Living Well With Diabetes

Our day of sailing on the Great Salt Lake had been scheduled for this Sunday. The weather forecast for Sunday is beyond dreary and venturing into the abysmal category. I remember from my sailing days when I was much younger that less than ideal weather is OK because it often means stronger winds and therefore better sailing. Well, this forecast barely mentions wind. “Light and variable,” is all it says. Also, Pat’s colleague who agreed to take us out, felt that we deserved weather better than dreary for our first outing. I couldn’t disagree. He is the skipper, after all.

Ironically, the weather forecast for today looks pretty good for a first outing. “Partly sunny, with a high near 53. Southeast wind around 7 mph becoming north.” It looks pretty good for a bike ride too. Maybe I’ll ride my bike out the to marina again.

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Imagine this scene: It’s February. You’re in the mountains. You’re tromping through about a foot of snow. It’s a beautiful, sunny day. A slight breeze is keeping you cool and the sun above keeps you warm. You’re dressed in the best high-performance hiking gear you can afford: boots, gaiters, water-resistant pants, three moisture-wicking layers inside of a stout wind-resistant jacket. You’re comfortable and ready for any imaginable change in weather conditions.

Coming up the trail towards you are two other hikers out for a Saturday afternoon hike just like you are. Except they’re not wearing clothing anything like yours. In fact, they’re wearing barely anything at all. For a base layer, they have boxer shorts and boots. After that, they have, well, nothing. OK, actually, they have sunglasses and one guy has a hat; the other guy has a backpack, a substantial paunch, and dense layer of graying chest hair. Do any of those count as a layer?

Do you have that scene in your imagination? Good. Now you have in your mind a bit of the scene I encountered on my hike yesterday. It was an interesting scene, to say the least. But, it’s a free country, I guess, and if a person wants to go into the wilderness wearing nothing more than a loincloth, I guess you should be free to do that.

Since it is a free country, my custom for weekend hikes is to take our border collie, Pearl, with me along with plenty of extra clothes, water, and food. I guess years of living with diabetes has ingrained in my mind the need to be prepared for all eventualities.

Another custom of mine is to start my hike at home instead of driving to the trail head. I walked out the front door, down the street about a mile, through an off-leash park for dogs (Pearl’s favorite part) and then, finally, to the trail head for Grandeur Peak. From there, it’s up steeply towards the summit of Grandeur Peak.

We didn’t make it to the summit though. Pearl doesn’t have the fitness yet to attempt that. (Hey, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.) We climbed about 3000 feet (the highest we’ve ascending on Grandeur Peak this winter!) and stopped to enjoy the view. I couldn’t possibly describe that scene in words, so here are some photos that I took:

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Salt Lake City had a bunch of new snow this morning. The wet, sloppy, springtime kind. With the heavy snowing falling and covering the roads, it was, as the kids say these days, “sketchy” riding my bike to work this morning.

By this afternoon though, the sun was out and it all was melting. On my ride home from work, I was enjoying the sun and doing my best to avoid piles of snow left by snowplows and snow blowers. There’s an intersection at the bottom of a hill near where I live and from a few blocks away I could see a couple of kids playing at that intersection. I got closer and saw why. It was filled with water. The road I was on wasn’t filled with water, but there was an ten or twelve-foot wide puddle in the intersection between the road I was on and the road I was going to be turning on to.

As I was setting up for my left-hand turn, the girls at the intersection yelled “Hey biker, hey biker, I dare ya to ride through the water!”

“You dare me?” I yelled back. They didn’t know I was going to ride through it anyway.

“Yeah, come on!”

Alright then. I gathered some speed and picked a line, hoping I had picked one without the pothole. The splash as I rode through water up to the hubs was much bigger than I thought it would be. My shoes were soaked, but I kept my my forward momentum and started pedaling again at the far side.

“Oh, cool!” I heard one of the girls yell.

Yeah, I had to agree. It was pretty cool.

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Whenever I write on Living Well With Diabetes, I wonder how many people are reading it? And who are they? Friends? Relatives? Complete strangers?

There a number of ways to find out the answer. My hosting provider has some basic reports by a program called Webalizer. These reports show that last week (February 14 through February 21), Living Well With Diabetes had 1516 page views. I’ve been a bit unhappy with those reports because provides only cumulative numbers of hits and page views on a daily, monthly and annually. Those cumulative numbers don’t differentiate between hits and page views by real people and those of automated web crawling programs such as Googlebot, Msnbot, and Yahoo! Slurp. I only care about the visits by real people because, well, I’m pretty sure none of the web crawlers have diabetes.

I finally got curious enough about my web site statistics that I installed a module on my web site to collect more detailed data. I did that about a month ago and I immediately noticed three things:

1. The module still collects all the visit data from web crawlers and there are a huge number of web crawlers scanning my web site. So many that it’s difficult to find the stuff I’m really interesting in. That is, the visits from real people.
2. The amount of data is large enough that it won’t be practical to collect it for very long.
3. The collecting of the data seems to slow down the web site.

Because of this, just over a week ago, I signed up for Google Analytics. By the nature of how it collects its data, it automatically excludes the visits by web crawlers. It still collects a large amount of data, but because the data is stored on my Google Analytics account where I don’t have a storage space limit, it doesn’t take up space where it counts: on Living Well With Diabetes.

I’ve been collecting data with Google Analytics since February 14 — just over a week. So, after excluding all the visits by web crawlers, the number of page views by real people is…wait for it…129.

Yep, 129 page views spread across seven days and five postings. And 59 of those 129 page views weren’t even to new postings on the site; they were to my Quotes page. Clearly, if I want this blog to be more than just a fancy electronic letter home to Mom, I need to get the word out about Living Well With Diabetes. How does one go about promoting a blog? More on that later.

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I’ve just learned that emails did not get delivered to the subscribers of Living Well With Diabetes. This happened only with my post dated February 1 and titled More about sailing. My apologies. The problem is now fixed though. If you’d like to read More about sailing, please follow this link:

More about sailing

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