Finding the chase and cutting to it

I have six months to train for the August deadline of the 100 mile Prudential Cycle ride and that means I need six months to prepare.

Today was taking that first bite from the elephant and I covered 25.7 in two sets: one of 20.5 miles and then a return home of 5.2 miles.  In total the average is 10.8mph.

The sun was shining, my blood sugar was not behaving itself but actually this was an interesting view on what cycling with high blood sugar would be like with a safety net (son at home for half-term and able to drive).

Getting ready to head out did not take too long, though with hindsight, I should have taken my camel pack!

Whoa, where are you going with this?

I trained: averaged 12mph for the first set and 9mpg for the second.  On that evidence, 100 miles is going to take me 9hrs.  Not a bad stab but I really want to do the ride in 8hours (with 30 minutes of breaks).

That’s an average of 12.5mph no matter the gradient and I suspect there’ll be some big hills out there.  It’s not East Anglia after all.

One of the things I’d really like to do by June is be able to ride from Felixstowe to Cambridge 71 miles.  I’m working up to that slowly.

Last year I went from 10miles to 47miles in seven weeks.

I’ve kept a base fitness up over the winter, but two months out after getting a bad stomach bug.  So six months should allow me to do that easily.

Week 1 (this week): 1 ride of 25 miles and 1 ride of 10 miles.  Some hill training.  A day off in between.

Week 2 (w/c 25th Feb): 1 ride 35 miles and 1 ride of 10 miles.  30 minutes hill training.

Week 3 (w/c 4th Mar): 1 ride 35 miles (different route) and 1 ride of 10 miles.  45 minutes hill training (I have a route).

Week 4 (w/c 11th Mar): 1 ride of 25 miles, looking at how close I get can to 2hours and 1 ride of 10 miles aiming for an hour max.  60 mins hill training.  A day off in between.

This is important as that’s an average of 12.5mph regardless of local gradient.  The 21st Feb, I am significantly under that.

Week 5 (w/c 18th Mar): 1 ride of 40 miles and 1 ride of 15 miles.  20 mins hill training.  A day off in between.

Week 6 (w/c 25th Mar): 1 ride 40 miles and 1 ride of 15 miles.  20 minutes hill training.

Week 7 (w/c 1st Apr): 1 ride 40 miles and 1 ride of 10 miles.  60 minutes hill training.

Week 8 (w/c 8th Apr): 1 ride of 40 miles, looking at how close I get can to 3hours.  This is likely to be to Woolpit along route 51.

Week 9 (w/c 15 Apr): 1 ride 50 miles (aiming for 5 hours), 2 sets of hill training.  Possibly up the A137.

Week 10 (w/c 22 Apr): 1 ride 50 miles (aiming for 4.5 hours).  Gym work and 2 sets of hill training.

Week 11 (w/c 29 Apr): 1 ride 50 miles (aiming for 4 hours).  Gym work and 2 sets of hill training.

Week 12 (w/c 6 May): 1 ride 50 miles (aiming for 3.5 hours).  Gym work and 2 sets of hill training.

Week 13 (w/c 13 May): 1 ride 60 miles (aiming for 5 hours) (average 12mph), 2 sets of hill training.

Week 14 (w/c 20 May): 1 ride 60 miles (aiming for 5 hours).  Gym work and 2 sets of hill training.

Week 15 (w/c 27 May): 1 ride 60 miles (aiming for 4.5 hours).  Gym work and 2 sets of hill training.

Week 16 (w/c 3 Jun): 1 ride 60 miles (aiming for 4 hours).  Gym work and 2 sets of hill training.  Probably Felixstowe to Newmarket.

Week 17 (w/c 10 Jun): Week off.  Just walking and motorcycling.

Week 18 (w/c 17 Jun): 1 ride 70 miles (aiming for 6 hours).  Gym work and 2 sets of hill training.

Week 19 (w/c 24 Jun): 1 ride 70 miles.  Gym work and 2 sets of hill training.

Week 20 (w/c 1 Jul): 1 ride 80 miles (aiming for 7 hours).

Week 21 (w/c 8 Jul): 1 ride 90 miles (aiming for 8 hours).

