I Should Have Listened to Al (and I Did)

I had a wonderful evening at the Freight & Salvage Coffee House in Berkeley Friday evening listening to Al Stewart. He, accompanied by Dave Nachmanoff, ended up doing all of the songs I hoped he would, including "Night Train to Munich" and "Running Man." I am, however, way too tired to write about it in depth, because after the show was over, Cheryl and I had to walk back to North Berkeley BART (about a mile away), where we caught the next-to-last train of the night for the hour-long ride home to Fremont. Neither of us had eaten dinner -- there hadn't been time before the show -- so we went to Denny's (nothing else being open at 12:30 AM) and ate more food that we probably should. Now to fall into bed. I'm sure glad I don't have to be up early Saturday.

Possible Diabetes Cure?

Thanks to danjite for spotting this one.

A potential cure for Type 1 & 2 Diabetes

Now as the article says, this is very tentative and lots more research is needed. But it may be a significant breakthrough.

I don't expect to stop my Type II treatment plan -- diet and exercise control is working pretty well, although I must lose more weight -- anytime soon, however. If fact, I don't expect to ever stop it -- it's with me for the rest of my life because it's improving my health generally, not such specifically reducing the diabetes.

Paying Off Interaction

Shortly after returning from Interaction in 2005, I took stock of the bills that we ran up on the trip and concluded that I simply did not have enough money to cover the expenses run up on the Worldcon trip. I was obliged to take a loan from my 401(k) retirement plan to meet current obligations. I've been paying $100/week out of my paycheck since late September 2005 toward that loan. Yesterday's paycheck had a deduction of only $63.46, which means that I've paid off the loan. Hooray!

Mind you, I rather expect that I'll have to do this again in October 2007.

More Retail Exercise

We went to Valley Fair Mall today, braving the holiday traffic that included about a mile of traffic backed up on I-880 south trying to get in. And in the four-story parking garage, cars tying up traffic as they hovered over people slowly getting into their cars to leave. When the traffic allowed, I drove up to the top deck, where I had a football field all to myself, or so it seemed.

The places was crowded as all get-out of course, and the stores were jammed, but it wasn't as unpleasant an experience as I thought it would be, partially because we encountered a bunch of genuinely friendly and helpful salespeople in the stores in which we were shopping. I was pleased; Cheryl was astonished, as she contrasted the attitude to what she would have expected to find back in the UK. Even I was surprised a bit, as this time of year is so busy that one who has worked in retail (as I have; I was assistant manager of a comic book store for several years) can forgive people for being a bit rushed and short. Yet we met a lot of people today who worked very hard to find us the things for which we were looking. I was really sorry that in one store we ended up buying nothing, despite the girl trying so hard -- they simply didn't have anything in Cheryl's size.

Anyway, it took so long to work our way through Valley Fair -- and we were up so late last night and accordingly up so late this morning -- that the rest of our schedule was abandoned for the day. Sunday, originally scheduled for little activity, gets to be the make-up day for the remaining shopping.

Cheryl has asked me what I'd like for a Christmas gift. I've suggested a card-shuffling machine, although it's likely to only get used once a year at SMOFCon. It might well speed up the games, given the number of people who don't have sufficient manual dexterity to shuffle cards.

Now we're watching England see if they can pull off a miracle in the Ashes 3rd Test.