A Gallon A Day Quotes

I stared at her in amazement. "How do you even live with yourself?"..."You're willing to sell children to a foreign government so they can be used as weapons, possibly against other Americans. I don't get it. Were you hiding behind a door on morals and ethics day?...You couldn't mother someone if they shot five gallons of estrogen into your veins.

The following day I abandoned my pointless searching and planted myself in one of the open air-cafés where I drank coffee and tried to find inspiration for the song I owed the Maer. Ten hours I spent there, and the only act of creation I accomplished was to magically transform nearly a gallon of coffee into marvelous, aromatic piss.

I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying... Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in the streets; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there s not one who would cry out, who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see the people going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by night, talking their silly nonsense, getting married, growing old, serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes...Everything is so quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition... And this order of things s evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible.

Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And who of Huitzilopochtli? In one year - and it is no more than five hundred years ago - 50,000 youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest. Huitzilopochtli, like many other gods, had no human father; his mother was a virtuous widow; he was born of an apparently innocent flirtation that she carried out with the sun. When he frowned, his father, the sun, stood still. When he roared with rage, earthquakes engulfed whole cities. When he thirsted he was watered with 10,000 gallons of human blood. But today Huitzilopochtli is as magnificently forgotten as Allen G. Thurman. Once the peer of Allah, Buddha and Wotan, he is now the peer of Richmond P. Hobson, Alton B. Parker, Adelina Patti, General Weyler and Tom Sharkey. Speaking of Huitzilopochtli recalls his brother Tezcatlipoca. Tezcatlipoca was almost as powerful; he consumed 25,000 virgins a year. Lead me to his tomb: I would weep, and hang a couronne des perles. But who knows where it is? Or where the grave of Quetzalcoatl is? Or Xiuhtecuhtli? Or Centeotl, that sweet one? Or Tlazolteotl, the goddess of love? Of Mictlan? Or Xipe? Or all the host of Tzitzimitl? Where are their bones? Where is the willow on which they hung their harps? In what forlorn and unheard-of Hell do they await their resurrection morn? Who enjoys their residuary estates? Or that of Dis, whom Caesar found to be the chief god of the Celts? Of that of Tarves, the bull? Or that of Moccos, the pig? Or that of Epona, the mare? Or that of Mullo, the celestial jackass? There was a time when the Irish revered all these gods, but today even the drunkest Irishman laughs at them. But they have company in oblivion: the Hell of dead gods is as crowded as the Presbyterian Hell for babies. Damona is there, and Esus, and Drunemeton, and Silvana, and Dervones, and Adsullata, and Deva, and Bellisima, and Uxellimus, and Borvo, and Grannos, and Mogons. All mighty gods in their day, worshipped by millions, full of demands and impositions, able to bind and loose - all gods of the first class. Men labored for generations to build vast temples to them - temples with stones as large as hay-wagons. The business of interpreting their whims occupied thousands of priests, bishops, archbishops. To doubt them was to die, usually at the stake. Armies took to the field to defend them against infidels; villages were burned, women and children butchered, cattle were driven off. Yet in the end they all withered and died, and today there is none so poor to do them reverence. What has become of Sutekh, once the high god of the whole Nile Valley? What has become of: Resheph Anath Ashtoreth El Nergal Nebo Ninib Melek Ahijah Isis Ptah Anubis Baal Astarte Hadad Addu Shalem Dagon Sharaab Yau Amon-Re Osiris Sebek Molech? All there were gods of the highest eminence. Many of them are mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament. They ranked, five or six thousand years ago, with Yahweh Himself; the worst of them stood far higher than Thor. Yet they have all gone down the chute, and with them the following: Bilé Ler Arianrhod Morrigu Govannon Gunfled Sokk-mimi Nemetona Dagda Robigus Pluto Ops Meditrina Vesta You may think I spoof. That I invent the names. I do not. Ask the rector to lend you any good treatise on comparative religion: You will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest standing and dignity-gods of civilized peoples-worshiped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead.

The world uses more than 4 billion gallons every day. When you’re using any product at that kind of volume, you can’t simply stop overnight.

I will give you a few guarantees of my own, Mukthar. I guarantee that before the sun sets, even if you win, even if my cold, dead body is lying on the field, you will rue the day you ever set foot in the Plains. For every inch you advance I'll exact gallons of Mukthar blood. I guarantee that there will be not one family of the Bear Mukthars or they will mourn at least one of theirs. I guarantee that even if you are triumphant the fruits of victory will taste like dust in your mouth. I guarantee that if you fail to kill me today, you will meet me again. You will meet me at the Ximerionian border. You will meet me at every city, town, village, and hamlet. You will meet me on every Amirathan crossroad, on every hill. I will fight you with every sword at my command, with every arrow, with every dagger. I will fight you with pitchforks. I will fight you with the very rocks of the land you try to conquer. I will never, never, never give up. ~Anaxantis, before the Battle of the Zinchara (May 29th, 1453 aed)

I narrowed my eyes. “Doctors say a glass a day helps the heart.” Hades cocked his head mockingly. “A glass of wine, not a gallon of hard liquor.” Semantics.

Special Agent Brad Wolgast hated Texas. He hated everything about it. [...] He hated the billboards and the freeways and the faceless subdivisions and the Texas flag, which flew over everything, always as big as a circus tent; he hated the giant pickup trucks everybody drove, no matter that gas was thirteen bucks a gallon and the world was slowly seaming itself to death like a package of peas in a microwave. He hated the boots and the belts and the way people talked, ya'll this and ya'll that, as if they spent the day ropin' and ridin', not cleaning teeth and selling insurance and doing the books, like people did everywhere.

I am not sure exactly what healing is or looks like, what form it comes in, what it should feel like. I do know that when I was four I could not lift a gallon of milk, could not believe how heavy it was, that white sloshing boulder. I'd pull up a wooden chair to stand over the counter, pouring milk with two shaking arms, wetting the cereal, spilling. Looking back I don't remember the day I lifted it with ease. All I know is now I do it without thinking, can do it one-handed, on the phone, in a rush. I believe the same rules apply, that one day I'll be able to tell this story without it shaking my foundation, Each time will not require an entire production, a spilling, a sweating forehead, a mess to clean up, sopping paper towels. It will just be part of my life, every day lighter to lift.

