Wordless Wednesday

If anyone knows how to rotate pictures, let me know, this is driving me nuts not to be able to rotate things...

Embarrased

So after I had my milkshake, I used a nifty A1c Now test to check my control over the past 2-3 months.  I love that in 5 minutes I know what it is.  I love that it is in complete privacy.  No one else knows it.  It was embarrassingly high.  My highest ever.  I wasn't expecting it to be good.  But I wasn't expecting that either.  I took a picture.  For the first time in I don't know how long, I had the picture printed.  It is now hanging on my bathroom mirror.  In a month, I'll do it again.  While it measures your last 2-3 months average glucose, it is more weighted towards the most recent, and I should see a change in a month.

Sometimes I hate this disease.  I really do.

Sweet Sixteen

At just exactly about the time this will be published, 16 years ago I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.  In many ways, I don't know where to start, or what to say.  Sometimes, in some ways, it still seems surreal.  Most of the time, I can gleefully imagine what my life might be like if I was cured, but diabetes is so currently woven so tightly in with my life it is just part of me.

Because of how sick I was when I was diagnosed, the memories surrounding that time are fuzzy or just plain missing.  Which is very unusual for me.  It is not that these are faded memories, I was so sick, even at the time I couldn't remember what had just occurred.  There are two moments that I very clearly remember making conscious decisions that really have affected how I have lived my life since them.  In some ways they are related to diabetes, but in others they are entirely independent and not really related.  If my diabetes were to be cured tomorrow, both of these decisions would still have a drastic affect on my life.

The first was on the drive to the hospital.  I clearly remember looking out the window and pondering what was happening.  I thought I had 2 options with dealing with my diagnosis.  The first was to be a huge pain and let everyone know how unhappy I was about it, be as big of a pain as I could, and try to avoid to do anything related to diabetes.  The second was I could accept that I had diabetes.  I didn't have to be happy about it, but I didn't have to make everyone around me as miserable as possible as well.  I could learn all I could, and live the best way I knew how with the knowledge I had, trying to minimize the impact it had on me and everyone around me.  I thought about the first option so more.  While it sounded good to let everyone else know how miserable I was about it, I figured it would make me more miserable-- not less.  Making others miserable would not really make me feel better.  I would most likely miss out on a number of things I enjoy because I would be too unhappy to participate/enjoy them or my parents would let me go if I didn't have the knowledge to take care of myself.  On the other hand, option 2 sounded like a lot of work.  I really was not happy about the situation in general.  Within a few minutes, I decided that option 2 was the path I was going to take, no matter how hard it would be at times.  For the most part, I've stuck with this decision.  Don't get me wrong, I whine about diabetes, sometimes more than others.  But I don't try to make others miserable about it, and I try to be as educated as I can.

The second decision came my way by the life of a 5 month old baby boy.  He and I were the only two "long term" patients on the pediatric floor of this hospital.  Other kids would be in for a night, but that was about it.  I was there for 6 days.  I have no idea how long the baby was there for, he was there before I was admitted, and he was there after I went home.  After my first 24 hours where I was seriously ill, I was bored.  Really bored.  Being the oldest of 5, and always in the position of caring for others, I naturally started playing with him if for no other reason to kill the time.  He didn't cry, he didn't eat, he didn't do much of anything.  No one came to visit him.  (I had my first visitor less than an hour after I was admitted...)  At first I just "flirted" with him, then I asked to hold him, then I asked to try to feed him the bottle that he was refusing from everyone.  With some discussion between the nurses and residents, they decided that they probably should not let me try to feed him, but on the other hand he had been refusing to eat and unless someone could get him to eat he was going to have to be tube fed.  Seeing he was responding to me by this point but no one else, I was given the bottle.  And he ate.  The next time it was bottle time, he once again refused from the nurse but immediately took it from me.  The older nurse looked at the young resident and said "See, I told you what is wrong with him is he is dying from lack of love."  I remembered thinking, "THAT is the bottom of the barrel.  To be literally dying from lack of love.  I know I will never be that low.  There will always be someone worse off than me no matter what happens."  And that idea has stayed with me.  No matter how rough things are for me, in the back of my head, I think of that baby.  I think of how old he is now.  And I say a prayer for him.  A prayer for others, particularly babies and the elderly, who feel so unloved they are literally dying.  I say a prayer of thanksgiving that I have so many that love me and that I love.  And no matter what, at that point my problems seem just a little smaller, and a little more manageable.