Week 22 (w/c 15  Jul) : 1 ride 90 miles (aiming for 7 hours).

Week 23 (w/c 22 Jul): 1 ride 100 miles (aiming for 8 hours).

Week 24 (w/c 29 Jul): Hill training, 2 sets, 10 mins each.

Ride the ride 4th August.

The past two years, for me, have had some interesting times.  I came off my push bike, a panic attack while skiing, I forgot my cannulas in Canada and had to completely overhaul my insulin treatment for 8 days and the resultant big hypo and the removal of my fixation plate (remember to do that much earlier next time).

In some ways, it probably looks like I have taken all this in my stride.  I get up normally, get my arse to work and keep my levels pretty reasonable.

But it’s been exhausting.  My requirements have fluctuated wildly and I’ve lost many of my hobbies in the background.  Since the ride in October, I’ve lacked a focus outside of my obvious work.

I have discipline, with the type 1 that makes things so much easier, but on the odd occasion, that feels like going through the motions.  It’s one of the reasons I am so keen to do the furniture!

I’m planning to do a motorcyle ride in June (heading out with a group to France) and of course I have my 100 mile cycle ride in August and October.

I take the time to smell the roses too and now it is a bright and beautiful day, I do really need to clean the inside of my office windows.

That should tide me over 😉

They say a change is as good as a rest.  As a programmer who has spent much of the past few months working out how to automate cloud building, I thought I would take the opportunity to learn how to re-upbolster some chairs my mum had lent us as a stop gap when they bought a new dining suite and we bought a house with a dining room.

That was 18 years ago and the suite was not in its first flush then.

I’ve been planning on redoing the cushions on the drop in chairs for a while but when my parents did this on their very first dining set, it was quite a different job and I was more than nervous.

While taking in the local town, I noticed fishface in Ipswich’s The Walk offered upholstery classes.  That was a while ago because there’s quite a waiting list.

The class was friendly: five other students were all of a similar standard and Penny takes you through the steps of stripping down your furniture (with all the right tools) and then putting it back together.  You even get lunch and coffees from the cafe downstairs.

My project aims to take four chairs and two carvers from blush pink velour covers to gold damask (before and after photos coming up):

Before

After

Very nice, so what?

This simple act took nearly six hours and I am chuffed to bits with the results but that makes 30 hours left to do the remaining chairs!

Stripping the seat back to panel and foam is half  the job and is not for the lighthearted.  You need a drapers  staple remover and a suitable mallet – plastic for a plastic handled staple remover and wooden for a wooden handled one.

Take out each and every staple.  This takes time and is non trival – plan to do this in the morning and after lunch, do the rest of the job.

Stripping

For this seat there are two bits of fabric to remove: the backing and the decorative pad cover.  Being a “modern upholstered piece of furniture” means that is stapled to a bit of ply or thin MDF.  There are 40 odd staples holding on the backing and around 50 pinning the decorative cover in place.

After the 15th one, you are promising yourself you don’t need so many so it will be easier next time.  You are fooling yourself!

Once the stripping is down you then cover.

Covering

There are three stages as the foam was in one piece.  First is a calico cover to give a uniform finish.

Next is the decorative one, going directly over the cailco.

Finally, a backing to finish it all up.

You will notice, we’ve put an extra layer on: which is more staples.

I’m not going to be the one to redo this dining set 🙂

Why don’t you just pay someone to do this for you?

The alternative is paying someone who has all the right equipment to do this for you.  I’ve spent about £100 on the fabric.

This took me 5 hours to do one chair.  I think I could do a chair in 3-4 hours next time as I won’t be working it out for myself.

This job requires skill and training.  Let’s say the pro only takes half a day as a max – six chairs would therefore take three days.

That’s if you don’t need foam or any re-webbing.  Plus disposal fees and business rates, insurance etc.

Food.  Boring for many but as a type 1, I need to understand what I eat when.

I left home and believed that I knew what a portion looked like.  I got takeouts and shared rice or noodles and used that as my yard stick.  I bolused reasonably and had cerals in a similar manner.