I'll tell you who has a lot of money, and that's Manny. I mean, that kid is RICH. A few weeks ago Mom and Dad told Manny they'd give him a quarter for every time he uses the potty without being asked. So now he carries around a gallon of water with him at all times.

Did you ever get fed up?" I said. "I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something? I mean do you like school and all that stuff?" "It's a terrific bore." "I mean do you hate it? I know it's a terrific bore, but do you hate it, is what I mean." "Well, I don't exactly hate it. You always have to--" "Well, I hate it. Boy, do I hate it," I said. "But it isn't just that. It's everything. I hate living in New York and all. Taxicabs, and Madison Avenue buses, with the drivers and all always yelling at you to get out at the rear door, and being introduced to phony guys that call the Lunts angels, and going up and down in elevators when you just want to go outside, and guys fitting your pants all the time at Brooks, and people always--" "Don't shout, please," old Sally said. Which was very funny, because I wasn't even shouting. "Take cars," I said. I said it in this very quiet voice. "Take most people, they're crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they're always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that's even newer. I don't even like old cars. I mean they don't even interest me. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake. A horse you can at least--" "I don't know what you're even talking about," old Sally said. "You jump from one--" "You know something?" I said. You're probably the only reason I'm in New York right now, or anywhere. If you weren't around, I'd probably be someplace way the hell off. In the woods or some goddam place. You're the only reason I'm around, practically." "You're sweet," she said. But you could tell she wanted me to change the damn subject. "You ought to go to a boys' school sometime. Try it sometime," I said. "It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques. The guys that are on the basketball team stuck together, the Catholics stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together. Even the guys that belong to the goddam Book-of-the-Month Club stick together. If you try to have a little intelligent--" "Now, listen," old Sally said. "Lots of boys get more out of school that that." "I agree! I agree they do, some of them! But that's all I get out of it. See? That's my point. That's exactly my goddamn point," I said. "I don't get hardly anything out of anything. I'm in bad shape. I'm in lousy shape." "You certainly are.

People love talking about the greatness of the human heart. No bigger than a fist, pumps two thousand gallons of blood a day. Et cetera. But the human heart is also stupid. At least mine is. No matter how many times I tell it not to hope that Chachu cares about me, it hopes anyway.

Be-or, be-or, be-or, all day long, with you Englishmen!' 'Nay,' I replied, 'not all day long, if madam will excuse me. Only a pint at breakfast-time, and a pint and a half at eleven o'clock, and a quart or so at dinner. And then no more till the afternoon; and half a gallon at supper-time. No one can object to that.

Jem said Mr. Avery misfigured, Dill said he must drink a gallon a day, and the ensuing contest to determine relative distances and respective prowess only made me feel left out again, as I was untalented in this area.

she’d braved a trip to the supermarket that morning, where her fellow housewives were acting practically feral, grabbing for the last loaf of bread or gallon of milk or four-pack of toilet paper, as if everyone’s snow-day plans included French toast and diarrhea.

That would have to be important. How fast did a forest’s heart beat? Once a year, maybe. Yes, that sounded about right. Out there the forest was waiting for the brighter sun and longer days that would pump a million gallons of sap several hundred feet into the sky in one great systolic thump too big and loud to be heard.

This intelligence keeps your heart beating more than 101,000 times a day to pump more than two gallons of blood per minute, traveling more than 60,000 miles in each 24-hour period. As you finish reading this sentence, your body will have made 25 trillion cells. And each of the 70 trillion cells that make up your body execute somewhere between 100,000 to 6 trillion functions per second. You’ll inhale 2 million liters of oxygen today, and each time you inhale, that oxygen will be distributed to every cell in your body within seconds. Do

Now, what do you want to drink? You look like a whiskey drinker to me. My ex-husband drank a gallon of whiskey a day. He said he needed it to put up with me.

grabbing for the last loaf of bread or gallon of milk or four-pack of toilet paper, as if everyone’s snow-day plans included French toast and diarrhea.

The one universal balm for the trauma of war was tea. It was the thing that helped people cope. People made tea during air raids and after air raids, and on breaks between retrieving bodies from shattered buildings. Tea bolstered the network of thirty thousand observers who watched for German aircraft over England, operating from one thousand observation posts, all stocked with tea and kettles. Mobile canteens dispensed gallons of it, steaming, from spigots. In propaganda films, the making of tea became a visual metaphor for carrying on. “Tea acquired almost a magical importance in London life,” according to one study of London during the war. “And the reassuring cup of tea actually did seem to help cheer people up in a crisis.” Tea ran through Mass-Observation diaries like a river. “That’s one trouble about the raids,” a female diarist complained. “People do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.” Tea anchored the day—though at teatime, Churchill himself did not actually drink it, despite reputedly having said that tea was more important than ammunition. He preferred whiskey and water. Tea was comfort and history; above all, it was English. As long as there was tea, there was England. But now the war and the strict rationing that came with it threatened to shake even this most prosaic of pillars.

It's not a big deal [...]. We do it every day. Kill the unborn to save the elderly. [...] every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?

Do you know what always runs out first in my supermarket whenever there’s a crisis? Toilet paper! Do you know why? Because it gives us a feeling of being in control of the chaos. When the world doesn’t feel safe, people go and do a big shop, because it makes them feel like they’re DOING something. But they don’t know what they should buy. Milk? You can’t buy a hundred gallons of milk, it’ll just go bad. Cans? Pasta? People rush around like headless chickens buying thousands of different things, but do you know what every single one of them buys? Toilet paper! Because that’s the sort of thing you buy every time you go shopping, and the whole family uses it every day. Can we live without it? Of course we can! But it has been imprinted on us as an everyday item, as normality, so when we get scared we drag great bundles of the stuff home with us, not because we need it but because it feels like we’re taking control of the situation. Do you get what I mean? People need normality in a crisis.

Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies ? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are. Lots of them lying around here : lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps : damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus!* And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of powder in a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure.

Hacker with Bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!" Prospective Station Wagon Buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!" Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!" Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music." Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks, we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!" Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!

It's not a big deal, the way Dr. Marshall sees it. We do it every day. Kill the unborn to save the elderly. In the gold wash of the chapel, breathing her reasons into my ear, she asked, every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?