So I've done it.  16 year of me and diabetes.  Time to go get a milkshake (my yearly celebration, someone made the mistake of telling me that I would never be able to have a milkshake again, so I've made it a point for having one every year to mark the day... and I've got quite talented at bolusing the right amount so it doesn't take my glucose levels all over the place).

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Rememberance Day

I don't remember ever not being aware of the sadness the loss of a baby brings a family.  When my mom was pregnant with me, her brother's wife was pregnant and due within a couple weeks as well.  It was a family guessing game who would be the oldest grandchild.  Part way through their 2nd trimester, my aunt lost the baby.  So I became the oldest, and a 'shadow child' as my mom referred to me in regards to my cousin.  While my mom calls me the 'shadow child', sometimes I think the babies that are lost are really the 'shadow children'.  An echo that many forget is there, but it is always there.  They seem to be easily forgotten by others that are not directly touched, but can loom large for those who do remember. 

Yet, fortunately I'm on the outside of the loss as I have never lost a baby of my own.  While I'm touched by the babies and their lives that were too short, I'm on the fringe.

I go with my mom on her visits to my youngest sibling's grave when she asks me to come.  Particularly in the last 6 months, I've listen to my mother-in-law go over and over and over the details she remembers around the birth of her youngest daughter.  She was born still, at full term at 7 lbs 11 oz, but much past that the details are murky at best.  I've sat and listened to friends talk about their babies lost to pre-eclampsia, umbilical cord accident, placental abruption, congenital defects, ectopic pregnancies, illnesses caught too soon after birth, SIDS, and some rare complications of pregnancy.  I've seen and treated women in ICU and rehab as they fight for their lives or to regain some of their independence after something in their pregnancy went wrong.  Some of those women have lost their babies, some of the babies are simultaneously fighting for their own lives on a different floor in the same hospital, and on a couple of occasions the babies have been healthy at home in the care of grandparents/aunts/uncles while their mom is fighting and their dad is torn between the two.  When I'm at work, I know how to do my actual job, but other than that, I'm sometimes at a loss of what to do.  I sit, I listen, I offer a hug, or a tissue, or a touch.  If I remember the baby, I try to say that I remember, to say their name.  And always a prayer, sometimes silent, sometimes shared.

Thankful Thursday

1. "Attitude adjustments" -- this is something my parents taught me to do as a child, and has been useful lately.  Sometimes even if I can't change the situation, if I change my attitude towards it, it is more manageable.
2. Bike rides and hikes in the fall.
3. Fresh apples picked off trees.  Yum.
4. Obsidian "graduating" to physical therapy once a month.
5. Pyrope doing well socially in school.
6. All of the ivy is out of our yard, and grass is planted.
7. Thick, heavy blankets.  I love curling up under them and once again, its that time of year I pull them all out.

Wordless Wednesday

Brighter

Obsidian was "graduated" to physical therapy (PT) once a month at his last session instead of once a week.  He has made great gains over the past 2 months he has been in PT again.  The first time he was in PT, he made gains, but not nearly as rapidly as this time.  The first time (almost exactly a year before), he was less than cooperative.  He would scream and refuse to work, and never worked when I was in the room or knew I was looking.  This time was an entirely different experience.  At times he has to be coaxed to do things, but for the most part he is cooperative.  He enjoys PT for the most part.  In some ways, I think he was just ready to make significant gains, in other ways I think he was just more with the program.  The only thing he really refused to do was to ride the smallest tricycle, the one that he rides there he has to sit on the crossbar or his feet can't reach the pedal.  Obsidian has my gift of stubbornness, I just hope he learns to control it, not let it control him.  It took me a long time to learn that, and I still have to work on it.  The first time he stopped going to PT because our insurance would not cover it any more.  I was not happy or comfortable with it being stopped.  This time, I am comfortable and ready to have him cut back.  I would even be a lot more okay with it being stopped if needed.  He has reached most of the goals that were set, and is well on his way to reaching the others.  Now, he is no longer deep in the "moderately" delayed gross motor, to more of "mild" gross motor delay. 

