Sunday is a day of rest

Very little to report regarding activities on Sunday.

I slept.

***End of report***

Longer version

While at Mass I noticed that I had lots of sore muscles: Calves, left knee, thighs, shoulders and neck. My eyes were itching and while waiting for the lovely Mrs ERJ after Mass I observed that the lymph-nodes at the base of my jaw were enlarged. 

I also noticed that I was tired, a hazy-gray, no-peripheral-vision kind of tired.

The sore muscles were most likely due to physical activity. Crusty/itchy eyes are from tree pollen and my allergies. Enlarged lymph-nodes could be from a multitude of sources including over-exertion and exposure to proteins that my body mistakes for alien invaders (like pollen). It could also be some minor, opportunistic virus challenging my body.

So, my Sunday day of rest was enforced by my body agreeing with God. I took a three hour nap and went to bed early.

What is this thing called "Faith"

I believe that there are many intelligent people who were raised in families that either did not practice a Christian faith or only practiced it in the most nominal of ways.

They look at Christianity as an intellectual puzzle and consider it to be contrary and irrational, a Catch-22 situation if you prefer that term.

"What is faith? How can I get it? It seems like I must  already have faith as a precondition to getting faith. I don't have faith. You say faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit but he never gave me that gift. It doesn't make any sense to me..."

One possible path...

I make no claims to having universal answers. However, a few verses that seems pivotal to those questions.

...they were cut to the heart, and they asked Peter and the other apostles, “What are we to do, my brothers?”Peter [said] to them, “Repent and be baptized,  every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the holy Spirit. For the promise is made to you and to your children and to all those far off, whomever the Lord our God will call.”   Acts of the Apostles 2:37-39

I want to call attention to the order St Peter listed them in:

1. Repent. Examine your conscience*. Resolve to not sin again. Analyze what conditions made it easier to sin than not-sin. Commit to avoiding those circumstances that make you exceptionally vulnerable to sin. Ask forgiveness from those who you hurt with your sins. (Repent, Examine, Resolve, Commit, Ask)

2. Baptize. Realize that "...name of Jesus Christ..." means that you are joining a family. Families (even dysfunctional ones) are a complex web of reciprocal  responsibilities and privileges. Baptism is a sacrament that is the equivalent of bathing in insecticides + antibiotics and autoclaving your lousy, infected old clothing.

3. AFTER you do those two things; that is when you will be visited by the Holy Spirit. It probably will not be bolts of lightning or flames or pigeons landing on your shoulder. It is more likely to be whispers and insights and maybe memorable dreams. 

*The linked Examination of Conscience is very thorough. There are many Examinations on the internet. Some are for younger people. Some are for people who are single. Others are for married people. In terms of sin, we all live in slightly different threat environments. 

Flowers, cutting grass, trees and raccoons

Unexpected surprises

Bittercress. Exact species unknown.

Crocus. Is the plural "Crocii"?

 

Cutting the grass

Bamboo. The ladder was used to clear gutters but was not needed to cut bamboo. 

Between 3% and 5% of what I need to cut. A lot of tomato stakes and fishing poles there.

Walnut roots

I was replacing pear trees that had died over the winter. In two cases there were walnut roots close to the tree. I removed those roots.

Last fall I had a gentleman use a trencher to run between the tree-line (which is mostly walnuts) and the orchard. It takes the roots several years to die and they keep pumping out juglone. I assume it is in reduced quantities as their metabolism runs out of reserves, but I don't know that.

Yesterday's "stem count" were one grafted Silk Hope mulberry, one grafted Illinois Everbearing mulberry and and five grafted Harrow Sweet pears over Pyrus betulifolia roots. I also stuck about 30 Salix purpurea cuttings on the windward side of a faint depression on an east-facing slope.

I cut scion from a male Morus rubrum, Lehman's Delight persimmon. 

Raccoons

I had a live trap in the barn (Eaton Rapids) for a month-and-a-half. During that time I caught three possum and no raccoons. I suspect that we had a die-off, either because of Canine Distemper or due to our brutal January.

I did see raccoon tracks in the mud at the bottom of the Hill Orchard. I set some traps.

Raccoons are devastating to my young mulberry trees. They climb out on the limbs to get the sweet morsels and tear them off the trunk. People growing fruit where there are bears have the same problems. Bears love apples and peaches.

