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Donsplaining Neanderthal metabolism
Tuesday, January 18 2022
I'm still between things in the turn my job has taken me, so it was sort of like getting a second Martin Luther King Jr. day. Today, though, I didn't have to shovel any snow or assemble a series of extensions to turn a set of shelves into a stack of hoppers. Later in the day I painted a small painting of a loon on a lake on a square of wood pried off the top of one of the cabin's staircase or railing newels so I'd have something to give her for her birthday in addition to the service of building and installing the hoppers.
This evening Gretchen and I convoyed out to Romeo Chevrolet (a dealership a little north of Adams on 9W) to drop off the Chevy Bolt for a battery recall. When we get our car back, it will have a brand new battery. Since the battery is one of the few things that wears out in an electrical car, it will be as if we got a brand new car.
When we got back home, Powerful (who'd been at Westchester Medical Center all day getting a heart tissue biopsy and other procedures) was on the couch in the living room. He'd just barely managed to get from his taxi into the house before giving out, and that was with the help of crutches. The doctors think his foot problems stem from gout, and that steroids might be a good way to temporarily relieve the discomfort. For now, though, Powerful remains mostly helpless, so Gretchen prepared him a meal of rice with vegan bacon and a salad. As for us, we watched Jeopardy! while eating sandwiches featuring vegan cold cuts.
Later this evening my brother Don called, mostly because he wanted to Donsplain Neanderthal metabolism. He took the bits and pieces he'd seen in the movies he watches on his phone and came up with a hypothesis (he called it a theory) that some Neanderthals hibernated, and that those who did likely had smaller eyes. He also said that Neanderthals aged at the rate of a chimpanzee, not a human, reaching senescence in their forties. Periodically I'd stop Don and ask for sources, but he never really answered, continuing with his lecture. I wanted to know how our mother Hoagie was doing (she'd just had her 85th birthday), and he eventually told me that he was worried about her because she kept having dizzy spells and falling down. He said she used to be able to anticipate the dizziness and sit down before she could fall, but now she just falls. "If she breaks a bone," I Gusplained, "she'll probably spend the rest of her life in a nursing home."
The closet shelves with their new hopper extensions. I added a little rim to the top today to keep things put up there from falling off.
The loon painting.
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