When my boyfriend, later husband, moved in, we cooked at home pretty happily – I was 25 at the time and he was 32 – we knew what we were doing.

I got a bit of a shock when I realised we’d eaten a 5kg bag of rice in two weeks.  Let’s say we’d had rice for one meal each of those 14 days – that’s eating 178g of dry rice each a meal.  I suspect significantly more.

I looked on the back of the Tilda rice bag to find we should be having 50-75g each a serving.  So that’s what I did, 50g each.  The portion looked tiny when cooked.  I mean, seriously, seriously mean.

I served it up: my lover gave me a look.

It was a shock though, we were full at the end of the meal.  I did the same with pasta, 50g dry pasta, and not only did we feel satisfied but actually enjoyed the meal more.  It wasn’t an effort to eat.  We even slept better.

When my son was born, we sized up his meals accordingly and never made a fuss if he didn’t finish it all.  My son has puddings most meals, we don’t every meal.

I measure all my grains and dry carbs (pasta etc).  I guess the rest.  My liquids are all against a set of 250ml glasses or out of 150ml cans.

Cereals are always measured.

We cook Yorkshire puddings from recipes not from frozen or precooked ones.

Everything?

OK, if I eat out, it’s not measured but if we eat out, I compare that to home and it’s unusual if I don’t get the bolus near the right value.

I’m finding, I don’t really enjoy puddings.  The ones I cook at home don’t follow the recipes completely: I’ve cooked a fruit crumble tonight and I don’t put sugar in with the fruit.  I don’t “dust” the top with extra sugar.  It’s got more flavour and bite as a result which I cannot get out from a restaurant.

I make my own lemon meringue pie: again no sugar in the lemon and I use a lower amount of sugar in the meringue.   The result is a pie that bites back.  The meringue is soft and caramelled.  It’s morish, tasty but not sickly and doesn’t need so much insulin.

That’s not to say I do this once a day.  I make lemon meringue pie twice a year at most.  On a Sunday for after Sunday lunch.

Readers of my blog know that I am a professional in the IT industry but some of the tools and techniques that we use in that industry are things I have been doing as a type 1 diabetic since I was 8.

One of the key things is reviewing a new situation and working out what worked and what did not so that the next time I encounter that situation,  I can get my insulin as close to normal as possible.

Tell me all about it

I talk about how stress impacts my blood sugar and therefore my insulin requirements because my body cannot do that itself.  Longer term stress is not sustainable in my body – so even if my mind is still stress, the normal flight and fright response fails after a period.  Over the past few months, I have been in a very stessful situation that peaked since Christmas.  Because I had other distractions, the impact on my blood sugar had been very small apart from a few notable days , after Christmas. those distractions disappeared and all I have been left to focus on is my current predicament.

It’s caused me to lose weight and my late evening blood sugars have been very high (typical of stress – I had a similar pattern for my GCSEs, A levels and finals.  Not so much for my apprenticeship because that was only in 9 week blocks so there wasn’t time for a sustained stress event).

I modified my basals to cope and basically waited for the climax – in my case a couple of two hour meetings: the last one yesterday.  Because of the measurements I had from the last one and my distress while discussing certain things (in itself a stress event), I used the measurements and planned to get my blood sugar as low as possible: with stress, the release of the stress hormones is not guaranteed, especially over such a prolonged period, but that was the model I had in mind.

The day itself was very different – I had a dramatic drop in blood sugar levels the day before and actually entered the day on a reduced basal rate.

Given the image below, you can see where I was when I woke at 06:10.

Doesn’t look so bad

it really doesn’t, does, it?  Given I had some time on my hands before the meeting at 2pm, I could actually focus on what was happening.

OKAYYYY

By that, I mean I could look at my capillary blood results and compare them.  I’ve known for some time that capillary blood and interstitial are not exact matches, the leaching of sugar from the blood to surrounding tissues and interstitial fluid takes my body between 10 and 17 minutes.  I’ve known it’s not great at measuring highs – it’s out and becomes increasingly out the higher I am.  If my blood sugar is above 6.5mmol/l, that’s a pretty linear scale in the normal course of things but of course, this is an exceptional event.

