Pumped

My insulin pump, a Medtronic Paradigm 722, is worth $7000. It is also two years old, banged up, and covered in little bits of dust, dirt and my own skin, but the price still remains. It is also not waterproof.

It is also, now, broken.

Yesterday marked the meandering start to Toronto's first heat wave of the year: slightly sticky, a little heavy, mostly pleasant. The temperature was stable at 25 when I went for my run at 6pm. I usually remove my pump when I run: too much basal insulin makes me bottom out, and the thing is so fucking expensive, right? What if I trip and smash it? What if my tubing gets caught in a tree branch? Yesterday, though, I decided to keep it on. I shouldn't have it detached for more than an hour at a time, and my training distances will keep going up in advance of my races this year.

So I kept it on, clipped to the inside of my sports bra. Around 11km I dug it out to check the time. It was slick with sweat. Pressed a button. Nothing happened. Pressed another. Nothing happened. The clock was still working alright, but the buttons, it seems, were brucked. When I got home I blasted it with a hair dryer. It started to beep at me like a crazy person. Then it flashed its final message: "BUTTON ERROR".

The jig was up.

This pump may not be waterproof, but it should, at least, prove sweatproof. I'm not a terribly sweaty individual. I didn't drop it in the toilet. It shouldn't stop working for this. I picked up the phone prepared to give Medtronic a piece of my mind...but the customer service agent I spoke to was so surprisingly nice I couldn't even muster up rage. Instead of the standard 24 hour wait, they had a replacement pump sent by courier to me within the hour.

This new pump isn't dented or covered in old skin cells either, so, y'know, every cloud.

21km and Type 1: On Shorts

My dad used to run cross country in high school. He told my brother and I stories about his past "running career" as we embarked on our own, but it was hard to take him seriously. My dad, beer-bellied and forever old, could not have been a runner, right? Some of his stories were a little hard to believe (like the one about him winning the regional championship, or how they had to run through rivers on the course, or how he claimed to have started the 1960's trend of wearing running shoes casually (my personal fav)). But then again, he did have the shorts.

The shorts. Teeny tiny blue satin running shorts edged in red. He even had a yellowed photograph of himself wearing them--proof enough for me.

I decided to wear them for OFSAA 2002. It was November and freezing. The shorts barely fit me (shit, my dad was skinnier at 16 than I was?) and they reeked of oak cabinet and must. I don't even remember my time or place in that race; I don't remember much beyond the shorts, and that's why I'm so thankful for them.

It's also why I need new shorts. I've been wearing the same running stuff for years. I've been wearing down my Dri-Fits slowly, convincing myself that I didn't deserve / couldn't afford the wardrobe of a real runner. My boring old black shorts symbolize nothing good to me; they sum up the last few years I spent adjusting basal rates, injuring my legs and training intermittently. It's time for me to change...shorts. Not sure if I'll go for blue satin though.

The Bachelorette Looky-likeys

I watch The Bachelor without fail every season, but it's never as entertaining as The Bachelorette. "The Bette" lasts just as long--two hours every week, are you kidding me Mike Fleiss?--but its cast of potential suitors always keeps me interested way longer than The Bach's fleet of catty bitches.

Season 7 started last night and already promises to be unsophisticated, disingenuous, messy and hilarious. Here are the best cast lookalikes we spotted during last night's episode.

Contestant: William

Josh Lucas, anyone?

Contestant: Frank

Contestant: Constantine 

There are at least 3 Grobans on this season.

Contestant: JP

 Pitter patter.

Contestant: Michael

Contestant: Tim

image sources: abc.go.com, too many to name

Hunting For: Pull-Down School Maps

I've had old school maps (literally: school maps that are old) on my radar for a while now. I love cartography in general, but these pull-down scrolls are something special. There's one hanging in the back portion of The Ossington--every trivia night I hope to get a geography question about South America so I can use the map to my advantage, but it hasn't happened yet. Pretty and functional.

