The night before we left, on the TV was the guy in charge of the throws for the St. Patrick's Day parade. He proudly showed off the 1200 pounds green cabbage heads, and I couldn't get out of my head my incredulity at the idea of catching a head of cabbage when I was expecting beads or a doubloon. And as we pulled away from the Garden District, we saw several people in chairs along the parade route and a bunch of chairs were setup too. It was right outside the door of where we'd stayed. If we knew, we might have stayed another night, but it was also good to get out before the crowds.
We ran for home from there on. We didn't really stop a lot, other than in a Holiday Inn in Amarillo for the night between Sunday and Monday (they had a hot tub and it was sooooooo good and the whole pool area was completely empty so it felt safe but the wifi kept cutting out so I couldn't post from there), just going north and west on 287, which was an odd highway. It's a mix of fast, four-lane separated highway, two-lane highway with passing lanes, and middle of city thru way with lots of businesses and traffic going through.
The wind picked up for nearly all of Monday. At one gas station stop, the wind was blowing so hard that we had to really watch the doors of the van, as they would blow up badly. The gas station had blocked off the front doors, so that everyone had to go in and out the side doors. That was fun.
There were cranes and herons out in the wetlands around the city. The white chop on the brown water, and the beauty of the white birds in the brown trees with the green starting to blush on the ground and on the ends of the branches.
We headed out, across Louisiana to Texas. The one stop we took was at a crackling stand. It was pretty obvious that everything that was in the stand was fried in the lard from the rendering of the cracklings.
It was an experience. John also got the fried ribs and a boudin ball with jalapenos in it instead of crawfish, but my crawfish ball was actually quite spicy as well. Traditional food for the area.
And in all honesty, there really wasn't anything else interesting in Texas until we got to Woodlands, the home town of Bob and Mai, our friends from way back when we were still working in Xilinx, nearly 16 years ago.
It was amazing to see them. We haven't for several years, and almost did so in the Christmas timeframe of last year, but I got a notification from the Colorado COVID check that I'd been in a location that happened to have someone who had tested positive for COVID. This was in the November run up for Omincron, so it was a generally scary time. And since their daughter-in-law was pregnant, we decided not to see each other while they were here. Which was something of a disappointment, but it was the right thing to do.
So it was really great to see them again. They took us to Rudy's BBQ and we stayed at their house and got to talk and talk and talk into the night, and we got up in the morning and were able to have breakfast at the Black Walnut with Bob and just talk. The older I get the more important it is to just be present for the people I care about. They're moving back to Colorado in the fall, and we're all looking forward to seeing each other a lot more.
One of the interesting things he asked me about was about when I was pre-diabetic somewhere in these last three years. I was that for a good year and a half, and I "fixed" things for myself by going off sugar and mostly going off carbohydrates by themselves. I was lucky, in a way, because I suddenly realized that I could feel that my body felt bad when I ate sugar. My taste buds would die almost instantaneously, and my tongue would feel thick. So it was actually pretty easy for me to tell when I'd had too much sugar. I was also lucky, in a way, in that, for my body at least, if I balanced what sugar I ate with protein, it didn't affect it nearly as badly, and I felt better.
I was also lucky in that after a year of cutting most of the sugar and nearly all of the added sugar from my diet, my blood sugar returned to normal.
And I had to admit to Bob that I really hadn't cut ALL sugar. My actual rule for myself was "No Sugar Alone," and that rule embodied the fact that I could take a little sugar if it were "properly" balanced with proteins and fats. The protein had to be pretty close to the sugar content. I could have soy milk if there were 6 grams of sugar when there was 8 grams of protein. If the sugar in a serving of beef jerky was MORE than the protein in it I could put it back on the shelf. But it also encompassed my tendency to go to sugar when I needed comforting by myself. So I could have desserts or ice cream or baked goods and the like when I was with friends or family. I would try to combine it with a meal as well when I could, but I really put a hard line against eating ANY sugar when I was just by myself.
I ended up losing 20 pounds and I'm still losing weight at a very slow rate, in slow steps and plateaus. What is funny is that during the road trip in December to Marina's graduation, I actually lost weight instead of gaining while I was traveling.
The one thing we took a little time to look at, nearly the beginning of the drive on Monday, was to look at Cadillac Ridge. Which in the 40's was a just a bunch of Cadillacs buried in a row in the middle of a corn field. Since that time, they've become a place where the locals come to spray paint these guys over and over again. There's so much paint on some of these car bodies that they've built up bulk on various parts of the remaining hulks. There were a dozen teenagers were new spray cans going at it while we were there, even in the wind. They've kind of become pubic art.
The storm stayed to the East while we went West and we were finally able to leave it when we entered Colorado. There were also these amazing coal trains along the way, with eight engines, two in front, two in back, four in the center, and lots and lots and lots of full cars. It was good to see the train traffic going strong.
We got home before dinner, ran to Smashburger because it was comforting, stocked up at the grocery store, and then got home and unpacked everything. There was so much of everything. And then we went for a nice walk in the night along our usual walking path, and as usual we hit the mailboxes. What surprised both John and I was that in our mailbox was a key to a package locker, and in the locker were more than eight packages!!!
We hadn't ordered anything, either of us, before we left, and when we looked at them, they were for our neighbor across the street. We walked over, delivered them to her, and she was very happy about that. "It's like Christmas!" she exclaimed. Glad we could do that for her.
So we're safe and home.
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