Kinko's was useless

Damn you, Georgetown.

I trundled over to the Samsung Kinko's, only to discover that my Georgetown University diploma was too big to be scanned all at once. The Georgetown diploma is huge, written in Latin, with a blue-and-gray ribbon in one corner; it's screaming to be proudly framed. I don't much like the idea of framing my diplomas, which is one reason why no frame for either of my diplomas exists. The Catholic U. diploma, by contrast, could be scanned; it's much smaller and used to be kept in its own folding leather cover. But like my GU diploma, the CUA (Catholic University of America, in DC) diploma now ignobly resides inside a plastic shipping tube, where it's been slumbering, curled up, for years.

So I'm sending the originals to the apostille service tomorrow. Since I already have my own self-done scans of my diplomas, I'll make do with those scans to create diploma PDFs for first-round applications. My own scanner is fairly tiny (not much bigger than legal-sized US paper), so the edges of each scan look strangely off-colored because that's where the outside light came in. But I made sure to make four scans of each document, rotated 90º each time, so I ought to be able to splice them together carefully into single wholes—one PDF for GU and one for CUA. I'm chafing that I have to spend money on physically shipping my diplomas, but I'm pretty sure the apostille service will detect the spliced nature of my scans and reject my documents. So it's better to send the originals. In other news...

After fasting for several days, I was feeling faint while standing out in the hot sun today, and while I normally try not to eat the day before a hospital visit, I just had myself two cans of tuna with mayo, plus slices of Edam cheese and some Welch's Grape Zero. I expect there to be an insulin/blood-sugar response despite the lack of sugar; pretty much anything will spike your insulin when ingested. Here's hoping my numbers aren't too bad tomorrow morning. Oh—as for breaking my fast, the hospital requires that I fast only eight hours before a blood draw, so really, I need to stop eating before 11 p.m. tonight. As it is, though, I'm supposed to give two blood samples tomorrow: a fresh one the moment I step into the hospital at 7 a.m., then another one an hour after eating something (I usually get a salad from the hospital cafe/kiosk, plus water or apple juice). The doctors never comment on the results of the second blood draw, but I guess they're checking to see how far down my blood sugar goes an hour after eating. If the blood-sugar level descends too slowly, that says something bad about my insulin sensitivity/resistance. FYI: Insulin sensitivity is good; insulin resistance is bad.