Sad to say, I've not had the bicycle out since Sunday morning. A combination of parental schedules, the Tour de France, rush hour traffic, and a heat wave have conspired to keep me indoors for most of this week. Now, this year's Tour de France has been about as predictable as an adolescent Type 1 girl's blood glucose levels are around menarche -- many favorites crashed out early; the second and third race leaders hung onto their leads far longer (and through more difficult terrain) than expected; expected attacks were never launched (while others were launched at unexpected times), and the French press has been having a field day (or ten) with the first potential French winner in more years than they'd care to count.

So much for "why watch, when I could be doing?".

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A bell's not a bell 'til you ring it... -- Oscar Hammerstein II

Much like the opening lines of the "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" reprise ⁽¹⁾, knowledge -- like love: doesn't exist "'til you give it away." Data become knowledge when they are shared, analyzed, verified. Or like money in Hello, Dolly!, knowledge "is like manure -- it doesn't do good unless you spread it around, encouraging young things to grow."

While sharing everything you know may, perversely, show up everything you don't know, knowing what you don't know gives you the option to learn it. Of course, there will be someone who will take that opportunity to say that it's your posterior, not your cranium, that has the intelligence,⁽²⁾ but y'know what? That's just him (or her) sharing his (or her) lack of knowledge. (READ MORE)

With a new year come new ideas, new resolutions, new solutions to old problems, and of course new problems needing solutions.

Among the last is, once again, need for a full-time job. Cell phone sales were not high enough to keep me on until Christmas, so I am once again navigating the waters of unemployment and job-search.

For now, enough of that. The meme going around the Diabetes Online Community has been that of "spreading the word" -- both telling people with diabetes of the online resources available to us, and bringing our online activism out to the world in which we live, visit our doctors, purchase our food and medications, and educate our children. While most of us talk about outreach in terms of getting our real-life neighbors to hook up with our online resources, I see a different reality.

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I'll admit I've never seen Buckaroo Banzai; however, the catch phrase "Wherever you go, there you are" has become as much a part of our popular culture as "Beam me up, Scotty" or "Time to make the donuts!" Yet, with about one in eleven US residents having -- or being at risk for developing -- diabetes, it's no wonder that almost every time we turn around, we meet (or learn about) somebody else "with the D".

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I guess technically, I joined the diabetes online community back in October, 2005 when I joined dLife, and I became active in the overall DOC some time in 2008 -- but it wasn't until this year that I, and others, had the opportunity to "eyeball" the folk we'd been e-mailing, blogging to, commenting blog posts from, tweeting, and otherwise conversing with on various diabetes-related forums and social networks. 2009 is also the year dLife launched the dLife Community, and the year I started blogging here at Blogabetes.

Some of my year's highlights include:

March (READ MORE)

As an informed person with diabetes and an active member of several online diabetes communities, it's important for me to "get out into the real world" and make connections with other people with diabetes and with people and associations whose purpose is to support us medically, psychologically, and socially. In addition to real-life meet-ups with members of my various diabetes online networks, I go to health fairs and community events to make contact, inquire about the state of diabetes-care support and diabetes advocacy programs, and have even given a presentation about how diabetes online communities positively effect the lives and health levels of people living with all types of diabetes. 

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