Minnesota Nice??

Why I ride: our boys I am participating in the American Diabetes Association's Tour de Cure for my ninth consecutive year, and would appreciate your support. Please follow the link below for more information. Tour de Cure by American Diabetes Association: 2016 Twin Cities Tour de Cure

Here is a tip for people who fall into the same small category as myself. If you use a Medtronic insulin pump, use the CareLink site to store your pump history, use a Mac, and are running OS X Mavericks for a time - short , I hope - after I write this post, you will run into the problem that I ran into when I first attempted to upload my pump data after upgrading to Mavericks. You will get an error page stating, Unfortunately, the configuration of your PC or web browser is not compatible with our standard system requirements. This is because the only OS X versions supported are "MacOSX 10.5 (Intel), MacOSX 10.6/10.7/10.8". Unfortunately, Mavericks is version 10.9. Unlike the logic for the browser, which recognized that my Firefox 24.0 met the Firefox 5 requirement, the OS check does not appear to allow for future versions. The workaround that I am using, for now, is to use the Firefox User Agent Switcher plugin. After installing the plugin and restarting Firefo...

This past Saturday, I did a warm-up ride for the American Diabetes Association 's Twin Cities Tour de Cure , biking 30.2 miles in 3 hours and 42 minutes, including breaks for snacks, etc. Given that my average pace, including break times, has been under 9 mph in 2 of the last 3 long bike rides I've taken this spring (pretty bad - not much time to train, given how long winter stretched into spring), I have decided to return to riding the 42 mile, rather than 62 mile, route. My commuter bike, loaded down with a luggage rack and bag to contain snacks, medical supplies, and other stuff , is just a bit too heavy to keep up the pace for the 62 (or 100) mile rides. One thing I have found out, compared with riding my bike last year, is that Continuous Glucose Monitoring is truly a blessing on multi-hour bike rides for someone with Type 1 diabetes! The audible warnings of impending lows, and just being able to check the screen when taking a break, allows for such better, quicker moni...

Though recovering from trigger finger surgery and the bad weather (winter storm warning on April 11!) are delaying my start in warming up for them, I am once again participating in two charitable bike rides this Spring. I am participating in: Bike MS: SAM'S CLUB Twin Cities Ride 2013 , and American DIabetes Association Twin Cities Tour de Cure If either or both of these causes interests you, I would be very grateful for your sponsoring me by following the donation instructions on the pages linked to above. Thank you for your consideration!

 I started using my new insulin pump yesterday evening, and have now been on the pump for over 24 hours! This is the biggest change in how I have been managing my diabetes in 39 years. Sara and I are still working with the pump training educator on zeroing in on the correct settings for me, but I seem to be doing better already this evening after a few small tweaks made this afternoon. Here are two shots showing what it looked like shortly after inserting the canula (tiny insulin delivery tube) into my side.   I feel a bit Borg -ish or, going back even further in science fiction television history, a bit bionic . I'm hoping that this will allow me to keep my tight control, without as many low blood sugars as I have been having recently. More to come, I am sure!