Do any of my readers who feed birds have any sure-fire ways to stop raccoons from shinnying up the pole? Stove pipe? Collars/barrel-top type blockers?

Bonus images (distribution of blood pressure by age)

Men, systolic (larger or first number)

Men, diastolic (smaller or second number)

 

Women, systolic

Women, diastolic

I was conversing with a gentleman of about 65 years of age and he told me that his doctor kept talking to him about his blood pressure. He claimed that he had a BP of 230...which sounds unlikely. I wonder if he was confusing cholesterol numbers with BP.

Percent of study group, siloed by age and sex, and class of drug therapy they were receiving

 

Some pictures

 

I increased the length of the arms on my buck for cutting firewood. It made a big difference in my productivity. The extended length is 16".

I originally had them shorter because of my concern about my (in)ability to lift heavy logs high enough. That concern proved unfounded.

This guy has an interesting buck. He cuts a lot of "trash/brush" for burning. He has the play-back speed accelerated so you might want to slow down the playback to 50% or less.

Beans, beans, the musical fruit... 

I was struck by how the water that I soaked the beans in overnight developed a stable foam when I ran more water in. That is evidence that soaking leaches out oligosaccharides and saponins that might otherwise distress your digestion.

...several hours later...

Incidentally, this is a great time of year to buy hams and freeze them. Many stores run sales before Easter with hams as a loss-leader.

Cutting update

Willow cuttings.

 

Even the Crack Willows in the back are showing signs of life

Elderberry cuttings

Close-up of elderberry cuttings showing the buds pushing. They don't show up in the other picture because there is not a lot of color contrast between the new shoots and the wood shavings.

For future reference: 

Link1 Link2

A source of hard-to-find fruit varieties. Scion. "Adara" universal Prunus rootstock.

Skinny senior citizens, the woodpile and a conversation overheard

Skinny old people

While I was fishing around the internet I stumbled across a peer-reviewed paper that claimed that young and middle-aged people who are "underweight" have death-rates that are comparable to the population who are of "optimal weights". It also claimed that senior citizens who are underweight had higher death-rates than those populations with "optimal weight" (and possibly overweight). The paper's conclusion was that BMI targets for senior citizens should be revised. 

I am leery of that proposal. There are assumptions of about the direction of causality. There are many underlying health issues that can manifest as weight loss....oral health, acid reflux, ulcers, colitis, depression, osteoporosis caused by inactivity to name just a few. Weight is data and not necessarily a stand-alone pathology.

Woodpile

I am still reducing the 48" bolts into 16" piece and then splitting-and-stacking them. If my calcs are right then 12000 pounds of wood has the heating value of 570 gallons of heating oil. It looks like I picked good year to beef-up my backup heating plan.

TMI

I was in a situation where I had to spend time in a confined space with strangers. Unfortunately, one of them felt a need to over-share information.

She shared that her parents are idiots because "they don't know how to handle money". 

She does not like being married. Her mom and her children asked if she was going to divorce her husband but she doesn't have enough energy to pull the trigger on divorce. She is dating a guy "who is a lot of fun" but she has no intention of a long-term relationship him...but he is good enough for now. I got the impression that she was the kind of woman who rented containers of milk rather than buying them because she was not a "long term relationship kind of girl".

She "is triggered" by the people she is working with because they walk around behind her and fix her mistakes.

She moved into her dad's house and shortly thereafter banished him to a nursing home. She was fretting about how she could protect the equity of the $400k house she now thinks of as hers from Medicare claw-back*. 

I took an instinctive dislike of the guy she was talking with. He was a "hipster" and spewed psycho-babble in a pious, soothing voice and spoke with precise diction in the third person. 

 "Cultural normative scripting is how other people control you and how they prevent you from reaching your full potential" was a typical bit of pseudo-wisdom he shared with the 304. Now that I look back, everything he said was some variation of that theme. That phrase was probably his Master's Thesis.

His clothing was a cross between John Lennon and somebody cos-playing a wizard from Harry Potter.

The girl was merely stupid and self-centered. The guy was pretentious and slippery. 

"Unctuous" is the adjective that sprung to mind. 

