Ned Harr

To follow up:

I started adding a few tablespoons of water to the dates, and then a few more to the whole bowl just before mixing, and that did the trick. They hold together perfectly now, even if I don't use almond butter.

Oh, and I now use 100% baker's chocolate instead of the 85% dark, so these are really pretty much free of added sugar.

I am heartened but not surprised to find myself here in the company of other intermittent fasters, and especially unwitting ones: I never set out to fast between mittents, I just noticed that if I skipped breakfast and then powered through the 10am tummy rumbles, I had more energy and felt generally better the rest of the day, so I kept doing it. The 10am tummy rumbles eventually went away too.

Over time I also learned about the benefits of doing this in terms of cellular health, the evidence suggesting it decreases cancer risk, etc., which further encouraged me. Now it would feel very strange to eat before 11am, though many days I don't eat before the afternoon. My "window" ends up being between 11am and 7pm most days, but sometimes is much smaller than that, like 3pm to 6pm.

When I do finally break my "fast", usually the first thing I'll do is swig a few gulps of cold coffee, followed by one or two of my energy balls (https://permies.com/t/268866/energy-bites-hold-peanut-butter), then whatever else I packed, then usually an apple at the end before I get back to work or driving home or whatever.

I notice that if I eat at, say, 9am then I am much more likely to feel hungry to the point of distraction at noon.

That said, I will sometimes eat breakfast on weekends, sort of as a "splurge" (because I like to cook, and sometimes on weekends I have time to cook in the morning*) and to keep my weight up.

To that last point, I found that since I started intermittent fasting, during my "window" I can eat basically as much as I want, of whatever I want, with virtually no noticeable change in my energy or weight retention or whatever. (It probably also helps that I don't drink alcohol or sugary drinks. Maybe also that I have a physically demanding job, though this was also the case back when I didn't.)

*To address the OP more directly, I used to love having a beer and a fried egg on a Saturday morning. These days it would be a zero-alcohol beer and a fried egg if I was going that route. I am also a fan of dumping whatever veggies I've already got chopped up in the fridge into a pan along with scrambled eggs and sprinkling cheese over it. My grits are legendary and my kids request them constantly. Sometimes I am in the mood for oatmeal with just salt and butter, always with some raw oats mixed in at the end to improve the texture. Leftover Chinese or Indian takeout for breakfast, even cold, has kind of a special place in my heart though it's been a long time since I had any of that ($$$).

Cool! I'm gonna check this out later today.

Edit: Watched. Yeah, get stuff used/for free is a great idea, and part of the Earthship ethos as well. I bet there are very few people building Earthships who don't do this.

I'm curious to know, when you talk about throwing build parties or tire-pounding parties, how do you find all those people with all that free time?

If I were building an Earthship, I can think of maybe 3 or 4 people I know who would be willing to help out for maybe a few hours in exchange for some pizza and fun. Double it if they drag along their spouses. I very much doubt I could get all of them together at once, because they are busy people with jobs and kids, and schedules just don't align. There's no way I'd get any of them for a whole day. This is something that always mystified me about Earthship builds.

I get that there are some people who do it to learn the skills, often because they want to build their own Earthship one day and they know putting in time now will help them get help later when they need it. But I can't believe there are enough of them to populate a whole "party".

Is being very popular a prerequisite to building an Earthship? Do you need to be an experienced party-thrower? What's your secret there?

Nick Graaly wrote:Thanks Ned. Cheers for tuning in. I really appreciate your compliments on the end product. If you feel inspired, please share that on the channel. Thanks again. Graaly.

Hi Nick, yeah I'm happy to copy my comment and paste it below your video on Youtube itself. Hope it helps prod the algorithm for ya.

Edit: done.

A month or two ago I saw an article online claiming that the minimum gross household income for a family of four to live comfortably in my state was $174,000 per year. It gave figures for other states, with the usual suspects like NY and CA being more expensive and WY and ND being less, etc. but generally the numbers were in that sort of range.

I no longer remember who wrote that article or where it appeared (I could probably look it up, but I won't right now), though I do remember that I came across it because it was passed around LinkedIn with much fanfare, amid people complaining about how they weren't being paid enough or something. It made me so irritated I'm still thinking about it, and it prompted me to write this!

There are definitely lots of people who are underpaid, and there are indeed way too many people who struggle and are unable to live comfortably. (As I struggled, for much of my life.) But this article was suggesting that to live comfortably, people must earn an amount that, to my eyes, looks too big by at least double.

