Cabbage. 

I have never been a cabbage fan, unless it's shredded and mixed with coleslaw dressing. (When I was a kid, I didn't even want the dressing; Mom would grind the cabbage and carrots into tiny shreds for the coleslaw, and I'd eat that plain.) I will also eat cabbage in Chinese food, although there needs to be enough soy sauce and other veggies involved that the cabbage is more or less an afterthought. 

But I have occasionally wondered if my problem isn't that my mother would boil the cabbage 'til it was limp and flavorless. I haven't wondered about it enough to make it some other way. But this recipe that I saw this week intrigued me. I figured that given enough butter and garlic, anything could be made edible -- even cabbage. I made it for supper tonight. Turns out I was right.

I don't know if I love it enough to throw it into a regular rotation. But I'll likely make it again at some point, probably for St. Patrick's Day -- which is, OMG, next week. Where has the year gone?

***

The glucose tracking device I mentioned last week came unstuck and fell off my arm last night. I'm not too fussed -- it was due for replacement tomorrow anyway, and a new one is on the way and should be here tomorrow -- but I will try to secure the new one better so it will last the full two weeks. The process is definitely helping me focus on eating low carb.

But now I know the answer to the question that was lurking in the back of my mind about how hard it would be to uninstall the device: Not hard at all!

***

These moments of muzzy-headed blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. 

Epstein fury and some backsliding.

Damn that guy taking up space in the White House anyway. I was all set to write a mea culpa blog post about how working this session screwed up my low-carb eating plan, and then I woke up yesterday morning, as we all did, to the news that Trump's latest gambit to draw headlines away from the Epstein files is to team up with Bibi Netanyahu to bomb Iran -- which country's nuclear capability we supposedly obliterated in June of last year, or so said Trump at the time.

The warmongers in Washington named the attack Operation Epic Fury, but it took no time at all for the memesters to change it to Operation Epstein Fury.

Already some US service members have lost their lives in retaliatory bombing, and Trump has said more are likely to die. Isn't this the same guy who said that if he was re-elected, he wasn't going to start any wars? His supporters believed him. And now, here we are.

I am so tired of this timeline.

***

Anyway, I'm not going to let him derail my plans for this post. My original topic is not good news, either, but I'll put in a little palate cleanser at the end. 

***

So yeah, the last week or two of this year's legislative session was hard. I whined about how hard it was here a couple of weeks back. What I didn't mention in that post was how the stress and anxiety, coupled with freely available, carb-heavy food, pinged my bad eating habits of yesteryear. I'd been amping up the snacking anyway, but this session put me back where I was toward the end of my time in DC.

Well, not completely back to those days. This year, I wasn't leaving work in the middle of the afternoon to head over to some shop to stock up on candy and a bag of chips, then polish off all of it at my desk before quitting time. But it was bad.

This past Monday, I had my regular appointment with my endocrinologist. Before session, my A1c was 6.5; on Monday, it was 8.9. Optimal for diabetics is less than 7.0. So yeah -- not good.

She told me to go back to a strict low-carb diet -- protein and veggies only. She outfitted me with a continuous glucose monitor that doesn't require a prescription and had me download an app that would let her see how I was doing. And then she asked me if I wanted to try Ozempic. I sighed and said okay.

Not my pen. This is a stock photo.
Artmim | Deposit Photos

I sighed because it felt like going backwards. When I left DC, I was not only taking Ozempic, I was also on a drug called Invokana that basically filters out all the extra sugar in your blood and sends it out through your kidneys. Neither one was too pricey when I was on the law firm's Cadillac insurance plan, but once I retired, hoo boy. It was those eye-watering prescription prices that made me try low-carbing in the first place. And low carbing worked -- until it didn't.

But it worked far longer than it might otherwise have. A fairly recent study found that most people regain the weight they lost, as well as losing all the other benefits they gained from being on a GLP-1, within two years of stopping the drug. I didn't lose weight when I was on Ozempic before because I was binge eating. But it took me five years to lose the benefits of taking it.

One thing it did help with, I believe, was quieting the food noise in my head. After I moved out here, I remember telling someone that I didn't have a craving for sweets anymore. Now I think that was because of the Ozempic. If it quiets the food noise again, it would be worth the eye-watering prescription price, at least until I can get back on the low-carb track.

I do like the continuous monitor. It's kind of fun, watching the numbers go up and down. I will likely feel different if I backslide again and the graph starts going the wrong way. But I'm pretty sure my numbers will be much better when I see my doctor next. I'll keep y'all posted.

***

Okay, here's the palate cleanser. We've had really nice weather here, with highs in the upper 60s. Tigs and I spent some time out on the porch this afternoon, and he alerted me when some birds showed up at the feeder. (I hope you guys can watch this -- I'm never sure about Apple's video format.) 

***

These desperate moments of blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there.