I'm still here..

I'm still here. I'm around, I promise...
I finished my thesis/dissertation/monster... Submitted end of August.. Phew!
Since then, i took a too short but much needed holiday in durban, visiting two of my favourite peoples, my brother and TUE (I would insert some photos from the trip. Except this is unnecessarily complicated to do from my iPad, and I'm lazy. I admit it.), and have been oscillating between catching up on much needed sleep and frantically preparing for my oral exam/defense.. Which was potentially going to be this week. Seeing as I found out yesterday that its in the beginning of november I can breathe a bit, maybe write some blog posts (?) and keep studying, because i'm so not ready yet... But i'm nearly there. I'm nearly finished. this bumpy three-year ride is nearly over. The end is in sight.

This is a familar feeling for this time of year. We have the most beautiful weather, with spring rapidly merging into summer, jacaranda trees bursting purple blooms all over the place, jasmine bushes and syringa trees more subtly perfuming the evenings, and the most fantastic high-veld storms cooling the evenings and lighting up the sky. And the only thing getting in the way of you just sitting back and soaking in the beauty is the last stretch of school work, matric, or university exams. Strangely enough its actually enough to incite some melancholy, it brings back so many memories from childhood through to student days, plus the remembered sense that you just have to get through this last stretch, and then its full blown summer, december holidays, and everything that comes with it...

Today has been a stormy, gloomy, rainy day. I love such weather, its the perfect punctuation to our mostly bright and sunny heat. And with it all comes some of the familiar and not unwelcome melancholy as well. I've been looping the Jars or Clay Furthermore double album all day. This is some of my favourite music, heavy with emotions and memories for me- and perfect for this weather, and this time of year- there are just so many memories to link the two, good and bad.

So hopefully more posts will follow with some D-related stuff that needs to be written and told. For today, i leave you with a particulary beautiful live version of a track from the Furthermore album- enjoy :)

Missing stuff. Like teeth..

So... I've missed some opportunities to go backbacking, and to visit some friends far away. I missed D-blog week (which made me sad). And, apparently, the one year mark from me starting this threadbare blog (blogaversary?) (which i'm ok with). I very nearly missed mother's and father's day, and some friends' birthdays.. No wait, i missed a few of those too. Most recently, i missed an opportunity to go to cape town for a few days. And lately i've been missing a friend who moved to london earlier this year (but that's a different kind of miss).

All of those are just noticable chunks of life, which stubbornly carries on when you're frantically trying to meet deadlines and finish work. Me, i finally finished up experiments (ok, i may have just decided to stop, and stubbornly refused to do any more.. In a hopefully nice and respectful kind of way..) wrote for a month and a half and finished the first draft of my thesis/ dissertation. I'm still not sure what i'm meant to call it- it's the 150 page-long culmination of the past two years of lab work and research (literally blood, sweat and tears), but i'm only getting an MSc out of it (i would feel slightly cheated about this, but i'm mostly just relieved to be coming to the end of this process). It's not over yet- i still have much work to do (my supervisors collectively chewed it up and spat it out gave me a lot of feed back, comments and corrections on the first draft), but this is the end stage of the work. A stage that i at one point seriously didn't think i'd ever get to, so i'm grateful even as i sit re-writing entire sections.

You can miss a lot of life when you're stuck behind a computer for a month and a half. Health stuff, however, carries on. Diabetes isn't a fan of being ignored for even a day. Let alone over a month. I adjusted basals, i tried to exercise kind of regularly, i made an effort to eat real food, as opposed to student-style junk food. Thinking back over it (logging is not my strong point), i think i did mostly ok.
And i still had to make doctor's appointments. I had an HbA1C test, which was ok, and other tests, which were not so ok, and worthy of a whole other blog post.
I had an opthamologist check-up. My first one since 2008, he was keen to point out to me. Woops. I clearly still have appointments to catch up on since my freak out last year. Thankfully, grace abounds and all is fine in the eye department. Phew.
Then there's the physiotherapy i've been going for this past week- somehow while spending most of my time seated behind my desk, i've managed to cultivate an adductor injury, which i'm finally getting sorted out. (is it just me who, when describing all my medical adventures to non-diabetes ppl, starts to feel a little like a hypochondriac? especially when i have normal ppl stuff on top of diabetes stuff? Can't i just have one?)
My latest health adventure? I managed to pull off the crown of a wisdom tooth yesteday while flossing (that's nearly as gross, but strangely not as painful, as it sounds.) i'll keep the further gorey details to myself, but i'm minus a wisdom tooth, drugged up on antibiotics and painkillers, and consigned to a liquid diet for a few days (yup, that's just great for controlling blood sugars).

Way to make a weekend- soups and yohurt and thesis corrections, in between myprodol naps.