Presented without comment

 

Lifting notes 8/14/2026

Today was a lifting day.

I got to the gym and started my maintenance routine.

Just for yucks, I set up my phone to record video just before my third set at 205 pounds. It was mostly blocked by the plates on the end of the bar but that kind of thing happens on the first attempt.

After the set, I looked down and saw blood seeping down my shin into my sock. 

I had made the tiniest change to how I was lifting. I moved where I was gripping the bar about 1-1/2" (40mm)  farther from the centerline with both my right and left hand. I had widened my stance to match.

That resulted in the knurled part of the bar gliding up the front of my lower-legs rather than the smooth part of the bar. I already had some scuff-marks on my left leg and the knurling was enough to strip off the scab.

I ended my lifting session a little bit short. Instead of four sets at 205, I stopped after three sets. I sopped up the leakage dribbling down the front of my shin and soaking into my sock and double-washed the bar with the quaternary ammonium impregnated wet-wipes the gym provides. Not that I have any communicable diseases, but the other gym goers cannot know that. 

I really like how the slightly wider stance feels. I will be wearing compression socks in the future to protect my shins.

Nuns and dementia and exceeding expectations

In 1986, a large, longitudinal study was started where approximately 700 Roman Catholic nuns were tracked as they aged. Convents are considered prime research subjects because many of the confounding variables that complicate these kinds of studies (like drinking, smoking, irregular sleep, diet, poor preventative care) are very muted. 

The convent archives were "mined" for prior histories, including samples of the nun's journals and early writing (to provide baseline cognitive ability assessments).

The nuns consented to having autopsies done after they died.

One of the nuns was 101 years-old when she died. She remained "as sharp as a tack" right up until the day she died. Her autopsy revealed that her brain was a total wreck of amyloid plaques and tangles. It was a junk-yard of neural tissue. By all conventional understandings of dementia, she should have been a drooling vegetable. 

And she was not the only one. Many of the nuns grossly exceeded expectations physicians would have predicted if they only looked at biopsies of their brain tissue.

One of the questions Mrs ERJ's friend asked was "What kinds of prescription drugs were they taking?".

Darned good question! I wish I had an answer. My impression is that most of those nuns were able to avoid many of the life-style induced, chronic conditions that result in rest-of-your-lifetime statin, metformin, diuretics, SSRI type prescriptions. 

Ever wanted to force-feed somebody a big dose of worming medicine?

 ---Disclosure: Some details have been fuzzified to protect the guilty--- 

Have you ever listened to somebody for ten minutes and thought, "If this guy was my dog, I would give him a whacking-big dose of worming medicine"?

There I was....

There I was in a phone call with the "On-boarding Specialist" for a multi-level marketing organization.  I had emailed him and waited two days with no acknowledgement or response from him. I emailed his boss suggesting that he share his expectations regarding getting back to underlings and I got a text from the on-boarding specialist three minutes later. "Is it OK if I call you tomorrow?"

I emailed him a list of issues I wanted covered in the phone call. Examples:

• What is the suggested attire?
• What are the key competitive points between what I am selling and the major competitors?

Pretty basic information, I thought. 

He started right off rambling. He acknowledge that he had received and reviewed my list of questions but didn't start answering them in the first five minutes of the conversation so I started asking him directly.

"What is the suggested attire?" I asked.

His response, "Well, we just want you to seem like the neighbor-next-door so you can wear whatever you want".

"What are the key competitive advantages that I should be hammering?" I asked.

His response, "It is my opinion that canned responses don't work and you should just wing-it".

In the nine-minutes and nineteen seconds I was on the phone with him (gotta love smartphones) the only thing he offered to do for me was to email a link to a "killer app" and he told me that I was expected to attend sales "pep-rallies" on Saturdays where "inspirational speakers" would energize us.

Every issue I raised where a proper response required that he actually DO SOMETHING/ANYTHING was met with the equivalent of an old, tired, worm-riddled Basset Hound mournfully lifting its eyes (but not its head) and huffing out a sigh. Does anybody want to guess the age of the OBS?

After cutting the phone-call short (hey, I was going to the beach and he had spent more than nine minutes saying nothing useful), I sent a quick email to the On-boarding Specialist's boss informing him that I didn't think I was a good fit with his organization's culture. That was the politest way I could think of to inform him that I have no intention wasting my time.

The day ERJ went to a swinger's bar...

Mrs ERJ and I were invited by Southern Belle and Belladonna, our two daughters, to join them for a fun day at the beach.

We went to our usual spot, Duck Lake State Park which is just south of Whitehall, Michigan. It is a family-oriented spot and not a "meat market" like some of the other beaches. Mrs ERJ likes it because there is no phone reception (other than 911). If you get a signal it is likely to be from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and your phone will change time-zones. One great thing about Milwaukee, though, is that it is always beer-thirty.

After the fun in the sun and surf, the kids wanted to go to a restaurant they had visited before. I only heard dribs-and-drabs of conversation as I was stowing cargo but I thought I heard that this restaurant was popular with "swingers". You can imagine my consternation when Mrs ERJ seemed very excited about visiting this restaurant.

 

The restaurant's name is "The Deck" and it is in Muskegon, Michigan. Entrees are in the $15-to-$25 range. Food arrived five minutes after ordering. The band was decent.

Work-tickets

We have been getting some spin-off from the storms raging through Northern Indiana for the last half-week. Random sprinkles, mist and fog. It makes cutting grass tedious because I have to stop frequently and clear the deck from wet clippings.

I went for a run this morning. It had been on yesterday's work-ticket but didn't happen. I chugged along for an entire mile at the blistering pace of 13:52. I had not run in over a year. I had no expectations. I hoped to be able to run more than a half-mile and I managed a mile. I was pretty sure that I would not be able to crack 12-minute-miles. 13:52 is a start.

