Nice, huh? More on this image below.

First, as it was my birthday two days ago, I bought myself my present today.  I’ve always liked watches but I very rarely see one I want to buy.  Today I finally did.

It’s all titanium and carbon fibre so it’s very light.  Also very thin of course, being Skagen brand.  I like the spare design and shades of grey colour, with a bright orange second hand. The band, although hard titanium metal, feels like silky cloth.

This is the first watch I’ve bought since 2008.  It joins my collection of five, two of which are badly scratched and worn.

I paid full rrp at a jeweller!  I started to walk away, intending to check the web price, but I thought, blow it, just do it, so I went back.  Of course, I couldn’t resist looking on-line later and kerrumbs, I paid $295 but I could have bought it on-line from a UK dealer for A$178, plus A$21 delivery from the UK!  We pay a high price for local shopping.

And bloody Amazon.  They sell it too, for US$84 !!  But they won’t sell it to Australia.  I’m finding Amazon pretty hopeless now.  Just about everything I choose says Sorry, this product is not available in your area.  Or else the shipping costs exceed the cost of the item.  Amazon, you’ve lost me.  Yes, I do know about getting it through a US based Aussie firm that provides a US shipping address and then forwards it to Australia.  I must follow this through.  In looking at watches today, there’s another one I want to buy,  a Pulsar, much cheaper than the Skagen but of similar sparse design in dark grey steel.  A$118 from the UK shop.

It’s not just Amazon.  I need a new strap for my CPAP mask.  Price here $65 at SJOG in Subiaco.  Price in USA US$31.  This is a Resmed Australian product and they charge us double the US price!!  Anyway, I thought I’d order two from the US firm.  They’ll supply me OK.

But for a cost of US$62 for the two, they want US$67 for the shipping!  How can this be? – they weigh about 100g each.  I couldn’t find any way to reduce this price, so I just had to back away.  Grrrr.

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The title refers to having to start injecting insulin tonight.  My BSL readings are consistently too high and it’s dangerous to be this way.  Not to mention that I feel terrible.  So weary!  The sugar in my blood can’t enter the muscles due to lack of insulin, so the muscles don’t want to work.  I’m told the injections will make me feel much better.  I’m seeing the diabetes educator tomorrow morning to learn how to do it all.

I’d hoped to avoid this by having the sleeve operation, but that’s not going to happen before June, so I can’t afford to delay.

The gastric surgeon put me onto a major study called STAMPEDE, one of those wonderful acronyms, which gives me heaps of reading material about curing diabetes through surgery over a purely medical/drug approach.  The results are dramatically in favour of having the surgery.

The crazy thing is that it’s the resultant weight loss that fixes the diabetes, not the surgery itself.  If only we could lose the same amount of weight and keep it off, we wouldn’t need to lose 90% of our stomach.  Surely there’s got to be a better way than the surgery, but although we, I, can lose all that weight as I proved in 2008, I can’t keep it off.  The body finds its own ways to get back up there.  Sigh.

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These two images are part of a series I took at a tailoring shop at Joondalup today.  I took nine in all, right across the colour spectrum, but unfortunately every shot was spoilt by camera shake.  There was too little light in the shop and I didn’t have the flash with me.  No problem, I’ll just go back and reshoot with my Olympus OM-D E-M1, which has superior image stabilisation, maybe the best in the game.

The staff were quite happy for me to take the shots and I plan to combine them into a very wide panorama and give them a copy.