Without salt, sugar, fat, carbs and soda, life gets tasteless

I know a man who suffers from a debilitating disease. He's like a walking chemistry lab as the doctors work to keep his body in balance, literally through science and pills. In the last several years, he's lost a lot of weight. I asked him what his secret is and he said, "food doesn't taste good anymore."

I laughed when I heard the answer because food has always tasted good...until now. My latest setback came Tuesday afternoon when a nurse told me that I was "mildly diabetic and had kidney failure probably due to higher than normal blood sugar levels so for the next three months I should restrict my sugar and carbohydrates and then we'll test you again."

Regarding the kidney failure, the nurse told me to stay off coffee, tea and pop. Only drink water. I was already off of caffeine so I haven't been drinking tea and coffee, but I did enjoy the occasional diet root beer or diet, caffeine-free Mountain Dew, but those choices are now gone as well. Like a line from one of my favorite movies, the dad says to his mis-behaving little boy, "Gee, your water looks tasty."

Really, I thought...what can I eat? My darling wife called my doctor's nurse and suddenly we were registered for two classes in May. One is with a dietitian and the other is with an expert on diabetes.

I haven't had the classes yet, so to be on the safe side, my meals have become pretty bland -- as in no taste and no reason for eating. Suddenly I feel like my friend with Parkinson's. There are times when I get up from the table and I want to go throw up because the meal tasted so badly.

All I want is something that tastes fairly close to what it used to taste like. My wife is a real trooper and works very hard to make sure I comply with the doctor's recommendations. So what I'm saying is no knock on her cooking skills...but honestly, sometimes I think my tongue is covered with wax because what I'm eating has no taste.

There are exceptions. A tuna fish sandwich on no salt bread still tastes pretty good. In fact, it tastes better than it did when I was eating other things. See, that's all I ask for. Just give me food that tastes like it used to.

I've already whined elsewhere about my attempt at homemade, no salt sausage and how terrible it was. I ended up throwing out most of it.

Well, my dear wife tried it again...thinking she could add a few more ingredients and it would taste better. Well, it didn't. She made it for lunch one day along with some "applesauce" pancakes. I had to put peanut butter and sugar free syrup on the pancakes to give them some taste and then cut up my sausage patty and eat a piece with every bite of pancake. I know dad hated it as well as he was more than willing to give away his sausage. Generally, if you make an attempt at some food on his plate, you'll end up with a fork in the back of your hand.

A week ago, I had lasagna with low sodium spaghetti sauce at my sister-in-law's house, and that tasted pretty good. In fact, I had a second piece and a second slice of garlic toast. But that was before I was cutting back on my carbs.

So tonight, dad and I will be dining on baked fish, baked potato (only pepper and low fat, low sodium margarine) along with a small salad. Yeah, that's right...I'm on a blood thinner so I have to also watch how much green leafy vegetables I eat as that seems to counteract the blood thinner.

Every day I drive by seemingly endless restaurants and fast food joints that I used to patronize. Now, they are only fond memories...like your first kiss or your first true love. They cook with way too much salt, and the portions are gigantic compared to what I get to eat.

So to sum it up...if you can eat and enjoy food, go get 'em. But please understand if I'm walking a little slower to the dinner table now days and leaving less satisfied.

I saw a lot of changes and I was against them all...

The title is a quote from an old man who retired about 15 years ago from a pipeline company in eastern Montana. At the time, I thought, "What a scrooge." But as I get older, I'm starting to feel more and more like him.

So I was thinking back to all the technologies that I've seen come...and a few go.

When I was in college, we wrote stories using a typewriter and then took our stories to someone who would set them in type. My first job out of college was at a small newspaper in a small town in western North Dakota, but the newspaper had better equipment than the college. It had something called a "Compugraphic" where you could write your story and it would come out of a computer ready to be waxed and put on a "dummy" page of a newspaper. I remember thinking that the Compugraphic would probably be the end of my career because I had a hard time learning how to run it, let alone master it. But the threat of starving to death without a job somehow persuaded me to learn to operate it.

From the newspaper in Beach, ND, I went to a newspaper in Baker, MT, and back about 10 years...at least when it came to technology. I was back using an electronic typewriter to write my stories, which I handed to a lady named Susan, who worked on the Compugraphic. But then I took a job at Mid-Rivers Telephone Cooperative in Glendive, and they had a state-of-the-art Compugraphic. They also sent me to Denver to learn how to operate this beast. After some training, I became proficient at it, but probably not an expert. I remember the paper was expensive for the Compugraphic so you didn't want to make a lot of errors.