It’s not a big deal, the way Dr. Marshall sees it. We do it every day. Kill the unborn to save the elderly. In the gold wash of the chapel, breathing her reasons into my ear, she asked, every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren’t we killing the future to preserve the present? The

I am not sure exactly what healing is or looks like, what form it comes in, what it should feel like. I do know that when I was four, I could not lift a gallon of milk, could not believe how heavy it was, that white sloshing boulder. I'd pull up a wooden chair to stand over the counting, pouring the milk with two shaking arms, wetting the cereal, spilling. Looking back I don't remember the day that I lifted it with ease. All I know is that now I do it without thinking, can do it one-handed, on the phone, in a rush. I believe the same rules apply, that one day I'll be able to tell this story without it shaking my foundation. Each time will not require an entire production, a spilling, a sweating forehead, a mess to clean up, sopping paper towels. It will just be a part of my life, every day lighter to lift. Ram Dass said, Allow that you are at this moment not in the wrong place in your life. Consider the possibility that there have been no errors in the game. Just consider it. Consider that there is not an error, and everything that's come down on your plate is the way it is and here we are. I don't believe it was my fate to be raped. But I do believe that here we are is all we have. For a long time, it was too painful to be here. My mind preferred to be dissociated. I used to believe the goal was forgetting. It took me a long time to learn healing is not about advancing, it is returning repeatedly to forage something. Writing this book allowed me to go back to that place. I learned to stay in the hurt, to resist leaving. If I got stuck inside scenes in the courtroom, I would glance down at Mogu and wonder, if I really am in the past, how did this blinking thing get in my house? I assembled and reassembled letters in ways that would describe what I'd seen and felt. As I revisited that landscape, I grew more in control, could go and go when I needed to. Until one day I found there was nothing left to gather.

There wasn’t much good to say about the voyage. Five weeks in, with no land in sight, the scanty provisions began to run out. This was a concern for passengers, and also for sailors who were traditionally promised a gallon of beer a day as part of their sailing wages. They could do without food; they could not do without drink.

Life is bullshit. Consider your life for a moment. Think about all those little rituals that sustain you throughout your day-from the moment you wake up until that last, lonely midnight hour when you guzzle that gallon of NyQuil to drown out that persistent voice in you head. The one that whispers you should give up, give in, tomorrow won't be any better than today.

Two dollars is less than the cost of a gallon of gas, roughly equivalent to that of a half gallon of milk. Many Americans have spent more than that before they get to work or school in the morning. Yet in 2011, more than 4 percent of all households with children in the world’s wealthiest nation were living in a poverty so deep that most Americans don’t believe it even exists in this country.

I draw myself up next to her and look at her profile, making no effort to disguise my attention, here, where there is only Puck to see me. The evening sun loves her throat and her cheekbones. Her hair the color of cliff grass rises and falls over her face in the breeze. Her expression is less ferocious than usual, less guarded. I say, “Are you afraid?” Her eyes are far away on the horizon line, out to the west where the sun has gone but the glow remains. Somewhere out there are my capaill uisce, George Holly’s America, every gallon of water that every ship rides on. Puck doesn’t look away from the orange glow at the end of the world. “Tell me what it’s like. The race.” What it’s like is a battle. A mess of horses and men and blood. The fastest and strongest of what is left from two weeks of preparation on the sand. It’s the surf in your face, the deadly magic of November on your skin, the Scorpio drums in the place of your heartbeat. It’s speed, if you’re lucky. It’s life and it’s death or it’s both and there’s nothing like it. Once upon a time, this moment — this last light of evening the day before the race — was the best moment of the year for me. The anticipation of the game to come. But that was when all I had to lose was my life. “There’s no one braver than you on that beach.” Her voice is dismissive. “That doesn’t matter.” “It does. I meant what I said at the festival. This island cares nothing for love but it favors the brave.” Now she looks at me. She’s fierce and red, indestructible and changeable, everything that makes Thisby what it is. She asks, “Do you feel brave?” The mare goddess had told me to make another wish. It feels thin as a thread to me now, that gift of a wish. I remember the years when it felt like a promise. “I don’t know what I feel, Puck.” Puck unfolds her arms just enough to keep her balance as she leans to me, and when we kiss, she closes her eyes. She draws back and looks into my face. I have not moved, and she barely has, but the world feels strange beneath me. “Tell me what to wish for,” I say. “Tell me what to ask the sea for.” “To be happy. Happiness.” I close my eyes. My mind is full of Corr, of the ocean, of Puck Connolly’s lips on mine. “I don’t think such a thing is had on Thisby. And if it is, I don’t know how you would keep it.” The breeze blows across my closed eyelids, scented with brine and rain and winter. I can hear the ocean rocking against the island, a constant lullaby. Puck’s voice is in my ear; her breath warms my neck inside my jacket collar. “You whisper to it. What it needs to hear. Isn’t that what you said?” I tilt my head so that her mouth is on my skin. The kiss is cold where the wind blows across my cheek. Her forehead rests against my hair. I open my eyes, and the sun has gone. I feel as if the ocean is inside me, wild and uncertain. “That’s what I said. What do I need to hear?” Puck whispers, “That tomorrow we’ll rule the Scorpio Races as king and queen of Skarmouth and I’ll save the house and you’ll have your stallion. Dove will eat golden oats for the rest of her days and you will terrorize the races each year and people will come from every island in the world to find out how it is you get horses to listen to you. The piebald will carry Mutt Malvern into the sea and Gabriel will decide to stay on the island. I will have a farm and you will bring me bread for dinner.” I say, “That is what I needed to hear.” “Do you know what to wish for now?” I swallow. I have no wishing-shell to throw into the sea when I say it, but I know that the ocean hears me nonetheless. “To get what I need.

America experienced its first oil shock. Within days of the cutoff, oil prices rose from $2.90 to $11.65 a barrel; gasoline prices soared from 20 cents to $1.20 a gallon, an all-time high. Across America, fuel shortages forced factories to close early and airlines to cancel flights. Filling stations posted signs: 'Sorry, No Gas Today.' If a station did have gasoline, motorists lined up before sunrise to buy a few gallons; owners limited the amount sold to each customer. Motorists grew impatient. Fistfights broke out, and occasionally, gunfire. President Nixon called for America to end its dependence on foreign oil. 'Let us set as our national goal. . . that by the end of this decade we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy source,' he said. We have still not met this goal.

untreated cholera patient may eventually die from producing diarrheal fluid at a rate of several gallons per day. At least for a while, though, as long as the patient is still alive, the cholera bacterium profits from being massively broadcast into the water supplies of its next victims. Provided that each victim thereby infects on the average more than one new victim, the bacterium will spread, even though the first host happens to die.