Let’s do that comparison now, in the graph, the capillary blood testing are the purple blobs:

There’s no correlation – that’s not a percentage out, the interstitial sensor did not pick any of this up!

It doesn’t look like it, does it?  Unless we look at the lower readings which follow the delayed rule.  The Libre missed the 20.3 completely and the pattern shadowed the high blood sugar but did not reach the same limits.

Abbott report that the sensor is not good at picking up rapidly changing levels precisely and maybe in the case of a severe flight and fight response, that is why the misalignment.  May be the stress hormones themselves stop glucose leaching out or block the sensor like paracetamol/acetaminophen does for older sensors but it explains why I feel so rotten at the moment if my Libre readings are above 7mmol/l!

Learnings?

I haven’t mentioned my learnings.  On finding I was 20+ mmol/l, although I’d already given 4iu by my pump, I gave a bolus of 10iu via injection.  Hence the monitoring: when I got to 9mmol/l, I had a mars bar and taking the Libre at its word on the drop, had a 21g CHO via glucose gel.  I firmly believe the gel was a mistake – I felt low, the graph suggested I was dropping but actually I was still kicking out at least cortisol.

I should have waited until 15:30 when the meeting was called closed and had it then to cover the drop from the cortisol.  I only had the 15iu bolus between 13:01 in my system which would have been completely out by 17:01 to bring down my glucose so the drop between 16:58 and 17:10 was purely the stress hormones being stopped.

I call this the cliff face drop and I only get it with prolonged stress!

My biggest concern is the cause of the stress.  I always say I don’t sweat the little things, people being rude is meaningless and up to a point, some of the stupid things people say about my type 1 are down the ignorance and I often try to educate those people about the situation us type 1s are in.

But I normally can talk about these things as funny anecdotes.  I’m so stressed at the moment, the frustrated is coming out as anger and my normal coping mechanisms are not working.

I’m thinking some short therapy is the next logical step?

Or is this a quantum thing, does opening the box, change the state of Schrödinger’s cat?

That’s a difficult question to answer.  I really don’t know.

In What does exercise do to your blood sugar levels? I shared what I did for the 47 mile (45 mile my ****) Palace to Palace run.

Planning for 100 miles should be similar.  I am not looking to break any record (though doing it in 8 hours would be amazing), just make it to the end in one piece.

Taking to an experienced long distance cyclist with type 1, James Fletcher, I am going to make use of glucose packs to give me an extra boost at 50 miles and 75 miles as well as the coke and Soreen.  I am planning on a light lunch (maybe pasta salad) around noon.

Having finally gotten over my bug from the new year, I am feeling a bit more energetic.  The biggest shock was how tiring even walking has been the past couple of weeks. I am heading into London on Friday before travelling on a skiing trip.

Maybe I’ll do an easy session at the gym later.

I live in the UK, which is lovely in the fact that no two months are precisely the same in terms of weather and our flora and funa respond to that.  In the summer, we have amazing blooms, the crops grow tall, etc, etc.

It makes budgeting your household bills non-trivial.  Even our esteemed meteorologists strangle with predictions on how cold it’s going to be from one day to the next.

If you are watching every penny to make ends meet, it can be a real worry to turn up the heating to cope with a cold snap.  The government chose to help everyone by introducing a price cap to ensure that the private market did not run wild.  I do believe in free markets but regulation to ensure natural monopolies and cartels due not form for essential services, such as power and water is the best of entrepreneurship and government owned businesses which can stagnate.

One of the things we get from our supplier is a comparison between our energy use and comparable houses (in terms of age, size and number of occupants).

Electricity wise, we do very well considering we have a work at home adult and run an electric car!

Electricity use

We do have solar panels mitigating some of these behaviours but even so, we’re using a good 60% less than the average in the area and our usage a month last year was between 275 and 467 kWh, an average of 354kWh.  Our annual total last year was 3.893MWh.

Our gas usage is really low over the winter (I’m guessing our thermostat usage, zone management and insulation help here) and while we’re a little high in the summer at 507kWh, our highs are significantly better than average maxing out at 3257kWh in January.  Our average is 1.756MWh with an annual total of 21.075MWh.