Tomorrow is a lifting day. We are expecting rain the day after tomorrow, so I need to prioritize my outside tasks. Some weeding, which almost always gets pushed to a back-burner, needs to get done. Pushing a lawnmower is on the list. Picking up a half-yard of fill sand to level out a depression and to get water to flow away from the house is another "must".

The four Khaki Campbell ducks I purchased in May are starting to show secondary sexual characteristics. I am pretty certain that one of them is a girl and another is a boy. The other two seem to change characteristics based on the angle of the light. The one senior duck that I thought was a Khaki Campbell is probably a Khaki Campbell x Peking duck. It has many white feathers compared to the KC I purchased in May.

Bonus video

The creator of this video argues that modern chickens had most of their "survival instincts" (street-smarts) bred out of them. They are docile, slow and much too trusting and don't fare well in free-range programs when there is high predator pressure.

He contends that there are some "less improved", borderline feral, heritage breeds that still retain the street-smarts of the chickens that survived thousands of years of rough-and-tumble, laissez faire care. He specifically mentions Icelandic land-race, American Game and Old English Game.

In climates that are warmer than his, you can probably add Egyptian Fayoumi, Sumatra, various "fighting" breeds and other "flighty", small-bodied chickens. You might get 100 eggs a year out of each hens. They are likely to go broody and hatch out chicks in the oddest places. They also tend to be very protective mothers.
 

Presented without comment

 

Sisyphus, Prometheus, Snowden and others

There is a class of hero who defies convention and goes off-script. He operates outside of sanctioned channels and defies the power-brokers. If you comb through history you will see this character, an uncomfortable combination of Jung's Hero and Rebel archtypes, popping up at random intervals.

Adam defied God and ate from the tree of knowledge, bringing death and pain into the world. He suffered the pain of having one of his sons murdered by another one of his sons. 

Prometheus stole fire from Apollo and gave it to humans. He was chained to boulders on top of a mountain and his liver was pecked at by vultures only to have it grow back over-night. In ancient Greece, qualities like bravery and fortitude were believed to reside in the liver, much like way we say "have heart".

Sisyphus bartered with the gods for a spring that never ran dry for Corinth. He was sentenced to roll a boulder up a steep mountain only to have it slip from his grasp mere feet from the top and roll all the way back to the bottom.

Jesus defied the scribes and pharisees and the powers appointed by Rome. He promised mankind eternal life, something that was reserved for gods. He was crucified.

Galileo observed the wobbles of objects in the sky and deduced that the earth is not the center of the universe. He shared that conclusion and he was condemned by the Catholic Church for "vehement suspicion of heresy".  

Snowden revealed that nothing is private on the internet. Big-Brother trawls all traffic. Snowden fled to Moscow, Russia.

Batman?  

There are others. Some would include various politicians who defied the puppet-masters who were pulling strings in smoke-filled, back rooms. They campaigned and won in spite of the puppet-masters' dictates. You know who ISN'T one of these archtypes? Bernie Sanders. He rolled over even though he was set to trounce Hillary Clinton for the Democratic POTUS nomination in 2016.

These heroes (or antiheroes, depending on your perspective) are sprinkled through history and the stories about them shape how we perceive and process events. They created the mental structures we use to bring order to our lives.

Have you been to the beach lately?

 A palate cleanser 

If you are like me, the first two things you noticed are the complete lack of visible tattoos and her very practical fingernails.

It is very nice to see a picture of a woman who hasn't turned her skin into a comic-strip or her hands into horror-movie props.

I am sure that she has a very pleasant personality. 

Advanced Directives

Mrs ERJ and I are thrashing through our "Advanced Directives". I will be Mrs ERJ's decision-maker and she will be mine. We have a second person, an alternate, lined up in case the primary is not available. That can happen, for instance, if we were both in the same auto accident.

One of the difficulties is providing the alternate with some simple, clear-cut questions to ask the surgeon or attending doctor and communicate what the GO-NOGO criteria will be.

So, the picture in my head is that if I can sit in a wheelchair and hold a fishing rod or a shotgun 60 days after the surgery or intervention then I want the intervention. If there is a 50% chance that I will have that level of capability, I want the intervention. If there is a 25% chance that I will be able to reach that capability in 60 days, I want the intervention. If there is only a 20% chance that I will reach that level of capability in 60 days...I think I don't want the intervention.

Critical to this process is that the medical caregiver who is providing the information not be aware of what the cut-off values are. 

I need to have some tasks on "the other side" that give me a feeling of being productive, whether it be catching bullheads, carp or bluegills, or whether it be slaying bunnies, woodchucks and red squirrels intent on ravaging the garden and orchards.

Studies on how the human brain calibrations for various probabilities are pretty consistent. Most people are fairly well calibrated for 50:50 probabilities. The calibration gets shaky at 25:75 events and goes totally into the weeds at 20% probability.

 

May 31, 2022. Mrs ERJ was out-of-town and the tomato plants weren't going to plant themselves. That is precisely 31 days after I got whacked as I was crossing a street by a Malibu going 35 mph.

I got a big assist from Belladonna. She moved the trays of pepper plants to the garden for me. And she didn't rat-me-out to Mrs ERJ.

A physically-fit person in a wheel chair can probably run a zero-turn mower if there are not too many obstacles. If he is sufficiently motivated, he can probably do some straw-bale gardening and grow tomato seedlings, brew small batches of beer and, with a little bit of help, run a still. He might even be able to do a little bit of blogging on the side.

He can shake a bucket with corn in the bottom of it but he cannot chase cows and probably cannot close the gate. 

Any thoughts?