We had to scramble for seats in the day coach, lugging one straw valise between us and a gallon jug of lemonade. And a thermos bottle of the kind the Spanish-American War soldiers carried, with our own well water for brushing our teeth. We'd heard that St. Louis water comes straight out of the Mississippi River, and there's enough silt in it to settle at the bottom of the glass. We'd go to their fair, but we weren't going to drink their water.

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack that should have been bagged in double layers —so that before you are even out the door you feel the weight of the jug dragging the bag down, stretching the thin plastic handles longer and longer and you know it’s only a matter of time until bottom suddenly splits. There is no single, unimpeachable word for that vague sensation of something moving away from you as it exceeds its elastic capacity —which is too bad, because that is the word I would like to use to describe standing on the street chatting with an old friend as the awareness grows in me that he is no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance, a person with whom I never made the effort— until this moment, when as we say goodbye I think we share a feeling of relief, a recognition that we have reached the end of a pretense, though to tell the truth what I already am thinking about is my gratitude for language— how it will stretch just so much and no farther; how there are some holes it will not cover up; how it will move, if not inside, then around the circumference of almost anything— how, over the years, it has given me back all the hours and days, all the plodding love and faith, all the misunderstandings and secrets I have willingly poured into it.

My love, this is the problem with your generation. Instant gratification,” he says, and because it took him, on average, forty-three minutes to come, because I put on the ears and the tail and learned the lyrics to “Painting the Roses Red” backward and forward, because I drank approximately five gallons of cranberry juice over the course of our relationship, and for a day or two required the use of a cane, I take issue with his definition of instant.

In October, she barged in while I was watching Working Girl. “This again?” she huffed and threw herself down in the armchair. “I’m fasting for Yom Kippur,” she sighed boastfully. This was not unusual. She’d been on some truly insane diets in the past. A gallon of salt water a day. Only prune juice and baking soda. “I can have as much sugar-free Jell-O as I want before eleven A.M.” Or “I’m fasting,” she’d say. “I’m fasting on weekends.” “I’m fasting every other weekday.

—I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man’s inmost heart. —It does, Mr Bloom said. Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead.

There is a white vein with a very small amount of liquid in it: … Men try to catch the murex alive because it discharges its juice when it dies. They obtain the juice from the larger purple-fish by removing the shell: they crush the smaller ones together with their shell, which is the only way to make them yield their juice.… The vein already mentioned is removed, and to this, salt has to be added in the proportion of about one pint for every 100 pounds. It should be left to dissolve for three days, since, the fresher the salt, the stronger it is. The mixture is then heated in a lead pot with about seven gallons of water to every fifty pounds and kept at a moderate temperature by a pipe connected to a furnace some distance away. This skims off the flesh which will have adhered to the veins, and after about nine days the cauldron is filtered and a washed fleece is dipped by way of a trial. Then the dyers heat the liquid until they feel confident of the result.—Gaius Plinius Secundus, Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis, first century

It is all an immensely demanding process. Your heart must pump 75 gallons of blood an hour, 1,800 gallons every day, 657,000 gallons in a year—that’s enough to fill four Olympic-sized swimming pools—to keep all those cells freshly oxygenated. (And that’s at rest. During exercise the rate can increase as much as sixfold.) The oxygen is taken up by the mitochondria. These are the cells’ power stations, and there are about a thousand of them in a typical cell, though the number varies considerably depending on what a cell does and how much energy it requires.

In a city of almost three million people, a white van stands out about as much as a pigeon in a park. White vans deliver flowers, they carry plumbers, and boxes destined for front porches. This white van is unlike the rest; it has been customized. The flooring has been torn up and replaced with sheets of steel, powder-coated with black paint so they won’t rust or show stains. Metal drains have been installed, complete with catches, drilled in three separate places for easy maintenance and cleaning. There are thick metal eyebolts fastened into the frame in several spots, impossible to remove, at various heights up and down the walls. The gas tank is a custom installation, almost double the normal size, holding up to thirty gallons of gas, which means that it can drive for almost six hundred miles, to St. Louis and back, without running out of fuel. It can also cruise the dark streets all night long—for days, even weeks—before finally becoming empty, frequent gas station stops to be avoided. And the windows are tinted black, illegal of course, but hardly drawing any attention, so dark that even standing up next to them, it’s impossible to see inside. And for the driver, that’s a good thing—a very good thing, indeed.

Adding carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere by, say, burning fossil fuels or leveling forests is, in the language of climate science, an anthropogenic forcing. Since preindustrial times, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by roughly a third, from 280 to 378 parts per million. During the same period, the concentration of methane has more than doubled, from .78 to 1.76 parts per million. Scientists measure forcings in terms of watts per square meter, or w/m2, by which they mean that a certain number of watts have been added (or, in the case of a negative forcing, like aerosols, subtracted) for every single square meter of the earth’s surface. The size of the greenhouse forcing is estimated, at this point, to be 2.5 w/m2. A miniature Christmas light gives off about four tenths of a watt of energy, mostly in the form of heat, so that, in effect (as Sophie supposedly explained to Connor), we have covered the earth with tiny bulbs, six for every square meter. These bulbs are burning twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year in and year out. If greenhouse gases were held constant at today’s levels, it is estimated that it would take several decades for the full impact of the forcing that is already in place to be felt. This is because raising the earth’s temperature involves not only warming the air and the surface of the land but also melting sea ice, liquefying glaciers, and, most significant, heating the oceans, all processes that require tremendous amounts of energy. (Imagine trying to thaw a gallon of ice cream or warm a pot of water using an Easy-Bake oven.) The delay that is built into the system is, in a certain sense, fortunate. It enables us, with the help of climate models, to foresee what is coming and therefore to prepare for it. But in another sense it is clearly disastrous, because it allows us to keep adding CO2 to the atmosphere while fobbing the impacts off on our children and grandchildren.