I made an executive decision to put in earplugs, something I rarely do in public places. I was sitting with my back to the wall and I wrapped a strap of my luggage around one arm. I pretended to fall asleep.

* The typical plan for a low-IQ person scheming to "protect" the equity in their parent's house is to falsify documents that fraudulently claims that they bought it from said parent(s). They back-date the document and forge the witness signatures. The attempt typically fails when the document is not notarized and there is no documentation of payments made or taxes paid on the $400k gift.

Like trees, most of us increase in girth as we age

 

Source (UK data)

The main strength of the paper is the thorough (longitudinal) analysis of 273,843 BMI observations on 56,632 participants in studies spanning births between 1946–2001 and ages from 2–64 years. No other study has such extensive serial data covering such a wide range of ages and birth years. 

In terms of weaknesses, 

(1) it was not possible to model separate trajectories for overweight and obesity; 

(2) the trajectories were smoothed over age periods in which no sweep took place and thus did not capture local traits, such as a peak during puberty, for some studies; 

(3) we assume our findings are due to changes in adiposity more so than fat-free mass, but this might not always be the case [51,52]; and 

(4) by excluding non-white participants, we were not able to consider the extent to which secular trends in obesity might be driven by the changing ethnic composition of the UK...

The measurement protocols for weight and height were not consistent within and between-studies, which could have introduced bias if, for example, self-reported measurements were systemically under or over-reported. The tendency of people with greater BMIs to under-report weight suggests that our results are conservative

For a man of average stature, he becomes "overweight" at 169 pounds. For the average woman, she becomes "overweight" after she passes 143 pounds.

Those same individuals have to gain 34 and 29 pounds respectively to graduate from "overweight" to "obese".

In the 1946 (immediately after 10 years of economic depression and 6 years of World War, 1958 and 1970 Body Mass Indexes were virtually identical for 10 year-old children.

From age 10 and after, the boys/men gain weight decade-by-decade for the duration of the study.

In the 1946 study, women's BMI remains virtually unchanged until 1960 when those women are approximately 30 years old and then their weight slowly climbs.

The 1958 study shows women's BMI starting to creep upward starting at an age that is eight years sooner than the 1946 cohort.

The 1970 study shows women's weights starting their upward creep even sooner.

The 1991 and 2001 data show both boys and girls with approximately 10% more individuals in the overweight or obese categories. That is 2X the "floor" from the earlier studies.

The tabular data for the 1970 cohort shows 7% of 10 year-old boys, 18% of 20 year-old men, 52% of 30 year-old men and 67% of the 40 year-old men being overweight or obese. It also shows 12% of the 10 year-old girls, 16% of the 20 year-olds, 34% of the 30 year-olds and 49% of the 40 year-old women being overweight or obese.

One more reason to flee Deep Blue Cities

 

A crab-bucket move.

"If we cannot rise to your level, we will put you out of business and force you down to ours."

Noted in passing

The wife of one of my former coworkers passed away earlier this month and I will be going to the "visitation" this afternoon.

While I wasn't exceptionally close to this particular coworker, the trajectories of our lives were parallel. His wife worked in the same field as Mrs ERJ. Our marriages were within a few months of each other and Mrs ERJ and my coworker's wife were born in the same year. They lived in a small, very inexpensive house in a dumpy, working-class neighborhood on the south side of Lansing for the first few years they were married. We lived in a dumpy, working-class neighborhood on Lansing's east side during those same years. When we moved out of Lansing, they relocated north of town and we relocated south of town.

I purchased that house in 1984 for a half-year's salary and sold it in 1991 for the same price. It was not an investment. It was a place to live. 

Fertilizer

Cruising the internet, I see TSC does not offer urea or ammonium sulfate on-line.

Family Farm and Home (a local chain) still has it but does not ship. A 50 pound bag of urea (46-0-0) costs $40.

Blue Ash

If you live in the green area you might have a Blue Ash on your property.

A high percentage of Blue Ash trees are resistant to the Emerald Ash Borer and Blue Ash seeds are selling for $20 an ounce, retail. (A tip of the hat to Lucas Machias)

Blue Ash twigs are very distinctive because the young twigs have four, corky ridges ruling along their length giving the twig a faintly "square" shape in cross-section.
 

I anticipate light-blogging until Saturday

I have places to be and things to do.