(images via 1, 2)

These aren't hard-to-find treasures. I know where they're at ( The Queen West Antique Centre, for one), but they've always been out of reach, money-wise. This summer I'm making it a mission to buy one at a price that suits my post-grad budget. I have a few tricks up my sleeve: my boyfriend's step-dad, a teacher in Southwestern Ontario, is keeping tabs on schools in the area that might be closing down; I've been checking listings for school auctions out in the country; and then there's Christie. These fingers are crossed. Map: I'm gonna get you.

A Wing and a Prayer

It's been a while since I've be truly excited for a film adaptation of a book. When I was younger, books-to-movies used to make me crazy; I love books and movies in equal measure, so the chance to have both, one after the other, could send me into a tizzy. (It's only now, at age 25, that I've started to realize my emotional attachments to art and media might be a touch freakish.) Sometimes the book to movie transition is smooth; other times, not so much.

I crossed my fingers for the Owen Meany movie. I swallowed that book up when I was 12, in the sixth grade, while my peers were still reading the Babysitter's Club Little Sister series, and felt so adult. An Owen Meany movie couldn't fail, right? And then I met "Simon Birch".

I basically peed my pants over The Virgin Suicides. I'd read the book in the fall of my grade 10 year, knowing that Sofia Coppola's movie was already in the pipeline. The book made me cry. I watched the movie on a Christmas eve. They both hit me, in different ways, equally hard.

Which brings me to this year's model: Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin. The movie is premiering at Cannes. The book I wasn't expecting to like nearly as much as I did.

I came away from Kevin's final page legitimately terrified of having kids. Granted, 'having kids' is a scary notion on its own, but this was different: what if my kid is horrible? What if they do something horrible? What if I don't love them.

Shriver's novel is oftentimes overwrought, repetitive and insincere. I've never read another book, though, that so thoroughly engrossed me in motherhood. I'm not a mother, won't be for a while, but I came away from this book thinking like a mother. Feeling like a mother, probably, too. I bought my mom a copy to read after I did. I expected her to feel as affected as I had been, but it didn't quite pan out that way. She found it more unsettling than affecting, which I suppose marks the difference between a real mom and a maybe-future-mom.

A few clips from the movie were released this week. It took me two days to finally watch them. I was hoping for Virgin Suicides but expecting another Simon Birch. I'm a fan of SWINTON, and I'd die for John C. Reilly, but I just wasn't buying them in the roles. When I finally bit down and watched the clips (what if I don't love them), I realized that my fears had been misplaced.

The movie, at least, looks good.

We Need to Talk About Kevin clip 3 by Flixgr

My future kids might still turn out to be mass murderers, though.

a different kind of coaster

My diabetes turns into a roller coaster at least three times a week, and there's never any fun to it: an over-treated low blood sugar becomes a high blood sugar in minutes; that high number gets corrected by insulin and plummets again; and over, and over, and over again. Let's call it THE DIABEAST. It is the worst coaster in the world.

I haven't been to Canada's Wonderland since I was diagnosed with type 1. It was the cool thing to do back when I was 11, 12, 15, and now I want to go again. But there's a problem. When I started using an insulin pump in April of '09 (happy two year anniversary, my pump!) I was told explicitly not to ride roller coasters. Blood sugar roller coasters, of course, are allowed--even expected--but real coasters were out of the picture. No explanation was ever given. Up until this point I've just accepted it as another fact of my crap life: no candy, no pizza, no roller coasters, no fun.

(image via)

This week I decided to research the validity of this myth. I was only able to find one legitimate source; the rest was just overly involved parents spouting off on Disney message boards. Here's what Animas has to say:

Amusement Parks

- Very powerful electromagnets are sometimes used on "free-fall" amusement park rides. Insulin pumps should be REMOVED AND NOT TAKEN on these "free-fall" types of rides.

- High gravity forces can be experienced when riding on some roller coasters. It is recommended that you disconnect (NOT suspend) the pump while on roller coaster rides.

Um, what? Looks like the only ride I'm going to be riding is THE DIABEAST, forever. Well, maybe the Ghoster Coaster too. That one's pretty harmless. 

Mackinac Island

I don't know where, how or when I found out about Michigan's Mackinac Island, a little summer island that rests near the northern tip of Lake Huron, but I want to go there.

