Three Weeks Have Flown By

Wow three weeks have just flown by.  The last time I wrote on the blog was the day after the Los Conchas fire started.  That fire is the biggest in New Mexico history.  Last I heard it was something like 140,000 acres, which I actually have no idea how big that is but I'm sure it's pretty big.  Sounds big.

I didn't mention this last blog but when I left for work on June 27th I hadn't heard that the lab was closed.  I missed the train that morning, which turned out to be a blessing, and as I'm driving towards Santa Fe I see this hugh cloud and I'm hoping that it might rain, but when I get to it I see that it's all smoke, so I look up towards where Los Alamos is and it's dark up there and I think to myself that no one could possibly breath in that so I decide to call the hot line to see if maybe work was canceled.  What the heck it's worth a try.  The hot line says that the Lab is closed and I was passing an exit on the freeway and slammed on my breaks and took the exit and came home.

Apparently I was the only person in my family who hadn't heard on the news, or some other source that the Lab was closed.  So I decided that I would start to clean off the side yard.  I say side yard but it is actually the area out the outside of our fence next to the road that the city says that we're responsible for and every year they come and say that we need to weed it.  Karen has planted some wild flowers there and they look really nice for a couple of weeks, but pretty scruffy the rest of the year.  When we first moved in we tried putting down some crusher fines to keep the weeds down, but we didn't get enough delivered the first time, and perhaps we couldn't afford to cover it all at that time but I didn't finish.  Also, the red lava rocks that we'd laid down had a bunch of weeds grow up in it and it looked bad.  I'd been thinking of cleaning it up and decided to start while I had this unexpected time off.  I started on Monday and thought it would take a day or two to finish.  I actually finished with everything that Saturday so it took 6 days instead of a day or two.  I think it looks a lot better now.  Karen says she misses the wild flowers but I don't.

On July 4th we went to the ward breakfast in the morning with Goosy, then in the afternoon we went to a party with her that someone from her work was giving.  Goosy really is growing up when she get invited to "adult" parties from work that we get to go to.  (The Goosy growing up part gets way worse in this blog than this.)

The Los Conchas fire was gotten under control and we had to go back to work.  On the first day that I went back Karen asked me about my crappy lungs and how I would fare in smokey Los Alamos.  A few years ago I was tested for asthma and while I don't have asthma the doctor told me: "You have crappy lungs.  It's a good thing you don't live somewhere with pollution like LA."  I told Karen I'd be OK, but by 9 that morning I was starting to get very congested lungs and was losing my voice.  I looked at the Park and Ride schedule and found out that the last bus had left about 3 minutes before, so I called Karen and asked her to come pick me up, and she very kindly came up and picked me up.  I took the rest of that Wednesday off, and Thursday.  I also went and bought a hepa filter for my cubicle for when I got back to help keep the air around me cleaner.  It seems to have worked.  Right now the air up there is pretty clean and I think that I'll start trying to figure out how to bring the filter home.

That Thursday Cathy called and said that she was going to be taking Grandma Evans to Arizona to see Aunt LaVon at their Arizona family reunion.  She said that Beth (my cousin) would be there, Lisa would come as well from Mayer and did we want to go with her?  Cathy loves to plan things out in advance.  It was a lot of fun to be go and see everyone and get to spend time with my sisters, and to see my cousins.  We hadn't seen everyone since the last time we went there.  It was fun to spend time with Grandma as well, but she doesn't visit very well.  We stopped at Earls in Gallup and ended up getting Karen about $100 worth of jewelry.  Gooey went with us as well.  It was a fun weekend, even if it was thrown together at the last minute.

I went back to work and the HEPA filter worked pretty good, but I had to leave my cage quite a bit, and my lungs started to get a little congested.  It was especially bad when I walked to the bus stop because the fire was still burning down south and the smoke would get blown in and it was very smokey and that was bad.  However, I saw that a couple of people had gotten the face masks that Occ. Med. was handing out.  I asked if they worked and was told that they worked really well, so on Tuesday I went and got a mask and got made fun of, but it seemed to help a lot.

This last weekend we had the youth conference and had a very interesting service project.  We went to the Catholic cemetery and picked up trash and weeded.  We picked up a ton of trash.  They divided up the cemetery into six zones and I was working in the first zone and didn't realize how much was getting done until I took my first full bag on weeds to a trailer and saw how heaped it was.  By the time we were done it was a mountain of trash.  I was talking to the high councilor that was there and he said that the caretaker was pretty much overwhelmed with gratitude.  It was a hot day, and Karen got a touch of heat stroke, and I was pretty wrung out so we left in the afternoon when Karen stood up to sing a song and said that she nearly passed out.