Gas consumption

All fine and dandy, so what?

Good question.

The reason I’m writing this today is with the UK leaving the European Union is there are going to be some big questions asked about the average footprint in the developed economies, including the UK.

Sales of diesel cars have plummeted and petrol car sales have stagnated.  Congestion is a big issue in most towns in the UK, so the obvious answer of buying an electric car to save some cash and avoid the penalties likely to be levied toward ICE is not a long term strategy.

The UK looked at removing some of the incentives towards micro-generate of energy in terms of the feed in tariffs for solar cells: the consensus was it was too early to do that.

Looking at the charts above, we’re a long way from generating all our electricity requirements from our solar cells (we generated 3.4MWh last year, so our total energy bill should have been 7.293MWh) and we’re feeding the majority of that back into the grid because it’s being generated when we don’t really need it.  Take our give and take graphs below:

Generating power 1st Sept 2018

Consuming power 1st Sept 2018

While we’re generating our peak, we’re not really making use of it (my husband tends to have a cold lunch for example).

So, if there’s no feed in tariff, it makes little sense to not store what we’re not using.

Batteries are not that efficient though, are they, especially per kWh?

They don’t need to be, if they are priced effectively.  There’s also the question of whether or not we’d make more use of solar water heating and extra voltaic cells too.

Smart homes could power the big items, like the dish washer and the washing machine while peak power is being generated from the solar cells rather than manually spotting the correlations – a quick wash uses far less power than a 60ºC 2 hr one for example.

A third of all businesses in the UK are now generating their own power and smart use of heating and lighting is helping many reduce their bills.  The UK finally produced more power by renewables than fossil fuels in 2018 (just).

We’re keen on the idea of combined heat and power in the home, but there are ground pump sources too.

My next big project is the use of  EvoHome to help reduce our gas usage some more.  The beauty of that system is we’d zone the upstairs which has 10 radiators managed as a single zone today.

Energy sources in the UK

It’s easy to think of solar as being the only renewable used in the UK.  Actually we have a long history of harnessing much more than daylight:

1. Nuclear (21%)
2. Wind (15%)
3. Solar (4%)
4. Hydroelectric (2%)
5. Gas, coal and other (58%)

(These numbers came from various sources on the internet).

Home automation is a hot topic but along with the ability to control multiple devices on a pre-programmed schedule or from the other side of the world comes that nagging feeling: is it secure?

This is a complicated question to ask and answer.  What do you mean by secure?

For me, in home automation I look at three basic questions:

1. Will my request work?
2. Will my request expose anything I don’t want to?
3. Will my request damage anything I care about?

Answering these questions help us assess the risk.  Or that’s how the professionals in this area sell it.

Part of my home network is exposed to the internet, using a BT infinity network and router.  As such, I use port forwarding to allow some holes in my firewall to get to some servers.  This is very basic perimeter security.

To allow my web pages to work, the firewall talks to my web server and the 5 applications I use to present my work to the internet all flow through that single, TLS 1.2 encrypted port.

Why?  Well, TLS or transport layer security gives me a means to protect me and my users when they need to login to one of my apps by encrypting the passwords and other data flowing between their apps and browsers and my server.

My web server also contains a proxy so that certain addresses can be directed to the right kind of web server.  My pump tools is a great example of that: https://samjwatkins.com/pumps maps to a completely different server with a very different set of capabilities to the one serving the web page you are reading.  As an end user, you don’t care and I protect you and the server by hiding that detail.  It also allows me to do the pump tools without any kind of login and I don’t store any data at all, which makes me GDPR compliant from day 1.

All very nice.  But what about the home automation?

I control my heating and my lighting through two different suppliers: Heatmiser makes my heating and TP-Link my lighting (and smart sockets).

Both provide a means to control remotely, i.e. if I am not connected to my home network, I can still find out if I left my bedroom light on for example, and remedy the situation if I did.

Or if I am coming home early, I can ask the central heating to come on a little earlier than planned because it’s turned really cold outside.

I got the Heatmiser thermostats back in 2011, when the second two areas of security weren’t really at the forefront of this technology.  As such, if I want to encrypt the data between the user and the device (to protect the password for example), I have to use a proxy on my web server.