Mackinac has been a popular summer tourist destination since the 1800s; only 400 people live there year-round. It's accessible by ferry and plane, and the island is almost completely car-free. Think of it as Toronto Island's much bigger sister. It's grandest hotel, the aptly named Grand Hotel, is so pretty it makes me sick. The place is overrun by lilacs every spring and tourists rent bikes or horses to get around. I think I might die there.

(images via 1, 2, 3, 4)

21km and Type 1: Extended Pause

So my IT band pain has not subsided. I have done lots to correct the problem--lots for me, which includes anything beyond trying to ignore its existence--and yet, the pain still nags. Two physiotherapy sessions brought me some stretches, some ultrasound, and some relief, but I still can't run more than 4km without feeling that familiar twinge along the outside of my knee.

As most runners know, this is heartbreaking. I was forced to stop halfway through my run on Monday afternoon and walked home, sobbing the whole way. Losing my shit probably isn't the best way to handle this problem, but my emotions can't be controlled at this point. Runner's Limbo sucks.

I'd planned on running the 15km Bread and Honey in Streetsville on June 4th, and maybe I can still get there(!), but this needs to be my reality for the time being:



Thanks for this, strange mumbly guy on YouTube. I've been pulling out his diy stretch everywhere: while watching tv, in the kitchen, at work watching to make sure no coworkers are walking by. I've tried to be sneaky but it doesn't even matter; I look ridiculous and it hurts like hell. I'm also going to give in and buy a foam roller tonight  for massaging my leg (sidenote: "giving in" costs approximately $30).

I'm hopeful, but I'm still emotional. The only thing this hiccup has taught me is that I can no longer afford to be lax about anything when it comes to my running. My focus over the past two years has been maintaining blood sugar control when I run; form, speed, and stretching all fell by the wayside. This is my wake-up call. This is up to me now: do I want to be a diabetic who runs or a diabetic runner? It's gotta be the latter.

The Worst Ride at Disneyworld

We went to Disney World, for a day, back in February. We toured the Magic Kingdom because we couldn't afford the "park hopper" ticket option--an extra $60, on top of $80 already spent-- but we did it from top to bottom. I mean, we went on every ride, even the ones where Devan could barely fit inside the cars.

I had been to the park twice before; when I was 3 (all of my memories of this trip are skewed, full of things I made up and moments cribbed from TV shows), and again when I was 11 (during the age of the Tower of Terror). This time around, it wasn't familiar. Since when did all of the rides involve bobbing down a river, surrounded by animatronic freaks?

Admittedly, we went on the Pirates of the Caribbean late in the day, and the ride did stop halfway, leaving us stuck in our boat staring at a skeleton, but it just felt so lame. There's no way kids could be tricked by that, right?

And yet, I've been tricked by this: OPI's tie-in collection for the new POTC movie. I definitely won't be seeing this movie, but I definitely will be buying Stranger Tides, a gloomy gray green that hopefully finds its way up to Canada in May.

I'm finally at an age where nail polish excites me more than Disney World. It's official; I am old.

(images via 1, 2)

The Butterscotch Stallion Rides Again

So the Butterscotch Stallion is in town. My sources aren't the most reliable (Facebook, Twitter) but the facts are just banal enough to be true: eating on Bloor, playing basketball at Hart House (what?). Apparently he's here visiting Woody Harrelson, who's here being Woody for the next while.

My fingers are crossed that I can hunt him down; my lunch breaks are extended so that I can cover more ground in Yorkville. I have seen him in the flesh once before, though: London, London proper, in August of 2006. I was walking through Hyde Park with my mom, jet lagged and delirious after our flight. He was wearing a tiny pair of running shorts, talking on his cell under a tree. I later figured out that he was in town to promote "You, Me and Dupree"-- so not his finest hour, but it was definitely mine. I lingered nearby but never approached him. He was on his phone--probably talking to Kate Hudson, since that relationship still existed back then--and I didn't want to be rude. Canadians aren't rude.

But now he's in Canada. And I am going to Hunt Him Down.

(image via)