Leap

Toff enjoys a game of leaping the village beck. 12 days have gone by since the last blip and Toff update, I hadn’t planned on another long pause in blipping. Time slips by, and we have also had a pause in renovation of the house.

However, Toff is making progress day by day. She is so much more relaxed now than even a week ago. A knock on the door no longer sends her into a spin. Her confidence may also be growing as her hormones are returning to normal after being on heat for nearly three weeks.

We learned last week that she enjoys a chase, and she can keep pace in pursuit of a hare over several fields. This was a worrying episode for all involved, and her excellent recall proved not to be excellent in the excitement of the moment. Since then we have been working on this through whistle and reward, and she is responding well, she is so willing to please. We wouldn’t want a repeat though. It’s also made me wonder if, despite having failed her sheepdog training, she might still think she has a job to do in rounding them up, however ineptly. It’s a risk we can’t take, the more so at the moment with so many pregnant ewes outdoors before lambing starts. So I shall have to be careful to scout out our longer walks which I was planning to do once her season was finished.

I can’t believe that we are almost at the end of January. The last four weeks have been consumed with the two projects I started the month with - getting Toff settled, and sorting out my poor blood sugar management. I honestly thought that over the last two years I had done enough to reverse the slide towards Type 2 diabetes. I weigh the same now as I did in my early twenties, bordering on being too thin. But it has only stabilised the situation, and so I have gone back to Square 1 to see if there is more I can do to reverse the trend without becoming cadaverous. There was more to do to in terms of reducing starchy foods, identifying particular foods that did or didn’t spike my blood sugar, and reducing my consumption of the wholemeal wheat sourdough and rye sourdough that I make. I’m deploying a lot of the ‘hacks’ that the Glucose Goddess recommends. But I haven’t solved the dilemma of how to do all these things without losing even more weight, particularly with a form of chronic leukaemia lurking in the background. That said I am feeling much better and more energetic than I was in early December, so something is working.