As I was driving home from PT, the colors on all of the trees seemed brighter.  I seemed lighter.  I still have hope that Obsidian's gross motor delays and possibly even his growth will be come interesting chapters in his past, but something in his past that he has "outgrown".  I am becoming even more hopeful that even if they are ongoing issues for his entire life, he will find a way to integrate them into his life so they do not have a significant negative impact.  Small steps.  For now, I'll take my more brightly colored trees.

Your shoes

Earlier this week I came across this article understanding where moms' time goes when I was on Facebook.  It was written 3+ years ago but for whatever recently started making its way through Facebook now.  I have been reading the comments about the article with interest and thinking about all of it.  At the end of the day, the crux of this article gets to for me is not about being a mom and what that specifically entails, but it is about being empathic to a friend.  It is about empathy when a best friend's life circumstances change.

I have thought about the many different situations that I have heard the basic same complain, either from the "friend" or from the person with the circumstance.  I have heard and read things of how others are less than understanding when a person with rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, Crohn's disease, chronic pain, can not work or go out and do other activities.  I have listened/read how these individuals list out the steps that they personally need to do just to do basic functions.  Steps that are different than common, and frequently more time consuming and complicated.  Yes, one person with RA might be able to do X, but that doesn't mean another person with RA can do X as well.  One mom might have the time to do Y with her friends like she used to, but another mom might not.  One person isn't better than another, we all have different life circumstance and deal with things differently.

When Jet has had a long or stressful day at work (or time period at work), he doesn't interact much with others.  He comes home, eats, then works on something mechanical alone, then gets ready for bed and sleeps until it is time to go to work again.  In a study of contrast, if things are hard at work, I'll talking a mile a minute to Jet (or on the phone to a non-work friend) the second I walk through the door.  I will be making plans of something to do with somebody that evening before I go to bed.  Neither reaction is "wrong", just different.

I had separately been thinking about a post my high school age niece made on her blog a week or so ago.  She was lamenting how her friends don't understand why she can not "just hang out" that much in the school year because of her dance classes.  The confusion she was expressing over her relationships with her friends changing because of her lack of time made me sad for her.  I wanted to tell her, or really have her figure out, that a relationship is going to change if you used to spend 20 hours a week together, and now you spend 2.  All relationships change.  While she loves to dance and spend a lot of time at the dance studio, it does have consequences that some are not positive.  She might be a better dancer but she won't have as much time for outside relationships and activities.  How to say that you need to find balance in your life, a balance that you are happy with living.

So all of these things started to fall together in my mind.  Life always means changes.  Time and activities and the frequency we do them changes.

The friend in the article isn't particularly someone I would want as a friend.  She doesn't show much empathy, and she makes some sweeping generalizations.  I have child-free friends who understand when I don't call or do things as much as I used to.  They are the same friends (as well as friends with children), who understood when I didn't call and do things when I was busy being the primary care giver for my great aunt in her last days, or when I was dealing with Jet and his problems finishing school, or when I was helping with my dad when he was dealing with cancer.  Life circumstances changes, activities change, we change.  Our lifelong friends are those people where the relationship also changes to reflect the people that are in it.  A friend tries to see the situation from my shoes.  And at the end of the day, she shows me some empathy.

Maddening

Today I got a call from my "health care coach".  I get one every month, or maybe it is 6 weeks.  I try to forget.  At any rate, if I talk to my "coach" at whatever the prescribed interval is, I get a significant discount on some of my diabetes medications (some I don't have to pay co-pays, some my cap is lifted, some both, which leaves the things that are not covered a whole lot easier to swallow).  Some of my "coaches" I've had through the various carriers I've been covered under I've liked more than others.  This one I don't like.  At all.  And I don't think she likes me.  However, until our coverage is changed again, she and I will be talking regularly.