And it got me thinking about 1) what sorts of habits and expectations and values must people hold, what sort of lifestyle must people lead, to arrive at a figure like that? And 2) what sort of effect does an article like this have on the way people think about their needs and their finances? Clearly, there is a lot more I could say about it, but I'll leave it at that outline level for now to give you the basic idea.

And then the meta-level question, which I referenced in the title of this thread, is what all this says about "standard of living". This concept is tossed around and casually accepted, it's named expressly by politicians and implied by advertisers, and even children seem to come up with an intuitive notion of it. But is it meaningful? Is it useful? Or is it a harmful lie? (Right now I feel like I have an answer to these questions, but I will leave them as questions because I am willing, eager even, to have my mind expanded on this topic by whatever you, Permies, might write about it.)

I bought my mortar and pestle at Ikea. It was about $15 and it's great. Before that I had a smaller one I bought at a small Indian grocery store.

If you don't have one of those, a handheld coffee grinder works. Though obviously your batches will have to be tiny.

Watching now. Enjoying it! Nicely shot and edited, a fine job on the production. Well done.

So now I'm curious: why does anyone use a "boy's bike" then?

I figured the high crossbar must be there for structural/stability reasons. If you are opting for a step-through bike and you don't perceive any noticeable downsides, it must mean that if bikes with high crossbars have a structural or stability advantage it's only at the extremes of performance requirements, right?

(Does this mean serious female cyclists use "boy's bikes"? I'm totally outside any cycling community and don't watch the Olympics so I don't know but maybe someone else here does.)

I can say why I personally have been using a bike with a high crossbar my whole life: acculturated gender roles! In other words, I would feel less manly otherwise.

Or at least that was true until I read the OP. Now, having read it and thought about it for 10 seconds, I think next time I'm in the market for a bike I'd probably be inclined toward a step-through design. I don't have trouble swinging my leg over, but it'd be nicer if I didn't need to, especially if I had to get on or off in a hurry.

When I ride my bike--my current one is a "hybrid"--it's pretty much always just around my suburb, and almost exclusively just for moderate exercise, so this isn't exactly a pressing issue for me, but it was interesting to think about so thanks for that.

We had three frogs in our little backyard pond, with whom I spent enough time this past summer to get to know them by both their looks and their personalities. So I named them, loosely after some lyrics in my favorite Cypress Hill song:

Tha Rill One
Tha Chill One
Tha Known To Get Ill One

John F Dean wrote:My thought on the  topic is that everything you say is true. BUT, if everyone lived the way we did, it would be easier to fit in, and these questions would never arise.  But maybe we would then ask ourselves if we live this way only because everyone else does.  

Right. Thank goodness the way we live comes with the added bonus of being unusual!

Alice Wegner wrote:Is the thought dark that one person's excess is another's treasure?  All life has it's niche.

I thought about adding to my post some discussion of this idea, popularized in the phrase "Takes all kinds". There's a notion that not only is it okay for there to be many different kinds of people, but that diversity (along all sorts of parameters) is a requirement for society to function. On one hand I can't help but recognize the profound wisdom of this notion, but on the other hand it can be used to equivocate and excuse behaviors or behavioral patterns that are harmful. That's the root of the conundrum I referred to: yes, I benefit from living in a wasteful society, but it's bad for societies to be wasteful.

William Bronson wrote:When Joe sixpack spends money to go see millionaires play ball, he is supporting an entire industry and that includes everyone from the vendors to to the security guards to the janitors,along with the millionaires.

This is the key idea at the center of so-called "trickle down economics"; despite its political connotations it was a concept that always made intuitive sense to me, thanks to the same logic you are outlining. It is why I never quite grasped why people reacted negatively to the phrase, but may explain why its synonym "Reaganomics" also became popular. (To be clear: I have no strong opinions, positive or negative, on Ronald Reagan, or on various styles of economic policy! I am talking only about the logic of this one economic idea.)

William Bronson wrote:
We have to ask ourselves, what would we be doing if we didn't live off our interactions with others?
For example I don't think homesteading was ever an activity independent of society.
Much like trapping, hunting, fishing and mining, it is an extractive process that depends on the tools that take a complex high tech society to build.

Well put; I agree. Everything is connected. And, all activity is extractive in a way...it contributes to and possibly helps speed the heat death of the universe, so to speak. Some activities more than others.