Inarguably, a successful restaurant demands that you live on the premises for the first few years, working seventeen-hour days, with total involvement in every aspect of a complicated, cruel and very fickle trade. You must be fluent in not only Spanish but the Kabbala-like intricacies of health codes, tax law, fire department regulations, environmental protection laws, building code, occupational safety and health regs, fair hiring practices, zoning, insurance, the vagaries and back-alley back-scratching of liquor licenses, the netherworld of trash removal, linen, grease disposal. And with every dime you've got tied up in your new place, suddenly the drains in your prep kitchen are backing up with raw sewage, pushing hundreds of gallons of impacted crap into your dining room; your coke-addled chef just called that Asian waitress who's working her way through law school a chink, which ensures your presence in court for the next six months; your bartender is giving away the bar to under-age girls from Wantagh, any one of whom could then crash Daddy's Buick into a busload of divinity students, putting your liquor license in peril, to say the least; the Ansel System could go off, shutting down your kitchen in the middle of a ten-thousand-dollar night; there's the ongoing struggle with rodents and cockroaches, any one of which could crawl across the Tina Brown four-top in the middle of the dessert course; you just bought 10,000 dollars-worth of shrimp when the market was low, but the walk-in freezer just went on the fritz and naturally it's a holiday weekend, so good luck getting a service call in time; the dishwasher just walked out after arguing with the busboy, and they need glasses now on table seven; immigration is at the door for a surprise inspection of your kitchen's Green Cards; the produce guy wants a certified check or he's taking back the delivery; you didn't order enough napkins for the weekend — and is that the New York Times reviewer waiting for your hostess to stop flirting and notice her?

If you have to wear a hazmat suit to raise crops, why would you ever eat them? If you’re afraid of getting that crap on your skin, how much more insane would it be to put it in your mouth! Seriously? I often wonder, and I wish someone would research it if they haven’t already, whether the CEOs of Monsanto, Dupont, etc., eat GMO products and feed them to their families, or if they send out their ‘personal shoppers’ to the local farmer’s market to bring home fresh, organic produce every week? I suspect the latter. I’m quite sure they all have reverse osmosis water systems in their mansions. Let me put it bluntly, if I haven’t been clear so far. The day the CEO of Monsanto guzzles a gallon of Roundup, is the day I’ll consider buying their products, maybe.

The physical heart, which houses the spiritual heart, beats about 100,000 times a day, pumping two gallons of blood per minute and over 100 gallons per hour. If one were to attempt to carry 100 gallons of water (whose density is lighter than blood) from one place to another, it would be an exhausting task. Yet the human heart does this every hour of every day for an entire lifetime without respite. The vascular system transporting life-giving blood is over 60,000 miles long—more than two times the circumference of the earth. So when we conceive of our blood being pumped throughout our bodies, know that this means that it travels through 60,000 miles of a closed vascular system that connects all the parts of the body—all the vital organs and living tissues—to this incredible heart.

John Roebling was a believer in hydropathy, the therapeutic use of water. Come headaches, constipation, the ague, he would sit in a scalding-hot tub for hours at a time, then jump out and wrap up in ice-cold, slopping-wet bed sheets and stay that way for another hour or two. He took Turkish baths, mineral baths. He drank vile concoctions of raw egg, charcoal, warm water, and turpentine, and there were dozens of people along Canal Street who had seen him come striding through his front gate, cross the canal bridge, and drink water “copiously”—gallons it seemed—from the old fountain beside the state prison. (“This water I relish much . . .” he would write in his notebook.) “A wet bandage around the neck every night, for years, will prevent colds . . .” he preached to his family. “A full cold bath every day is indispensable

As expected, Nevada’s summer heat was oppressive; temperatures under the desert sun bubbled around the 130-degree mark, which made it even harder for Monroe and almost everyone except [Clark] Gable to put in a full day’s work. Though he had a chauffeured limousine at his disposal, he drove himself back and forth to work in his silver Mercedes-Benz SC. He always arrived punctually at eight-forty-five A.M., bringing along gallon Thermoses of booze-spiked lemonade and iced tea to fortify himself. For the better part of the morning, he would sit around studying that day’s script pages or gabbing with the crew while waiting for the other principals to arrive. Though the delays were driving him mad, he tried not to show it. But one day while his writer-friend John Lee Mahin was visiting from Los Angeles, Gable told him, “It’s not professional, John, it’s stealing. It’s stealing the bank’s money and United Artists’ money. I don’t see how they’re going to get a picture out of this, but I’m stuck with it now, and I’m trying to do the best I can. It’s been hard on me.

Well, I hate it. Boy, do I hate it,” I said. “But it isn’t just that. It’s everything. I hate living in New York and all. Taxicabs, and Madison Avenue buses, with the drivers and all always yelling at you to get out at the rear door, and being introduced to phony guys that call the Lunts angels, and going up and down in elevators when you just want to go outside, and guys fitting your pants all the time at Brooks, and people always—” “Don’t shout, please,” old Sally said. Which was very funny, because I wasn’t even shouting. “Take cars,” I said. I said it in this very quiet voice. “Take most people, they’re crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they’re always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that’s even newer. I don’t even like old cars. I mean they don’t even interest me. I’d rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God’s sake. A horse you can at least—” “I don’t know what you’re even talking about,” old Sally said. “You jump from one—” “You know something?” I said. “You’re probably the only reason I’m in New York right now, or anywhere. If you weren’t around, I’d probably be someplace way the hell off. In the woods or some goddam place. You’re the only reason I’m around, practically.” “You’re sweet,” she said. But you could tell she wanted me to change the damn subject. “You ought to go to a boys’ school sometime. Try it sometime,” I said. “It’s full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques. The guys that are on the basketball team stick together, the Catholics stick together, the goddam intellectuals stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together. Even the guys that belong to the goddam Book-of-the-Month Club stick together. If you try to have a little intelligent—” “Now, listen,” old Sally said. “Lots of boys get more out of school than that.” “I agree! I agree they do, some of them! But that’s all I get out of it. See? That’s my point. That’s exactly my goddam point,” I said. “I don’t get hardly anything out of anything. I’m in bad shape. I’m in lousy shape.” “You certainly are.