Mid-Rivers also was the first company I worked for that had IBM PC's. I remember going to training on the PC's that required floppy disks to store data. The trainer told us that floppy disk was a "car" and we had to remember to put the "car" in the "garage." In other words, the training was very elementary. But it beat writing stories on a typewriter because it was so much easier to make changes and edit.

From Mid-Rivers in Glendive, it was on to MDU in Bismarck and back to the Selectric typewriter. Again, we had a lady who used a Compugraphic in the printing department, and she had the exact model of what I'd used in Glendive. If we made a mistake on the typewriter, we would make our changes with a pencil edit, and then hand it off to our secretary who would retype it before we sent it to an executive for final edit.

And then we got a computer. That's right. One computer for about 10 of us in the communications department. The slogan at MDU must have been, "We'll spend no dime before it's time."

Having one computer is like begging for a fight. Let's face it, computers are far superior to typewriters so who wants to use a typewriter if there's a computer available...although generally it wasn't available.

Then there was a retirement and a promotion and suddenly MDU had a technology champion as president and we all had shiny PC's sitting on our desks. Also, the floppy disks had given way to the compact disks. Writing was easier and more efficient with a computer. In time, we would quit using the compact disks and start saving our work to a large computer through a networking system.

So with everyone using a computer, except for those that retired or would soon be retired, we were introduced to e-mail. This again was about five years after I first heard of e-mail. Suddenly, we didn't have to talk to anyone anymore. We could just send them an e-mail. I liked this technology.

Another technology I was introduced to was the pager. If you handled calls from the media, you had to carry a pager so the media could get a hold of you. It generally wasn't a happy week if you were carrying a pager and it went off. Once, it was in the middle of the night and the pager beeped. We were in the midst of a bad thunderstorm and the media was calling because of outages and downed power lines. So I called the MDU dispatch office and got the latest information about how many crews were out working and relayed this to the media that kept calling throughout the night for updates. I also had an angry newspaper publisher call me because the Bismarck Tribune was without power and they wanted to start printing the morning paper.

In 2002, I went to work at the Lignite Energy Council and we had computers and a network along with e-mail, so I felt write at home. They didn't have pagers so I was extremely happy.

Until I learned that pagers were yesterday's news. Today's technology was cell phones and I would be required to wear one in case the media came calling.

Like the Compugraphic years ago, I'm proficient on the cell phone, but I'm not an expert. I don't know all the bells and whistles, but I do know that cellphones can do a lot more than just make calls. I can now text my sons and look up things on the Internet. I can also take pictures.

So in the last 30 years since I graduated from college, I've learned a lot about technology and how it has shrunk my world and made me more efficient as an employee. But I've got probably 15 years left to work. I'm sure there will be more changes. And like the fellow that retired back in the 1990s, I'm less interested with each passing year to make changes and be more technology savvy. My guess is that the decision about when to retire will be brought about by some new technology. I'll throw up and hands and finally say, "Enough is enough."

The benefits of procrastination

Last December I bought a new suit, new shirts, pants, etc. I had every intention of throwing away all the stuff in my closet that no longer fit. However, tomorrow always seemed like a better day than yesterday, so I didn't do it.

Now having lost a considerable amount of weight and needing to lose a lot more, I'm counting the benefits of procrastination. Because of my lack of action, I also don't have to buy a new wardrobe. I have one...or two...and they are good ones.

Luckily, I don't have any leisure suits or striped, bell bottom pants and flared silk shirts from the 1970s, but I do have clothes that I doubt meet the fashion standards of today.

For shoes, let's start with the classic black wing tips. Going north, we have argyle socks. Then there are suit pants and suit coats of different colors and styles going back 25 years. Let's face it, suits wear like iron.

I have a variety of dress shirts starting with white and moving all the way to cream. Actually, I also have a shirt the color of every arc in a rainbow. But I've been limited to white and cream because those have fit. Now they all fit...except for the big ones.

Where this weight loss really hurts is in the jackets and coats. Because all of my outerwear have been up-sized over the years and the old ones wore out, I'm currently stuck between a rock and hard place. My big green puffy winter coat -- that I've had since the boys were in high school -- kicked the bucket a week or so ago when the zipper blew out. I know they were in high school because I was taking them to school one morning when the zipper blew out on my big puffy blue coat.

However, the good news here is that Spring is expected to arrive in North Dakota some time in the next month. So I won't need coats and jackets for a couple of months and maybe by next fall, I'll have a better idea of what size I should buy.

Now the best news is that my belts are also looking way too big. However, I don't know yet what size belt to buy, so again, to be on the safe side, I'm comfortable walking around with my pants down to my knees until I settle on a size.

Turns out, I'm finally fashionable with the low hanging pants and clear view of my boxer shorts.