She started with my goal is to get my A1c lower.  Yeah.  She then said that I need to work on not having so many highs and lows.  That would be spectacular.  The conversation quickly went downhill from there.  We only got to about lunchtime in my daily routine before she ended the painful conversation.  I know it will be continued at a later date.  I know I got labeled "non-complaint" or "argumentative" or some similar negative labels in my chart.  Her basic suggestions were that I do the same thing every day.  Eat the same (or similar) foods at the same time each day, at regular intervals.  That I should get up at the same time each day.  That I should have a similar activity level at the same time each day.  I don't do well on any of these things.  That is why I have a pump.  That is why I accept the negative parts of pumping.  I'm not going to get up at 5 am every morning because on the mornings I work this is what time I have to wake up.  I have not the faintest idea how I would keep my activity level the same on a day to day basis.  I have a physically demanding job, and some days it is much more physically demanding than others.  On days that Pyrope has preschool and the weather is nice enough (and really this means that it isn't freezing cold, raining hard, icy, or really windy) I ride my bike 3 miles round trip to drop him off, then 3 miles round trip to pick him up.  On the nights that Jet gets home at a reasonable time, I try to go run a 5k.  Twice a week I take the kids swimming by myself.  Then throw in the Parent & Tot classes of anything from gymnastics to ice skating (depending on current age, interest, and schedule), outings, and random hikes and bike rides, it is rare that I do things the same two DAYS in a row, let alone every day.  And how do I account for the general increase/decrease my body needs of insulin depending if I'm pre/post ovulation?  I know some people that are creatures of habit, they do close to the same thing every day.  The do close to the same thing every day at work.  In some ways it would serve me well to be more of a creature of habit, but I'm not.  I tried for a while, and I was a miserable person who still wasn't great at following the same patterns.   If I didn't have diabetes, doctor's wouldn't care much about this.  But since I do, many doctors and medical professionals put all kinds of negative labels on me.  I'm not a pancreas.  I do my best to think and function like one, but I'm not great at it.  It is maddening to talk in these circles.  Sometimes I think maybe I should "listen" to them and try to be more scheduled.  And then I think, no.  I don't know how to live my life, or if I really could have the life I have now if I had one schedule I had to follow day in and day out.  I couldn't have the current mainly SAHM but work when I need to lifestyle.  I couldn't ride my bike randomly with my kids (where I live it is not an option to do it year round).  I would have to give up running or find a sitter for my kids.  I would have to find a job in a different area of my profession.  I would need my ovaries removed.  For all of the problems I have with my life, I really do like it, and I don't want those types of drastic changes.  So I think I will for the time being continue with the game of talking and disagreeing with my "coach".  Or maybe I'll switch strategies and agree with what she says/suggests, then completely ignore what she said.  The latter being the path of least resistance if I can manage to stomach it.

Thankful Thursday

1. Our new windows.  We turned on the furance this week.  It has not turned on nearly as often as it would have before we got the windows.  Cosmetically the windows didn't do much for the house (or me) but thermal regulation they seem to be making a huge difference
2. Getting a great deal on Pyrope's new bike.  He really didn't need one, but he had been really wanting a bike with a flame job (think hot rod cars or motorcycles).  I found one that was used that was advertised as his size.  It wasn't, it was the next size up.  Not surprisingly, he figured out very quickly how to ride it just fine.  He is over the top happy about his new bike.
3. Being allowed to park "on site" for work.  There is a lot of construction at work and as a consequence, not everyone can park "on site" (you still have a fair walk, but it is in walking distance).  The idea of having to take a shuttle (which sometimes they are full) to a remote lot just is not fun.  Particularly because this is going to be like this for a year.
4. My mom and her baby sitting of my kids. It is awesome to have family that I trust to leave my kids with when I'm working, out on a hot date with my man, or doing something one-on-one with one of the kids.
5. My slow cooker.  I love having meals ready for me when I come home from work.  On days that I am home, I just love how the house smells when I'm making a meal in the slow cooker all day.
6. Sweatshirts.  They are my favorite article of clothing, and it is the time of year I get to wear them.
7. Pyrope's laugh.  He has a great, infectious laugh.  Even when he was a baby and his nickname was "Stoneface", he always had a great laugh.  One day when I was dropping him off at preschool another mom stopped and made him laugh "because she just loves his laugh". 

Wordless Wednesday

Finding the best words

Sunday would have been my parents 34h wedding anniversary.  Every year, I have the same dilemma.  What should I do?  What should I say?  Since my aunt (my dad's twin brother's wife) passed away, I am the only one who acknowledges the day.  My siblings never remember.  The people in the wedding party (4) are either no longer in contact with my mom, don't remember (dad's twin), or deceased.  Her brothers don't remember either.  I know it is a hard day for my mom.  I also know whatever I say and do is better than nothing.