So that's pretty much what has happened in the last few weeks.  Karen and I are in the 3rd week of the maintenance phase of the hCG diet.  Karen is following the rules pretty good but I'm not.  However, things seems to be going to way that I would like them to.  I've gained 8 lbs but 6.9 lbs of that is lean body mass (muscle) and 1.1 lbs of body fat.  I was worried about how much muscle that I lost during the dieting phase and I've gained about half of it back.  I have to admit that I was hoping I would be able to gain the muscle and lose more fat.  Actually I'm amazed that I'm able to gain weight at all with how few calories I'm eating.  I'm averaging around 2100 a day, as well as I'm still exercising pretty vigorously in the morning (now that I have some more muscle) so I would think that I'd be losing weight but I'm not.  The body is a pretty amazing thing.

I also went and had another HA1c test.  It was 5.5 which averages out to 111 which is pretty good but I was hoping that it would be a little closer to 100.  I don't know when I'll go back and get the next test I'll just have to wait and see.  However I've gone from 7.6 (171) to 6.4 (137) to 5.5.  That's pretty good and I'd have to say that I've got my BG better under control.  I'm taking 2 grams of metformin a day because I like eating fruit, and I'm pretty sure that it would be higher without the metformin.  In fact I've forgotten to take it a couple of time and I can see that my BG has gone up every time.  Hopefully after the next round of the diet I'll get my weight down even further and the control will be better.  I'll just wait and see, but right now I'm thinking that it's worth taking the the metformin to be able to eat fruit.  Fruit is the only thing that I've added to my diet that I didn't eat before.

6 am and I haven't slept very much at all.

Last week I was talking about how great I thought the silver water was.  Well it was very good, but Saturday I started coughing and the cold came on strong.  After doing some more reading I decided that I needed to use more of the silver water and I was getting a little low on the water that I had so I called Cathy's friends husband and asked if I could get a couple more bottles to tide me over.  While I was there with him he told me that he had the older generator that made larger particles.  So I got even sicker on Sunday but I kept doing the nasal wash and finishing with silver water and using it in the nebulizer and by Monday morning I was feeling well enough to start exercising and able to go to work.  I took a bottle of silver water with me to work and kept doing the nasal wash and I kept getting better.  I thought that I was through with it.  If I can get though a cold without it turning into bronchitis that's great in my book.

However, I spoke too soon.  Friday I started coughing at 2:00.  It weird how I can tell when it starts.  Well I was hoping that it was just the one cough.  I came home early to surprise Nini when Mom took her to dinner before the going to the Legally Blond play.  The coughing kept getting worse.

I was impressed enough with the silver water that Cathy's friend gave me that I decided that I'd buy a generator for us, and it arrived on Thursday so when I got home after dinner on Friday I decided to mix up a batch.  Supposedly I've got a newer Micro-Particle Colloidal Silver Generator.  The smaller silver particles are supposed to better than larger particles generated by other methods.  The first batch I mixed didn't work so I thought I might have the wrong kind of distilled water.  The directions said that the Wal-Mart brand was best, but there is a sensor on the generator that senses if there are too many minerals in the water for it to work correctly, and the light was bright green.  When it didn't work I was so tired I just went to bed.  However,  my cough was such that when I laid down it got worse and I wasn't able to sleep.  When Mom got home I was starting to lose my voice.  So since I couldn't sleep I decided to try to mix another batch so I went back to Wal-Mart at 12:00 and it turns out that I had got the right kind of water, but it wasn't a total waste because Mom asked me to get her some ice cream.  When I got back I decided I would clean the mason jar really well before I put in the distilled water and it worked great.  It takes 3 hours to make a quart of this stuff, so I went to bed again, but was still coughing when I laid down.  So I got back up and waited for the batch to finish and started using it, and that's what I'm doing right now.  I don't think I've slept very much because the cough and hacking is back.  I read in the book that I got with the generator that many people will do what they call loading with silver when they first start and will drink 4 oz 3 times a day for 10 days and then go to a maintenance level of 1 oz a day.  Maybe I'll try that.