On May 31, 1921, the Ford Motor Company turned out Car No. 5,000,000. It is out in my museum along with the gasoline buggy that I began work on thirty years before and which first ran satisfactorily along in the spring of 1893. I was running it when the bobolinks came to Dearborn and they always come on April 2nd. There is all the difference in the world in the appearance of the two vehicles and almost as much difference in construction and materials, but in fundamentals the two are curiously alike—except that the old buggy has on it a few wrinkles that we have not yet quite adopted in our modern car. For that first car or buggy, even though it had but two cylinders, would make twenty miles an hour and run sixty miles on the three gallons of gas the little tank held and is as good to-day as the day it was built. The development in methods of manufacture and in materials has been greater than the development in basic design. The whole design has been refined; the present Ford car, which is the "Model T," has four cylinders and a self starter—it is in every way a more convenient and an easier riding car. It is simpler than the first car. But almost every point in it may be found also in the first car. The changes have been brought about through experience in the making and not through any change in the basic principle—which I take to be an important fact demonstrating that, given a good idea to start with, it is better to concentrate on perfecting it than to hunt around for a new idea.

This Dr. Wilburforce was wonderful! He sounded as if he had had adolescent children. He said that adolescence was a difficult period but entirely normal and his sympathies were with the parents, not the adolescents. He said that there was entirely too much “understanding,” actually excusing of the adolescent, his lack of manners, selfishness, tantrums, and so on. He thought that the most intelligent approach to the problem was to understand that the adolescent, just by the nature of the beast, is going to chafe and rebel and he needs something specific to chafe and rebel against. Lay down strict rules of behavior and enforce them. Rebelling against nothing is very frustrating. Demand that the adolescent go along with the family routine. Do not allow him to keep the household in a continual uproar. …Instead of giving your child too much freedom, too much money, and all the responsibility for his actions, try giving him limited freedom and money, a strict code of behavior, and oceans and gallons and mountains of love. Not the deep-hidden-river I-bore-you-so-I-will-have-to-like-you type of love, but the visible, hug-and-kiss, lavish-compliment, interested-audience kind. Tell your adolescent he is brilliant, handsome, charming, witty, and lovable. Tell him every day. Tell him even when you are taking away the keys of the car and would like to kick him. Assure him and reassure him and re-reassure him. Love is the most important element in human relationships. You can never give a child too much love.

Many people approach Tolstoy with mixed feelings. They love the artist in him and are intensely bored by the preacher; but at the same time it is rather difficult to separate Tolstoy the preacher from Tolstoy the artist—it is the same deep slow voice, the same robust shoulder pushing up a cloud of visions or a load of ideas. What one would like to do, would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under his sandalled feet and then lock him up in a stone house on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper—far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna's white neck. But the thing cannot be done : Tolstoy is homogeneous, is one, and the struggle which, especially in the later years, went on between the man who gloated over the beauty of black earth, white flesh, blue snow, green fields, purple thunderclouds, and the man who maintained that fiction is sinful and art immoral—this struggle was still confined within the same man. Whether painting or preaching, Tolstoy was striving, in spite of all obstacles, to get at the truth. As the author of Anna Karenin, he used one method of discovering truth; in his sermons, he used another; but somehow, no matter how subtle his art was and no matter how dull some of his other attitudes were, truth which he was ponderously groping for or magically finding just around the corner, was always the same truth — this truth was he and this he was an art. What troubles one, is merely that he did not always recognize his own self when confronted with truth. I like the story of his picking up a book one dreary day in his old age, many years after he had stopped writing novels, and starting to read in the middle, and getting interested and very much pleased, and then looking at the title—and seeing: Anna Karenin by Leo Tolstoy. What obsessed Tolstoy, what obscured his genius, what now distresses the good reader, was that, somehow, the process of seeking the Truth seemed more important to him than the easy, vivid, brilliant discovery of the illusion of truth through the medium of his artistic genius. Old Russian Truth was never a comfortable companion; it had a violent temper and a heavy tread. It was not simply truth, not merely everyday pravda but immortal istina—not truth but the inner light of truth. When Tolstoy did happen to find it in himself, in the splendor of his creative imagination, then, almost unconsciously, he was on the right path. What does his tussle with the ruling Greek-Catholic Church matter, what importance do his ethical opinions have, in the light of this or that imaginative passage in any of his novels? Essential truth, istina, is one of the few words in the Russian language that cannot be rhymed. It has no verbal mate, no verbal associations, it stands alone and aloof, with only a vague suggestion of the root "to stand" in the dark brilliancy of its immemorial rock. Most Russian writers have been tremendously interested in Truth's exact whereabouts and essential properties. To Pushkin it was of marble under a noble sun ; Dostoevski, a much inferior artist, saw it as a thing of blood and tears and hysterical and topical politics and sweat; and Chekhov kept a quizzical eye upon it, while seemingly engrossed in the hazy scenery all around. Tolstoy marched straight at it, head bent and fists clenched, and found the place where the cross had once stood, or found—the image of his own self.

office into a sauna. She dropped her purse and keys on the credenza right inside the door and flipped the light switch. Nothing happened. The electricity had already gone out. The only light in the house came from the glowing embers of scrub oak and mesquite logs in the fireplace. She held her hands out to warm them, and the rest of the rush from the drive down the slick, winding roads bottomed out, leaving her tired and sleepy. She rubbed her eyes and vowed she would not cry. Didn’t Grand remember that the day she came home from the gallery showings was special? Sage had never cut down a Christmas tree all by herself. She and Grand always went out into the canyon and hauled a nice big cedar back to the house the day after the showing. Then they carried boxes of ornaments and lights from the bunkhouse and decorated the tree, popped the tops on a couple of beers, and sat in the rocking chairs and watched the lights flicker on and off. She went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, but it was pitch-black inside. She fumbled around and there wasn’t even a beer in there. She finally located a gallon jar of milk and carried it to the cabinet, poured a glass full, and downed it without coming up for air. It took some fancy maneuvering to get the jar back inside the refrigerator, but she managed and flipped the light switch as she was leaving. “Dammit! Bloody dammit!” she said a second time using the British accent from the man who’d paid top dollar for one of her paintings. One good thing about the blizzard was if that crazy cowboy who thought he was buying the Rockin’ C could see this weather, he’d change his mind in a hurry. As soon as she and Grand got done talking, she’d personally send him an email telling him that the deal had fallen through. But he’d have to wait until they got electricity back to even get that much. Sage had lived in the house all of her twenty-six years and