This year, my mom made a spur of the moment trip to visit my sister to help her with a project for her classroom.  This is the first time my mom has visited my sister in the year she has lived there (and I don't think she ever visited her in the 4 years she was at college, she only went to help drop her off twice in those years).  I find out about the visit from a strange message on my answering machine from my mother letting me know that she was not going to be home the next day (her anniversary) and I was the only one that would visit her that day so I was the only one that she was going to tell that she was leaving.  Brother #2 might have stopped by to visit her that day but he would have been clueless to the meaning of the day and wouldn't have thought twice if she wasn't there when he stopped by.  A quick phone call to my sister to warn her of what the occasion was left her cursing (and promising to not mention that I called to tell her).  My sister wound up doing what I do, buying my mom flowers and wishing her a happy anniversary.  I did the same (just delivered a day late).  I always think about a card, but I never can find one that is appropriate.

So I do my best, I let her know I'm remembering with her.  I get her flowers just like my dad always did.  I get to think about others around me.  I know my mom is a bear to be around on that date, but for the most part there isn't a living sole that knows why (other than me, or whatever person I alert that year).  I wonder how many people who are seemingly just "having a bad day" are having a difficult day of remembrance with no one to remember it with.  For a while, I always seem to be gentler to those in random bad moods.  You never know...

I just pray that I don't forget (I've almost forgot my own anniversary... and I've only had 6 so far).

Truth

It started with a NPR story.  It was about people who thought they had "remembered" being abused after the memory was repressed, but then decide later on that the repressed "memory" never really happened.  A day or two later I was talking with my sister, and we were talking about some events, and her memories were so very different than mine.  In many ways, it didn't even sound like the same story.  I knew were were talking about the same event, but her truth of it was very different than mine (a large part of this particular instance was because she was a teenager at the time and I was in my 20's... 9 years at that point of your life can really give you a different perspective).  Then as I was reading the end of To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus, Mr. Tate (the sheriff), and Scout were talking about what the "truth" was for the events of the evening (where Jem's arm got broken).  So I got to thinking about what "truth" is.

If you ask Goog.le to define truth you will get:

• a fact that has been verified
• conformity to reality or actuality
• accuracy

But this still was not really helping me with my pondering.  While I would love the "truth" to be more like an objective addition fact such as 2 + 2 = 4 -- there is one answer that is correct, the older I get the more situations the truth seems to be something that is more subjective. I have a very clear memory of driving home with my parents and brother late at night through a really long tunnel.  It was from a relative's house that we don't go to very often.  As a teenager, I asked my parents about this tunnel as it didn't make much sense.  There are no tunnels (long or short) between our houses.  My dad in particular told me I was crazy and I was just making it up, keeping in mind I must have been between 3-4 when this incident happened.  But I was quite adamant that I was remembering this night.  I described some plants that were in the front yard (I have no clue why I remembered them).  Several months later, were were looking through some old photo albums of my cousin's.  She had a picture of us outside from that night (it is HIGHLY unlikely I had ever seen this picture before), and the picture was how I described some of the plants very very closely.  My dad decided I must have really been remembering that night, but couldn't figure out my "tunnel".  A year or two later, I was driving in a different city (but a similar set up for the neighborhood), and I figured out my "tunnel".  I had been looking up at the trees.  In this city, trees, really old trees, line the streets.  Their branches grow over the road, forming my "tunnel" when the leaves are on them.  The relative's house we were at, we typically only went to their house at Christmastime, so there was never any leaves, and no "tunnel".  For whatever reason, the night I remember was clearly a warm evening (as no one was wearing coats) and there were leaves on the trees.  When we went home, we were driving through a "tunnel".  My memory is still of driving through the tunnel, I can see it in my mind's eye, and smell the car, and feel my vinyl car seat, and that is my 3 year old "truth".  Even though as an adult, I know this is not a true "fact".  There is no tunnel. 

Yet at the same time, some truths are facts.  Some event happened at some time.  Some one said some specific set of words.  Then I tried to take into account people's memory of what happened, particularly when emotions are involved.  The more I thought about this, the more I decided that it is when you add emotions and the individual's human experience and interpretation of events, that is when the "truth" has some difficulty being something purely objective that is correct or incorrect, and something that has at least an element of subjectivity to it. 

