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It is now into August and I
haven't made any comments in my diary so far as I'd really intended to
stop it at this point. That said I've been having some medical
issues and so thought it might be worth documenting some of this from an
historical perspective.
This period also saw the
launch of the Electric Scotland Community. I've always thought
that Electric Scotland should have its own community where our visitors
can exchange messages on all kinds of topics. We've been trying out a
new system for around a year and are very pleased with it and so we
decided to take the plunge and make it a permanent part of our our
offerings.
As a base we use the
vbulletin v4 suite which is new and we feel offers long term benefits.
To get a community off the ground it certainly takes time and I've
personally added over 400 messages to the community just to get things
going. We've also got a couple of Universities onboard with us which
will start to participate at the start of the new university year.
I also discovered that my
moving from Front Page to Web Expressions has had an unfortunate side
effect it that when trying out the Google Chrome and then the Firefox
web browsers I discovered all the pages I created with Web Expressions
are displaying incorrectly in that the font looks tiny and almost
unreadable. This has meant me spending almost a month reformatting
all these pages which has been quite a chore.
We've also added a
toolbar to our web site which from early stats seems to be of interest
to our visitors.
On the health side I got
a haemorrhage in my left eye and could see almost nothing out of it.
I waited for my Doctor to arrange an appointment to see an optician but
as she didn't do anything I ended up doing it myself. When I
phoned and explained the problem he arranged for me to come in the next
morning. After that I was referred to another specialist in Chatham and
he in turn referred me to an eye surgeon in London.
Long and short of it is
that I had surgery done on my eye together with some laser surgery and
thankfully my eye is now in excellent condition.
I discovered that my Dr
McIntyre had had a nervous breakdown and so she's been away for some
months and expected back around September. She was concerned about
my diabetes and was meant to have referred me to another Doctor
specialising in that condition. Well after waiting for some months
I eventually got an appointment.
The result of that visit
was that I was told my cholesterol is very high. I was quite
shocked about that as I'd been giving blood samples quite regularly to
my Doctor and I would have thought she'd have noticed that and done
something about it. Anyway... I have now been put on some new
medicine although when getting it from the pharmacy I was told it
clashed with Lipitor which I was taking but they phoned the Doctor and
she said that it was ok to take both. I'm of course just getting a
wee bit concerned about all this.
The other outcome of that
appointment is that my blood sugar levels are too high and so I am now
moved from being a type 2 diabetic to a type 1 and so now need to take
insulin. And so am now getting into this new routine. While this
is of course a hassle it's actually a lot easier than it used to be in
my mothers day.
Now what else? Oh
yes... I stood down from being President of the Scottish Studies Society
as I really don't have the time to do justice to the job with me living
in Chatham.
I've also been helping to
do the newsletter for St James Priory in Toronto. As it happens
they are the host prior for this years International convention which is
being held in September in Toronto. I attended the Priors Garden Party
in August and it seems that we may have some 10 new postulants joining
us. We had an abundance of food as we'd arranged all the goodies but as
several of the new postulants are of Italian descent they brought in
several pasta dishes and some excellent fruit pies.
This past month it has
been hot and humid so am pleased that I have air conditioning in both my
home and car otherwise it would be very hard to get any work done. Mind
you in April it wasn't working very well but I had my half yearly
furnace maintenance visit and they managed to fix things for me and it's
been working well ever since. As it happens the same happened with
the car air conditioning and after some $1500 they eventually managed to
fix it and that was after 3 visits to them. At the time I thought
this was very expensive but it sure makes an amazing difference when
it's hot and humid.
In August I spent a
couple of hours at the Fergus Scottish Festival and Highland Games. Due
to the heat and humidity I was starting to feel quite poorly and so cut
my visit short. I did manage to get lots of pictures of the
various clan tents and got that up on the site. It's around a 2.5
hour journey from Chatham to Fergus.
That reminds me... I did
also visit the University of Guelph to hear a lecture on Scotland in the
20th century given by Dr Catriona MacDonald of Glasgow Caledonian
University. It seems Scotland and the Scots had a poor century
with only a few highlights like Dolly the Sheep.
As to the house...
nothing needing done this period but I did put down some mulch on the
garden around the house to make it a bit tidier and I did get one good
lot of rhubarb.
And so not that much to
report on. |
