Eggs, fats-and-oils revisited

We have five girl ducks. When all five lay every day, the eggs pile up quickly. They also eat more when they are laying.

Papillon

This is in-reference to the difference that fats-and-oils can make in austere circumstances. 

The book Papillon was published in 1969 and the author claimed it was an autobiography of when he was imprisoned in a French penal colony of French Guiana between 1931 and 1945.

At one point during his incarceration, he was under the protection of a guardian angel and he received a gift of a half-coconut a day (an additional 700 Calories per day). The half-coconut was a major game-changer. Before it showed up, he was clinging to life by the thinnest of margins. He was cold and shivering even when the weather was hot. After they started showing up, he was filled with energy and doing pull-ups and running in place. Life was good.

In time, the (illegal) deliveries of the coconuts were discovered and stopped. Life once again became grim. 

Link to a three-minute clip from the movie when the first half-coconut showed up. The clip starts when the protagonist (played by Steve McQueen) is recovering from a beating and is at a low-point in his life.

Because we live in a society where access to fats-and-oils is virtually unlimited, the role that they play in brain chemistry and how they impact emotional health is rarely appreciated. If you love movies and have lots of time, the movie "Lorenzo's Oil" might be worth your time.

Raccoons

It was mentioned in the comments that mountain men sought bears in the late autumn just before they went into hibernation because they were rolling in fat.

Raccoons, unlike possum, also pack on the fat and hibernate during the winter. A fully grown, boar raccoon in late fall can be carrying five or more pounds of fat on him.

Paying wages with vegetable oil

I image that some of you did the math in your head after I proposed paying for 1 day's labor with 250ml of vegetable oil. 250ml at approximately 9 Calories per ml equals 2,250 Calories which is less than the laborer burns in a day. Why would anybody work for that?

The answer is that the calculations are done on the increments. 

My reasoning is that it is 2,250 MORE Calories. Somebody else in the laborer's household stands in the bread-line to get his 2000 Calories-per-day that is distributed for famine relief.

Working 8 hours is about 800 MORE Calories burned over the course of 8 hours of work. So he is getting paid with almost 3X times the Calories burned when calculated as (Incremental Calories Received) / (Incremental Calories Burned). That is, 2,250 Calories received / 800 more Calories burned = 2.8 payout or 1.8 net gain per calorie burned.

If the worker walked the entire 8 hours, it would burn about 1600 more Calories and the economics would shift. Most work is less than half "walking" time and is more tedious than strenuous. Pulling weeds, hoeing, watching children for example.

Some kinds of work like cutting and hauling wood in the wood-lot, running a mechanical tiller, chopping weeds beneath an electric fence, bucking bales of hay have significantly higher calorie burn-rates and will require much higher pay-rates to make the economics work for the laborer. 

Delayed onset muscle soreness

Yeah, those Farmers carries are sneaky.

It isn't debilitating but it is noticeable. Mostly in my pecs and quads. A little bit in my forearms.

"And this too will pass." 

Get back on the horse and ride it

Counterintuitively, continued exercise may temporarily suppress the soreness. Exercise increases pain thresholds and pain tolerance. This effect, called exercise-induced analgesia, is known to occur in endurance training (running, cycling, swimming), but little is known about whether it also occurs in strength training. There are claims in the literature that exercising sore muscles appears to be the best way to reduce or eliminate the soreness, but this has not yet been systematically investigated.     -Wikipedia

Mission creep

My smartphone will not up-date to the newest operating system.

Keeping the OS "fresh" is considered a good practice because evolving security risks are addressed with patches.

The reason it will not update is because it requires 17.8 Gigabytes of free memory. The new OS boasts two AI modules which may be adding to the bloat.

A lightweight Linux install requires about 5GB. 

Windows 3.1 Operating System, by comparison, required 3 Megabytes of RAM and 6.2MB of hard drive space. So, doing the math, the OS for my phone requires 2000 times more memory than Windows 3.1 

Donald, take a vacation

I say this with love in my heart, Don, you are acting like a man who is in dire need of some down-time. Take three days off. Take care of yourself. Let the dust settle. Get some perspective. Make a plan.

We will survive three days without you. Heck, the country managed to stagger along for four years under Biden and he was never really all there. 

Today's work-tickets

Deliver Quicksilver to play-date. One of the new kids is named "Felonious". Ok, I fictionalized her name for privacy reasons. But the child does have a name that is listed in the Michigan Penal Codes. Why do parents do that?!?

See if my buddy on Bellevue Hwy has a window of time to sell me the item he agreed to hold for me.

Buy a couple of gallons of vegetable oil and transfer it to mason jars. My current plan, based on information that 10x45mm shared, is to put a layer of polyethylene "stretch wrap" over the glass jar before installing the lid. I doubt that he jar will vacuum seal but I can leave the screw ring in place and that should maintain the compression on the seal and minimize oxygen infiltration.

Buy some rodent poison. 

Clean the truck in preparation for deer season. I would invite Don but I don't think the Secret Service would approve of Don Sr. joining our party. 

Visit the dentist.