Hello again,

I'll try to put together some more of my thoughts and experiences since I started my quest to turn my life around. It is about a week since I last met with my doctor, and he sent me away for a couple of months to see if I can continue my progress. I am still excited about what I am doing, and I know that I am on the right track. But I feel like a recovering addict, in that I am only a donut or an ice-cream away from disaster. When my blood glucose level is low, is when I have to be careful. I have to eat something, but not too much carbs that it will over-correct and send me into high blood glucose level territory.

A lot has happened to me recently. I have discovered, or perhaps I have seen the light finally.

My health has followed the path of a global pandemic over the past years. I'd say my sedentary life lead to me gaining weight over time. Then came the high blood pressure, followed by diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. Over the years, I got heavier, and my doctor put me on progressively more and more prescription drugs to compensate for the symptoms. I could do lots of exercise, but it made little or no difference. Then my doctor started talking about me going on insulin to help control my blood glucose level.

I've liked to work with wood for a long time. I think my father got me started when he got me some hand tools. When I was at school, I took woodworking class there. I had some good teachers, and looking back I can see how much of their teaching stayed with me.

I find it like some kind of meditation. Some people do knitting, and I like to create something out of wood. I've made lots of things from furniture to small carvings. Wood is from nature. and I like to hold a piece of wood in my hand and imagine what I can make it into. I will take a board of wood and plane it and sand it smooth. From there I might make it into a box.

"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;

I often wonder if any humans visit these pages any more. Years ago, there were many who would drop by and read the articles. Some would comment with their feedback. These days I moderate comments, because they are more likely to be comment-bots that like to spam blogs with links to porn sites etc.

A lot of the visitors are bots. You get the friendly ones, like google and bing. You get a bunch of evil ones, that are probing for opportunities to exploit. The evil ones will try to destroy what is here and deface it with their junk. They get to score points for their hacking teams, viewed on online hacker scoreboards. Destruction has become a game for bored teenagers in countries like Turkey and Russia.

It has been a long time since I posted anything here. My analytics suggest that some people still visit to read an article or two. I started Big Dreams over 20 years ago. I know that because I have some web archives going back to 1994, which is a long time. (Find the way back machine, then search for Big Dreams) But in the last few years, my focus and energies have been elsewhere. It's not that I abandoned Big Dreams, but you only have so much time in the day. As you put time into one thing it closes off the chances of doing another.

I’ve been suffering from a bad cold, which followed a bad flu and several other illnesses. It seems like most of the winter went by with me struggling to function while under attack by various viruses. I don’t know if I am just more prone to illness these days, perhaps my age is a factor? I know many other people who are also sick, so I wonder if there is some especially strong virus strain that is going around the world this year. It seems that having taken the flu shot has done me no good.

Hello again,

Hope you are doing well with 2013, and the year of the snake. We have already had the Western new year, the Chinese new year, and this month we get the Persian new year. So the year is well and truly begun. I recently upgraded this site from Joomla 1.5 to 2.5, it seems like it never ends. I have to keep up with the newer versions, which include improved security that thwarts some of the hackers and their exploits. It is never foolproof, as I have long ago learned. These days I just keep backups for when I need them. Trying to hunt down any malicious code and clean it out is usually impossible, and a restore from a recent backup is the easiest solution.

Hello again, and welcome to Big Dreams. I hope you are doing well this year, this month, as you read this article. I just upgraded from Joomla version 1.x to 1.5, and it took some time to get it all working again. I managed to migrate the content over, no trouble, but the comments didn't make it. I am not too worried. It means the slate is wiped clean, and ready for you to add new comments. Today's column is on working less and living a more balanced life.