07:54 – It’s Barbara’s next to last day of working for someone other than ourselves.
I’m seriously thinking about blowing away the Amazon-hacked OS on my Fire HD7 and replacing it with vanilla Android. I’m getting tired of the crashes and forced reboots with Fire OS, and the other night for the first time the splash ad screen was a video with loud audio. That’s simply obnoxious. I’m not sure how to go about installing Android, but I’m sure there are instructions all over the Internet. If I brick it, I brick it. No great loss at this point.
I’ve harshly criticized those ridiculous X-person/Y-year emergency food kits in the book, but yesterday I followed a link to the most ridiculous one yet: the Augason Farms Mega 40-Person 1-Year Food Storage Set for only $29,999.09. Wow, enough food to feed 40 people for one year, at “only” $750 per person-year. The catch is that this kit provides only “Approximately 1,297 calories/day/person”, which is roughly what the Nazis fed inmates in their concentration camps. So this kit is fine, if you want your 40 people at the end of one year to look like those stick figures in the newsreels shot when the Allies liberated the concentration camps at the end of WWII. Jesus wept.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Augason Farms products, and recommend them. We have a bunch of AF #10 cans in our long-term storage, but only stuff like powdered eggs, butter, and cheese, TVP in beef and chicken, and similar supplemental items to give some flavor to the bulk rice, flour, pasta, and similar items we keep in quantity. But their so-called 40-person/1-year kit is actually more like a 20-person/1-year kit or even a 15-person/1-year kit. Calling it good for 40 people is simply a lie.
Which got me thinking that I really needed to add a section to the book about Basal Metabolic Rate. I just used the Mifflin St Jeor equation to calculate my own BMR, which is 1,750 calories/day. Understand that BMR is the amount of energy required just for autonomic functions like respiration, circulating blood, digesting food, making new cells, and so on. It assumes you’re lying flat on your back and engaging in zero physical activity. BMR typically accounts for 60% to 75% of total energy needs, assuming only very light physical activity. For my 1,750 cal/day BMR, that means I actually need 2,333 cal/day to 2,917 cal/day. If I’m engaging in heavier physical activity, I’ll need more, perhaps 3,500 cal/day or more.