Which I can do, but it’s all a bit fiddly.

The other thing that starts to breakdown are the web apps.  They rely on my home router being able to do port forwarding.  Which is great to a point, but the increased security on today’s browsers means that’s not trivial to test.

Then there’s things like the WPA2 passwords: my devices do not allow you to get these unless you directly connect your laptop to them via a usb cable.  Then the network password is available to all!

To give us peace of mind, we’ve put the Heatmiser thermostats and the TP-Link smart lights on a separate “guest network”.  Still protected by a password but traffic on this network cannot talk to the rest of the house.  Magic.

Anything on the home networks can talk to the devices but anything obtaining the network password can only talk to the devices and then only with the passwords.

Perfect.

When I read my blog, I sometimes feel like it must seem like a bit of a whinge.

Type 1 diabetes can be mindblowingly frustrating as no two days are the same and much of the theory regarding what you should do does not cope with the edge cases when the normal rules do not apply (yes I do appreciate the 1600 rule for correcting highs, but that has not really come up all that often).

When it does work, the feeling is amazing and not just because you are not high or low.  I had that last Wednesday.  Using my Insulin on Board Calculator and my Carb calculator, I had treated a low and was seeing how things panned out.

My basal rate had dropped back to basal rate 1 and my treatment of the hypo was obviously spot on as can be seen from my read out:

I took my 10:34pm reading and fed it into my Insulin On Board Calculator.  I was feeling good and by chance happened to look at my meter again just as the time was up on my Insulin on Board calculator.

The two values was spot on.  We have a saying in the type 1 community of “an unicorn” – that’s when you’re blood glucose meter reads precisely 100mg/dl because it’s really rare.

That moment last Wednesday when everything lined up felt like my unicorn, despite an unpromising start.

Thanks to the majority of people being well fed these days, being ill is unusual.  I’m not talking about the odd cold that refuses to shift, but an actual viral infection.

As seen from my last post, Sometimes, it just doesn’t work, I should have guess that something was brewing.  It didn’t actually hit until New Year’s Eve – I felt a little knackered but not unexpected given the battles with my blood sugar.  The 30th Dec 2018, I had 82iu over the day (I was fine if I didn’t eat, yet every bolus for food seemed to be ineffective and my bolus to carb ratio increased from 1iu to 10g to 3iu per 10g) compared to 38iu on Christmas Eve.

My husband was feeling grottier than I was and despite making  it down the hill  to our local, we left earlier than planned and my husband headed for bed at 21:30.  He started being sick at 22:30.  My blood sugar was still being a little stubborn, but not eating for the majority of the day had helped a great deal and things were a little high but I made arrangements that our son would stay over a friends to ensure he would reduce his exposure (he had school today).

I popped up, made sure he was OK and got him some water.  I got myself some too.

I couldn’t get my sugar below 8mmol/l so waited for the New Year and ensured the  next three times my husband lost his food didn’t cause him any issues.

Insulin On Board

I finished some changes to the insulin on board calculator: if you’re a user, you may notice that the output has been updated to allow multiple results to be displayed.

But didn’t feel that sleepy so took the work to the next stage for a multiple dose calculator.  It has a long way to go, not least in terms of testing, but I am making some progress on this more complex modelling which catches a few of us out.

Although still not sleepy, I did need the loo suddenly at 01:36 New Year’s day and found I that I had the bug too – bad diarrhoea and then I started being sick!

Some water helped clean my palette and I cleaned out the toilet and got into bed.

Finally my blood sugar dropped.  I took water and simple carbs and that day I didn’t need to miss with my basal levels – things just worked and my daily intake was only 42.9iu.  In fact, since my blood sugar hasn’t been above 10mmol/l and my intake hasn’t been above 60iu even though I am now managing one small meal a day.

That meal is still causing a small issue, but a temporary carb ratio of 3iu sliding back to 1iu per 10g seems to be working well.  I’m taking off 0.5iu a day.

I’m not 100% over the bug yet, but I’m progressing well and am not that far behind my husband’s healing rate 😀