The best solution is to get an egg separator. Instead of paying about $4 for a carton of engineered egg whites, pay like $2 for a separator like the one that comes with OXO measuring cups. Eggs are $0.99/half dozen.

The egg separator is in the front

I end up ‘hypo’ in the 89-100 range at times, and I always have something handy to eat to bring that back up, but most of my measurements of plasma glucose are around 90-110, with the occasional post-meal 120 or so. I’m keeping it in a pretty narrow target, and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll need something like a CGMS or Insulin pump to maintain comfortably the fluctuations throughout the day.

I’m eating less carbohydrates, and luckily there’s a lot of great natural low-carb food out there. I use meat substitutes for protein and fat content, and I generally have some fresh vegetables on-hand at home for quick steaming. In order to avoid periphery nervous and vascular complications, I’m trying to reduce my use of things like cheeses and other polysaturated fats.

I’m taking a trip this weekend that I know will interrupt my schedule greatly, but I’m going to try and stick with my plan and eat roughly the same stuff where I can. I have all of my gear ready to go and will be able to maintain clinical discipline during the trip.

I’ve learned a lot of things in the last few days. Mainly, what I’ve been feeling in my head and in my bones and to my very core was wrong. I’m now to take a drug that’s supposed to kick my pancreas in the ass and tell it to try harder.

I also have to limit my carbohydrates to 45-60mg per meal. That’s going to be rough to pull off, but I think I can do it. I also have to eat more protein, which may have been severely lacking in my diet in some ways.

But I’ll manage, I’ll carry on, and I feel very supported by friends and family. Thank you all.

I ordered a Singh-Ray Vari-nd so I can slow down time and be a bit abstract. It’s very difficult to shoot certain scenes during the day, and the ability to add an extra few stops to the exposure will help me lengthen certain shots, and do stuff like turn lakes into glass in my photos.

On another filters subject: Filters NOW has pretty much the best price for home air filters as I could calculate. My method was to go to the filtrete site and look at all the linked vendors. I figured shipping costs into the price per filter, since I’d normally pick them up from the store.

I spent about an hour going over the prices for a 16×20x1 and 10×20x1 filters and found this site has the best prices overall. I ordered a years supply of filtrete red filters, and I’ll be budgeting about 19 dollars a month to savings for next year’s buy. Buying them all at once saved me quite a bit versus Lowe’s prices. It’s about $70 in savings for buying them in large quantities.

I could save a lot by buying $3 fibreglass filters, but filtrete filters really do cut down on the dusting I have to do around the house.

I’m also arranging to replace the UV anti-microbial lamp in my furnace. That’ll be about $70, with shipping.

UM HELLO YOU’RE ON THE INTERNET LOOK IT UP MORON

Anyone that has no moral compass and would sleep with a prostitute should never be allowed to give advice to others. It is disgusting that you are allowed to write for this blog.

Sex is not a way to save money. It is a way for a good Christian couple to raise a family. This is the worst financial article I have ever read.

There are several fallacies here:

1. Thinking that to have sex with a prostitute means you have no moral compass. Having sex with a stranger for money is only bizarre in the USA. It’s not immoral, nor is it amoral. It doesn’t increase suffering, and it is both a consensual act and a business transaction.
2. It doesn’t make someone’s advice invalid on any subject. Being someone who doesn’t know about a subject (like say, morality) makes for bad advice.
3. Because one person doesn’t like it doesn’t mean that a person should never give advice. A lot of people think this is a valid form of argument. You can’t state an opinion forcefully and have it magically become fact. That’s not how things work.
4. It is not disgusting that this person is allowed to write for the blog. This again is opinion stated as fact, another thing I can’t stand from this segment of the population.
5. The author pointed out the ways that sex has saved money for him. To say it doesn’t save money is a flat-out contradiction of this. Of course, paying for sex doesn’t save money, but this isn’t what he’s talking about.
6. Sex is not only for Christians. It’s for people of all faiths or lack of faith.
7. Sex is not a tool used only to start a family. It is both useful for reproduction and recreation. Again, stating opinion as some sort of fact.
8. The worst advice I can imagine would be something like: Buy contractualized debt obligations. Not this.

Yet another example of one culture thinking it’s the only culture and training people to spark moral outrage at the slightest offense. It’s embarrassing that we have to see this sort of thing in the 21st century.

My plan was to be out in 10 years from my loan, and I can better do that with my current terms while adding little to no stress on my bank accounts. Plus, I’m not forced to spend $5,000 in closing costs, or $200 a month in mandatory payments.

Sure, I’m out the $320 in rate “lock-in” fees, but I found that I have 3 accounts hurting my credit report in the process ($35 of those fees) and that I should close them. I can’t recover the lock-in fee, unfortunately. Still, it beats falling behind $5,000 in principal.

Let this be a note to everyone considering refinancing: do the math before accepting a lock-in. Do not trust your broker or bank — they do not have your best interests in mind.

The Math, for those who are curious. I used the PMT function to find the payment for each situation, and multiplied it out by the terms of the loan. If I continue in my pre-payment plan, I will be out in 8-10 years, depending upon my aggression toward the goal. At that point, my expenses will drop by about $1,200/mo, and I’ll be mostly free of needing to work to live. Taxes and HOA fees not-withstanding.

Calculating re-finance is fairly easy. Given the following:

PV = $100,000
i = 6.25% APR
n = 30 years

First, solve for payment:

100000[PV]6.25[g][12??]30[12x][PMT] = -615.72/month

Say the homeowner wanted to re-finance after 5 years? First, clear number of periods (n) and calculate 60 months of amortization:

0[n]60[f][AMORT] = -30,280.21 (interest), and -6,662.99 (principal), found by hitting swap x/y key,

They find a loan at 5.5% over 15 years. Now we want to enter our refi data:

PV = $93.337.01 (found using [RCL][PV], but it’s already stored in the calculator, so we won’t be entering it below)
i = 5.5% APR
n = 15 years

15[g][12x]5.5[g][12??][PMT] = -762.64/month

OMG, a higher payment! But what does that do to the remaining payments? Let’s re-amortize the remainder of the loan to figure out what the rest of this will cost us:

0[n]180[f][AMORT] = -43,938.57 (interest), and -93.336.63 (principal)

Don’t worry, you can always balloon that 38 cents, right? Look what the time value of money does here: the first five years cost the homeowner -30,280.21 in interest over the first five years., the next 15 cost only 13,707.36 more than the first 5 years in interest. Of course, it turns out that if I just double my current interest payment, I can pay off the home in 10 years (the above was a hypothetical abstraction of my current situation) for about 30/mo less than the refinance would cost with origination and other fees involved, all without modifying my savings plan. Go figure.

Of course, you could solve for n based on a monthly pre-payment, to see where an extra 200 bucks a month takes the length of the new mortgage… or you can see what paying that money to a higher interest investment does for you… or… Ahem. Best $40 bucks ever (bought it used, in perfect condition).

Also, in the above example, I’m ignoring things like closing fees, up front fees, etc that may be rolled into the refinance.