Entry for November 27, 2007

"Pika pika!"

Shiny shiny!

The Pumpkin Daddy decorated one of our trees with Christmas tree lights. They're LED lights so it's about 12 watts to light the 320 lights we have on there. They are blue and white. It would probably make us look like lame scrooges in an American suburb, but here, we're the only house on the block that has Christms decoration of any kind.

The planning was meticulous, in standard Pumpkin Daddy fashion. He drew a sketch of the tree, making rough measurements of the branches, and borrowed one of the Pumpkin Princess's crayons to draw how he would tie the lights on the tree. The result is quite good, if not fancy.

Good news: I do NOT, repeat, NOT have diabetes. A couple months ago, I took a physical on a whim. The results came back as "suspicious for diabetes". I took an oral glucose tolerance test (you drink a very sweet soda and they check your blood sugar one and two hours later after you drink it) and a couple other blood tests and it all came back negative. I told my co-worker and he said "that's what I figured. You're not that fat, and neither of your parents has it. They probably mixed up your blood sample with someone else's." I'm so pleased that I don't have to deal with diet or insulin or exercise regimens (actually, I should probably look into the last one regardless of the clean bill of health) that I'm not going to let that remark about being "not THAT fat" (as opposed to being only a little fat, I guess) pass.

In other news, I have come to a sort of peaceful truce with the quasi-Asperger's guy. Everyone gets stressed out over him because they expect to teach him something. His mind is not wired to learn new things the way ours are, and he will never learn everything he is supposed to learn during his three months here. I will try to teach him what I can as best I can, under the premise that he actually has Asperger's (again, I have no proof, but I need some sort of starting point). I have tried breaking down the tasks into a long series of very simple, very basic tasks with as few "if-then" pathways as possible, to circumvent the tendency for fixation and lack of adaptivity. It worked pretty well today. We'll see how things go on Thursday, which is the next time I will work with him.