Exceed expectations Jesus said, “Do more than is expected; carry it two miles.” That’s the attitude you need to have: “I’m not doing just what I have to. I’m not doing the minimum amount to keep my job. I’m a person of excellence. I go above and beyond what’s asked of me. I do more than is expected.” This means if you’re supposed to be at work at 8 a.m., you show up ten minutes early. You produce more than you have to. You stay ten minutes late. You don’t start shutting down thirty minutes before closing. You put in a full day. Many people show up to work fifteen minutes late. They get some coffee, wander around the office, and finally sit down to work a half hour late. They’ll waste another half hour making personal phone calls and surfing the Internet. Then they wonder why they aren’t promoted. It’s because God doesn’t reward sloppiness. God rewards excellence. In the Old Testament, Abraham sent his servant to a foreign country to find a wife for his son, Isaac. Abraham told the servant that he would know he’d found the right lady if she offered a drink to both him and his camels. The servant reached the city around sunset. A beautiful young lady named Rebekah came out to the well. The servant said, “I’m so thirsty. Would you mind lowering your bucket and getting me a drink?” She said, “Not only that, let me get some water for your camels as well.” Here’s what’s interesting: After a long day’s walk, a camel can drink thirty gallons of water. This servant had ten camels with him. Think about what Rebekah did. If she had a one-gallon bucket of water, she said, in effect, “Yes I’ll not only do what you asked and give you a drink, but I’ll also dip down in this well three hundred more times and give your ten camels a drink.” Rebekah went way beyond the call of duty. As a result, she was chosen to marry Isaac, who came from the wealthiest family of that time. I doubt that she ever again had to draw three hundred gallons of water.

There is always, for some reason, an element of sadness mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and, on this occasion, at the sight of a happy man I was overcome by an oppressive feeling that was close upon despair. It was particularly oppressive at night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my brother’s bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! ‘What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying... Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in the streets; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one who would cry out, who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see the people going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by night, talking their silly nonsense, getting married, growing old, serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes... Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition... And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It’s a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him—disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree—and all goes well.

I DON'T WANT to talk about me, of course, but it seems as though far too much attention has been lavished on you lately-that your greed and vanities and quest for self-fulfillment have been catered to far too much. You just want and want and want. You believe in yourself excessively. You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups. You don't even take pleasure in looking at nature photographs these days. Oh, they can be just as pretty as always, but don't they make you feel increasingly ... anxious? Filled with more trepidation than peace? So what's the point? You see the picture of the baby condor or the panda munching on a bamboo shoot, and your heart just sinks, doesn't it? A picture of a poor old sea turtle with barnacles on her back, all ancient and exhausted, depositing her five gallons of doomed eggs in the sand hardly fills you with joy, because you realize, quite rightly, that just outside the frame falls the shadow of the condo. What's cropped from the shot of ocean waves crashing on a pristine shore is the plastics plant, and just beyond the dunes lies a parking lot. Hidden from immediate view in the butterfly-bright meadow, in the dusky thicket, in the oak and holly wood, are the surveyors' stakes, for someone wants to build a mall exactly there-some gas stations and supermarkets, some pizza and video shops, a health club, maybe a bulimia treatment center. Those lovely pictures of leopards and herons and wild rivers-well, you just know they're going to be accompanied by a text that will serve only to bring you down. You don't want to think about it! It's all so uncool. And you don't want to feel guilty either. Guilt is uncool. Regret maybe you'll consider. Maybe. Regret is a possibility, but don't push me, you say. Nature photographs have become something of a problem, along with almost everything else. Even though they leave the bad stuff out-maybe because you know they're leaving all the bad stuff out-such pictures are making you increasingly aware that you're a little too late for Nature. Do you feel that? Twenty years too late? Maybe only ten? Not way too late, just a little too late? Well, it appears that you are. And since you are, you've decided you're just not going to attend this particular party.

I put my hand on his forearm, I don't know why I do this, and it's not exactly natural, although it's not unnatural, except that I really want to touch his skin. It's smooth and tan just a little bit and feels like summer, like something familiar and warm and good, like my skin did on the first days aboard 'Fishful Thinking' before it salted and burned and peeled. 'We broke up three years after that.' I sit back in my chair and give a sly smile. Relationships are complex and sometimes you can't really explain them to an outside party. 'I can't believe I just told you that' 'YES! YOU! ARE! LIVING! YOUR! FULL! LIFE!' A third time. I am not imagining it. 'There you are.' This time my heart does skip a beat. I look down at his arm, and we are still touching, and he has made no attempt to retract his arm or retreat. All my surroundings, the red formica table top, the pink yogurt, the blue sky, the green vegetables in the market, they all come alive in vibrant technicolor as the sun peers from behind a cloud. I am living my full life. 'Honesty in all things,' Byron adds, lifting his cup of yogurt for a toast of sorts. I pull my hand away from him and the instant my hand is back by his side, I miss the warmth of his arm, the warmth of him. Honesty in all things. I should put my hand back, that's where it wants to be, that's Lily's lesson to me. Be present in the moment, give spontaneous affection. I'm suddenly aware I haven't spoken in a bit. 'Did you know that an octopus has three hearts?' As soon as it comes out of my mouth, I realize I sound like that kid from 'Jerry McGuire.' 'Did you know the human head weighs eight pounds?' I hope my question comes off almost a fraction as endearing. 'No,' Byron says with a glint in his eye that reads as curiosity, at least I hope that it does, but even if it doesn't I'm too into the inertia of the trivia to stop it. 'It's true, one heart called the systemic heart that functions much like the left side of the human heart, distributing blood throughout the heart, then two smaller branchial heart with gills that act like the right side of our hearts to pump the blood back.' 'What made you think of that?' I smile. It may be entirely inappropriate first date conversation, but at least it doesn't bore me in the telling. I look up at the winsome August sky, marred only by the contrails of a passing jet, and a vaguely dachshund shaped cloud above the horizon. I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in love at first site. I don't believe in angels. I don't believe in heaven and that our loved ones are looking down on us, but the sun is so warm and the breeze is so cool and the company is so perfect and the whole afternoon so intoxicating, ti's hard not to hear Lily's voice dancing in the gentle wind, 'one! month! is Long! Enough TO! BE! SAD!' ... 'I recently lost someone close to me....I don't know, I feel her here today with us, you, me, her, three hearts, like an octopus,' I shrug. If I were him, I would run. What a ridiculously creepy thing to say. I would run and I would not stop until I was home in my bed with a gallon of ice cream deleting my profile from every dating site I belonged to. Maybe it's because it's not rehearsed, maybe it's because it's as weird a thing to say as it is genuine, maybe it's because this is finally the man for me. Byron stands and offers me his hand, 'Let's take a walk and you can tell me about her.' The gentle untying of a shoe lace. It takes me a minute to decide if I can do this, and I decide that I can, and I throw our yogurt dishes away, and I put my hand in his, and it's soft and warm, and instead of awkward fumbling, our hands clasp together like magnets and metal, like we've been hand-in-hand all along, and we are touching again. ...