One of my favorite quotes involves the phrase "universal truths".  If there is such a thing as "universal truth" it implies there are "truths" that are not universal.  This to me hits closer to what the truth is.  When I want to hear the "truth", for the most part what I am wanting for is to get a persons honest version of what happened without any willful distortions/contortions/outright lies.  I want to keep in mind that sometimes maybe multiple people are correct with their different stories of the same event.

Book review

The books I have read this month are:

1. Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A celebration of 50 years of To Kill a Mockingbird by Mary McDonagh Murphy.  An interesting read to make me think about different parts of To Kill a Mockingbird.
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  This time when I read it, I spent a lot of time thinking about how different the book would have been if it would have been told through someone else's eyes other than Scout.  Along those lines, I was thinking on how truth is more subjective than objective.  My truth version of an event might not be the same as someone else's, even if we were both there. 

To Kill a Mockingbird is a reread for me and I did it for National Banned Book Week (which is always the last week in September).  I started reading book that had been banned by some group for banned book week when I was in 5th grade.  I was hoping to get a "don't do it" reaction out of my teachers and parents.  I got one out of my teachers but to my confusion, my parents just encouraged me.  Throughout grade school I got more negative reactions to my annual read a banned book and flaunt it that I did every September.  My parents on the other hand helped me choose books that were banned (I very clearly remember them helping me make it through Macbeth by Shakespeare, and my language arts teacher over the top reaction to it).  I'm falling behind with my reading goal, but I have a lot on my "really want to read list".  I started "The girl with a dragon tatoo", a book which my mom bought than loaned to me to read (if you knew my mother, you would know that she never buys books, she will wait months to get it from the library, however she read one of the other books in the series than had to read the first but the waiting list was too long for her at the library).  The new Rick Roirdan book about Camp Halfblood is being released on the 10th of this month.  He is currently favorite author of books that I can just escape into.  I also want to reread "Play to Talk" and "Communication Partners" by James McDonald.  I have been doing this with Pyrope, and need to really read it more indepthly.  When I first got the books, I quickly read through them and decided to give it a try.  Other people as well as myself have noticed significant improvements in Pyrope's speech, so I want to read them more closely and decide what I want to implement more systematically.  I have also been thinking about some of the premises in the book and how they really apply to people in general.  Some of the points I would just like to incorporate into my own communication habits so I can be a better friend, co-worker, and fellow human being in general.  Looking at the list, it is an eccletic mix, a popular fiction for adult women (for the most part), a series aimed at tweens (including boys), and two books that the closest genre is textbook.

Slowly

The reasons I set goals for myself each year, and why I need to review my progress towards them, is clear this month.  They are goals because they are not something I'm doing now and I need to make an effort to change my behavior so I can reach them.  And I need to review my progress towards them because I don't necessarily make the changes, or maybe the correct changes to meet my end goal, just because I set the goal.  It is something I need to keep working on.

I didn't start running again.  I dropped a ratchet wrench and broke my toe. Then less than a week later because of how I was favoring the foot with the broken toe, I sprained my ankle.  This coming Monday I'm starting to run again.

Diabetes goals have cone somewhat the way of the running.  My A1C the when I went to the doctor earlier in the month was the exact same it was in June.  Blech.  I'm going to do a home kit of the test on my anniversary later this month.  I doubt it will be much lower, but I need to start testing more to start getting it lower.

So in this past month I lost 4 lbs.  I would have liked to lose more weight, but if I look at it seriously, I'm content with this pace of weight loss.  1 lb a week will get me to my goal in 30 weeks, more or less.  Looking at it that way, that isn't that long.  I can do it, I can do it, I can do it.

My book goal, and not reaching it for the month was a little bit of a shock.  Reading is such a good release for me, I'm somewhat amazed that I've slipped that far away from it that I'm struggling to reach such a low for me goal of 4 books a month.  I used to easily do that in under a week.  I was also amazed at the effort it was taking me to expand to new kids books.  My kids are enjoying the different books but it is so easy to just read the same ones over and over again.  There are so many books that we even own that I just haven't been dipping into and reading to them.  And they love getting a whole stack of different books when we go to the library.  So this one I have been able to do easily.

So I'm getting to my goals.  Slowly, with revisions of how I'm going to get there.