The funny thing about this cough is that I was thinking that in the past I've tried to just work through a cold, and it will seem like I've done it, and then it will suddenly take a turn for the worse and the bronchitis will start up.  However, I really thought that I'd beat it this time when I started coughing.  I was surprised the first time it happened at 2:00 and was hoping that it just a spare cough.  Hopefully this fancy new micro silver water will get this cough back under control.

One other thing this week.  Last Friday night I did something that I just love.  I bit my lip and caused a canker sore.  These sores sometimes just go away and other times they become super painful just like all the rest.  These sores are what make me think that canker sores are related to a virus or something like that.  Anyway the sore this week didn't hurt.  When it started hurting I would rinse with silver water.  The sore didn't go away.  It felt like it went through the canker sore stages it just didn't hurt.

So I have a generator and I'm hoping that I can get through this cough without it taking for ever.  I hope so, but even if it keeps canker sores from being so painful that would be a really good thing.

By the way I've started a new blog called "A Mormon's Thoughts on Mormonism."  This is my attempt to help portray Mormonism on the web.

Colloidal Silver and Atkins Cookies

This has been a fairly eventful week.  My sister Cathy had a friend that had told her that she used to get bronchitis and pneumonia quite a bit but that she'd started drinking something that kept her from getting it anymore.  She asked if I'd be interested in it.  I'm pretty much interested in anything that might help me keep from getting sick a couple months a year.  Turns out it's called Colloidal Silver.  She got a couple of bottles of the stuff and the lady gave her a printout of information about Colloidal Silver.  It was very interesting stuff.  The information that I got didn't say anything about how much I should be taking or what the concentration of the Colloidal Silver that I had.  Then I looked up some more information about Colloidal Silver on the internet, including Dr. Mercola's web site, an alternate medicine site that I look at.  Eventually I got hold of Cathy and she gave me the names of the people that she got the silver water from.  I gave them a call and was able to talk to the husband, Bill Norton.  He talked to me a while about it, but basically he told me that I should drink about an ounce a day prophylactically.  He also mentioned that he had a nebulizer and that he put the silver water in the nebulizer instead of the saline and albuteral.  He also reminded me about a web site called thesilversource.com, which was mentioned in the literature.  I went to the site and found that a lot of people there spayed the silver water in their noses to help keep from getting colds.


I have to admit that I was pretty surprised when I woke up the next morning and felt a lot better.  My nose was nowhere near as runny as it usually is in the morning when I exercise.  My chest didn't feel as heavy.  I was pretty impressed.  However, the next day Thursday I woke up and I felt wrung out completely.  I tried just riding the exercise bike but couldn't do it, so I went back to bed for 1/2 an hour.  Later that day it felt like a cold was coming on.  I decided that I'd try doing the salty nose thing and finish up with silver water, and try drinking some more of the water.  Friday I woke up feeling better.  I have to admit that I'm pretty impressed with the stuff.


The diabetes front is going pretty good.  I re-read the section of the Diabetes Solution about medication.  He mentioned that there was some stuff called R-ALA (Alpha Lipoic Acid) that acted like an insulin memetic.  I decided to try and get some and try it.  The book suggested that I get a brand called Insulow so I ordered it from Amazon.  I started taking it at night but that actually seemed to start raising my BG in the morning a little.  I then tried taking it before meals as the direction of the bottle says.  That started to work really well I was getting reading below 100 right around 90 and even had some below 90.  I was getting pretty excited, and then this week for some reason the readings started going back up above 100.  I don't know what's going on, but that's still not too bad I think.


I'm starting to build up some endurance in exercising.  Last week I was to tired to fully exercise a couple of day so I only did the exercise cycle a couple of days.  This week I've been able to work out every day except for Thursday and I think that that might have been caused by a cold that started coming on.


Today I decided to try and see if the Atkins Cookies would be as bad for my BG as I thought they would be.  They were bad.  I don't know if they were as bad as I thought they would be but they were pretty bad.  I guess that I'll not try those again for a while.  Perhaps when I lose some weight I might try the cookies again.


I've been watching my diet and cutting back on the calories.  It seems like my weight is going down some.  I guess about as much as I can expect them to.  The BF% is going down according to the scale that Goosie got me.  From what I understand about the scales they're not the most exact devices, but they do log trends, and the BF% trend is down and that's good.  According to what I've read everything says that the more weight that is lost the better your insulin sensitivity becomes.  That's what I'm hoping anyways.