Blog for Meridajg

Many people don't really understand Diabetes. Sure they know that it has something to do with sugar and people that shouldn't have it. But really what is Diabetes?

Diabetes is essentially an insulin deficiency in the body that causes difficulty with processing out sugar. This includes natural as well as synthetic sugars and all carbs also like bread and potatoes. Insulin which is naturally produced by the pancreas is no longer produced in the proper amounts at the proper times, and therefore the amount of sugar in a Diabetics system at any one time can be either too low, or too high. Allowing the blood sugar to remain out of balance can cause issues like neuropathy, necrosis or even coma and death.

Diabetes symptoms that are most commonly acknowledged by the general public include issues like the peripheral neuropathy that affects the feet and especially the toes and of course light-headedness and fainting. a

It used to be very difficult for people with diabetes to watch their diets, because there were so many products that were high in sugar and carbohydrates, but things have been made a bit easier now with great tasting sugar substitutes like sweet and low, splenda, and nutrisweet, which allow diabetics to satisfy their sweet tooth without going too far off their diet, which is honestly the key to keeping their blood sugar under control.

Dieting can help a diabetic, as being overweight has been shown to be a contributing factor to diabetes, even though they are not really sure why. So keeping yourself in shape and eating healthier may help you avoid some of the debilitating factors of having diabetes.

The good news is that with a proper diet, exercise, glucose blood testing, and insulin, Diabetes can be kept under control and you can live a normal, healthy, productive life. Many are living their lives in spite of diabetes, and find that with regular insulin injections and diet they can keep their diabetes under control. Insulin, is used by many as their sole course of treatment, however, this is not advisable, because progressively it will take more and more insulin to produce the same results, this is why limiting your carb and sugar intake is important even when you are taking regular insulin injections.

After a grueling freshman year here, I have finally finished all of my finals as of today. With all of them out of the way I can really start to look ahead to what I am going to do to pass all the time this summer. I am not taking any classes because over the summer I cannot afford to spend any money. My job at the local pizza shop will not pay enough for me to have that kind of luxury and so I will have to cut back to just night work and playing during the day. I am sure it will be a fun four months of hiking, swimming, and playing guitar out on the lawn. By the time the fall semester starts up I should definitely be a professional barbeque chef, or at least really great at grilling.
In the spirit of keeping my schedule loose but looking ahead to the fall, I have decided to take my time and tick off some various things that I felt should have been different throughout the last year of school. One of my biggest problems was the office equipment I had in my apartment. The reason I spent so many hours outside of my house at the computer labs was because I could never get in to anything close to a comfortable position in in my own space. My room here is definitely not big enough for my desk from home and so I have been lefty with no choice but to do my work on my bed or out of the house.
To remedy this I have been looking forward to the annual trash to treasure sale that our school holds every year at the football stadium for charity. They hold this huge sale with thousands of items including office desks and office chairs which they sell for super low prices. I found this out because I went to the home office furniture store here in town to get some estimates and they were all really high priced. My roommate, who is a junior now, told me about how he got all of his stuff for less that a hundred dollars at this sale last year.
This hopefully will not be the highlight of my summer, but it should be something to make the next year a lot more comfortable.

I really have never quite gotten into it, but a lot of people I knew in high school were big on car shows so I would go once in a while. It was fun because you would get to see the girls dressed up with their hair and makeup done and they would be pointing out the new cars and since my friends dad sponsored a lot of the shows (well, his company did) we got to go in some of the cars. It was fun when we were a lot younger, but I would definitely not get up now early in the morning to spend the day at the car show looking at stuff I couldn't care less about ha.
And I remember when one time over the summer my friend's dad bought him this old antique car and he wanted to fix it up for his birthday with him. So we would go to these auto aftermarket parts sales and look for parts that went for the car. Or we would look in the paper and online to find auto performance parts (well I didn't really know what I was looking for so I would just online shop for clothes ha). But I do remember a search for vellano wheels that took months.
Anyways it really wasn't a habit or hobby that I got into. But it was fun to watch with friends and hang out while they were fixing up the cars. And I actually ended up learning a lot about cars and what's what. They taught me how to change tires and even how some of the wires in the car are hooked up.
I probably won't be going to any car shows in the future (even though where I go to school they are really popular and people go all of the time) but I did take a lot from the experience. I learned that you can make a lot of networking progress at car shows (there are a lot of business people there) and even about how to put a car together. It has come in handy because I tend to get into a lot of accidents and when I need to bring my car in (since my dad is 5 hours away from me when I'm at school) I know when someone's trying to scam me ha.

