Today, the first Friday of February, is national "Wear Red" day in honor (or observance) of Women's Heart Health Awareness, as spearheaded by the "Go Red for Women" campaign. So of course I will be wearing red to work and I've been handing out Red Dress pins.

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Once you get past the congestion of sheer numbers and the mix of colors, designs, and graphic techniques, there's one thing that stands out on every team shirt at the Seaside Heights, NJ JDRF Walk: cure. It's not just because the event is called the Walk to Cure Diabetes (emphasis mine), or because insulin is "not a cure" for autoimmune diabetes. It's not because parents are struggling to pay for their children's pumps and CGMs, or because adversity breeds strength.

The reason we see the word cure is same reason we see another word on team names and slogans, and that word is hope.

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Ring around a rosy, a pocket full of posies...

By the time we reach adulthood, most of us know that the seemingly-nonsensical nursery rhymes of youth were sharp political snipes and sarcastic observations at the time of their composition. We know, for example, that the "ring" or "rosy" was the distinct buboe of bubonic plague, that it was believed that carrying around fresh flowers would help ward off the Plague, that the belongings of a Plague victim would be burned to try to limit the spread of the disease, and that all too many people had succumbed -- and would succumb -- to its horrors.

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Sometimes, real life hands me topics for posts and pleasure, and sometimes, there are "soapbox" issues on which I feel I must speak out. Often the "issues" arise from my being a "pattern thinker": I synthesize information by finding patterns. This means I often see patterns where others don't -- but that doesn't mean the patterns are real. Just like I need to analyze blood glucose logs to make sure that pattern of highs and lows I think I'm seeing is real, I need to research and observe to see if other patterns I think I'm seeing are real, or just my subjective impressions.

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