If you have never experienced multipoint video conferencing then you are really missing out. I love learning about all the new technology that there is and I am very glad that I have had the opportunity to experience video conferencing first hand. See, I decided that while I was still in school, it would be a good idea to get a part time job at a firm that was the most advanced, and learn a good deal about running a business and things that you need to do and have. I figured this would help me out in the future, and would allow me to make the most of my time, making money to live off of right now, while getting great business tips and advice for the future.

When I first began looking, I started interviewing with different people and basically, I had a hard time landing on someone that I just kind of meshed with. I wanted to find someone who I felt was running the type of business that I hoped to one day run. That is when I finally interviewed with Frank. Frank is an older guy, but yet still cool if you know what I mean. He is very much into technology and loves running his business. He likes toys and so if there is something new on the market, then he just must have it. It is one of the things I like best about working with him. I get to see the newest and best of everything, since he always not only buys what is new, but the top of the line. Anyway, the video conferencing that he is using is incredible. He has explained to me that he is using this to make contacts in other countries. And honestly, I have read in some of the biggest publications, that anyone who wants their business to succeed in the current economy must expand their overseas business. Frank is doing just this. He says now he can not only have face to face meetings with his clients overseas, but it saves him much money and time on travel. He says that he can also use this video conferencing to help him keep in touch with his employees, when he or they are overseas. Thank goodness for Frank and all he is teaching me about business. I know that I will go far, if I even come halfway to where he is.

I have always had a sweet tooth, but last month, while I was helping a friend out because her husband was very ill and dying, I had the occasion to visit an old family friend, because I needed a place to stay for an evening or so. Really wanted to go home, but it would have been too long a trip and this woman who has been a friend of my mother's since childhood offered, so I just couldn't say no. Well, she and her husband were more lovely than I had remembered and welcomed me into their home with open arms. They had a beautiful old home which had been in the family for generations and was perched on top of this incredible little mountain with a view out their back sliding doors that you couldn't believe. They had little bowls of candy around the house, which indicated to me that this couple must have had stock in bulk candy or something. I didn't take any because I was trying hard to be polite, but then Mary came over and offered me a candy that she said was special candy from Germany that she discovered in her travels many years ago. She said by far this haribo candy was the best that she had ever had, and that she tried to keep some on hand, but not all the time because she didn't want to over indulge her sweet tooth. I told her I could relate to that. Anyway, we had such a lovely evening, and it was wonderful. The next day, I headed back for my friends funeral, so this was a nice break from the sadness that I was going to be dealing with.

We buried my friend that next day, a 32 year old guy with two babies, one 8 months old and one 3. It was so sad, a man with so much to live for taken suddenly by cancer. A few weeks later when I returned home, a small package arrived for me with some haribo candy in it from Mary, with a small note that said Enjoy!

The world we live in is definitely moving in an interesting direction with regards to technology. We are looking straight down the line and we still don't quite understand what our world will look like in just a few years as a result of technology moving at such an insanely fast pace. For college students I mean look at the last five years or so when computer have totally changed and each year we are asked to learn a brand new program and a brand new set of skills that may actually become useless when we get out in to the world.
This fast pace of development is both a bane and a boon on the face of learning in the future because the results of what it does are still a bit unknown. There is no doubt that elearning makes peoples' lives easier and makes getting an education more accessible to more people. Uses of online training courses will no doubt grow in number as time goes on as well as the number of strictly digital jobs. At the same time though for young students there is some research to show that online training videos and online media in general are detrimental to their ability to think critically because they are constantly fed information and then never asked to analyze any of it. The data on that sort of result is inconclusive, but the truth is when you look at the ways in which technology changes our patterns of social interactions life is already changing to fit these types of things in to our lives with amazing speed.
I am not an expert on any of this stuff, but I do have sort of an informed opinion because I am in education and see what the implications of increasing technological integration could hold for us. The future that I see in classrooms is something of a pendulum swinging. One the one hand we will see an over saturation of schools with these types of things and we will find that they don't help with many skills that are essential to our lives in the future. Then things will swing back to center at the request of people realizing this. Either way though I think technology has its place in our lives and schools, the degree is where the question lies.