If your favorite politician got ran over by a bus, I’d express my condolences by telling you I know how you feel. Why just the other day I ran over a rat, and I felt so guilty about it that I bought a whole gallon of ice cream, rather than just the normal two scoops I usually get on the cone.

Two days later, on August 17, Smith’s Cove was abuzz with activity. The bulldozer was scraping a deep pathway from the beach, past the beach shack, heading up toward the Cave-In Pit, and the pump was pulling water from the bottom of the freshly-dug shaft located partly up the hill. Bobby was working near the beach shack with Andrew Demont, Leonard Kaizer, and Cyril Hiltz--young, local men who were helping Bobby to clear brush and burn it in an empty 50-gallon drum that sat on the shoreline. Both Dunfield and Karl Graeser were also on site. The air was electric with optimism and urgency. My father needed to take the boat over to mainland so he could visit his bank in Chester before closing time--papers had to be signed before Dunfield’s funds could be released. Dad was running late, but before he went up to the cabin to change his clothes for the trip ashore, he decided to take one last look in the new shaft to see how well the pump was getting rid of water. This newest shaft was behind the beach shack at a point where the land had started to rise to go up to the clearing. The shaft was large and deep (10 feet by 30 feet by 27 feet deep) and had three or four feet of water in the bottom. Dad peered down into the shaft, and without a sound, he tumbled in. Bobby saw it happen, dropped the bushes he had in his hands, and raced over to help. Others did, too. Bobby started down the ladder, but suddenly fell into the shaft. Karl Graeser was right behind Bobby, and began to climb down, but he lost consciousness and slid into the shaft, too. Cyril Hiltz followed Karl, and Cyril’s cousin, Andrew Demont, was close behind. Leonard Kaizer was the last man to rush in to help the others. One-by-one, as each man tried to climb down the ladder into the shaft, he lost consciousness and fell in. Ed White, a fireman from Buffalo, was visiting the island that day with a group of friends. He heard the cries for help and rushed to the shaft. His wife pleaded with him not to go down, but White tied a handkerchief around his face and had someone lower him into the shaft. He was able to get a rope around Leonard Kaizer, so that those at the top could pull him out. Then White went after Andrew Demont, who was unconscious with his arms locked around a steel pipe, which supported him above water. Even in his unconscious state, Demont lashed out and punched White. But the fireman prevailed and got the rope harness around him so that he could be pulled from the shaft. Ed White was a hero. He saved Leonard Kaizer and Andy Demont that day. But he could do no more. By then, he, too, was feeling the effects of the invisible gas. On that fateful day, August 17, 1965, Cyril Hiltz, Karl Graeser, Bob Restall, Sr., and Bob Restall, Jr. all lost their lives. The coroner’s ruling was “death by drowning.

Simply put, the way kettlebells work your muscles is the same as carrying a heavy bag, a gallon of milk, a toddler, or carrying some grocery bags—and that’s why the body easily adjusts to it.

Historians estimate more dead soldiers at Cannae than in any other day of battle in Western History, and that 30,000 gallons of blood were spilled in that one day.41

haloumi Made in Cypress, Haloumi is a firm, pickled (brined) cheese. It is a good hot-weather cheese: The salt inhibits the growth of mold and unwanted bacteria, which usually thrive in temperate conditions. 2 gallons whole milk 1 packet direct-set mesophilic starter or 4 ounces prepared mesophilic starter ½ teaspoon liquid rennet (or ½ rennet tablet) diluted in ¼ cup cool, unchlorinated water ¼ cup plus 2 pounds cheese salt, for brine 1 gallon cold water, for brine 1. Heat the milk to 86°F. Add the starter and mix well. 2. Add the diluted rennet and stir gently with an up-and-down motion for 1 minute. Cover and allow to set at 86°F for 30–45, minutes or until the curd gives a clean break. 3. Cut the curd into ½-inch cubes. 4. Increase the temperature two degrees every 5 minutes, until the curds reach 104°F (this will take about 45 minutes), stirring gently to keep the curds from matting. Maintain the curds at 104°F for 20 minutes, stirring gently every few minutes. 5. Ladle the curds into a cheesecloth-lined colander. Drain the whey into a pot and reserve. 6. Pack the curds into a cheesecloth-lined mold and press at 30 pounds of pressure for 1 hour. 7. Remove the cheese from the mold and gently peel away the cheesecloth. Turn over the cheese, re-dress it, and press at 50 pounds of pressure for 30 minutes. 8. Remove the cheese from the mold and cut into 3-inch-square blocks. 9. Bring the reserved whey to 176 to 194°F. Place the curd blocks in the whey and soak for 1 hour, at which time the cheese will have a texture similar to that of cooked chicken breast and will rise to the surface. 10. Strain the curds into a colander and let cool for 20 minutes. 11. Sprinkle the curds with ¼ cup of the salt and let cool for 2–4 hours 12. Combine the remaining 2 pounds of salt and the cold water to make a saturated brine solution. Soak the cheese in the brine for up to 60 days. The flavor increases with age, but the cheese may be eaten fresh at any time during the 60-day period. YIELD: 2 pounds

One day, someone dared Sunflower to drink one gallon of mixture wine, liquor, beer, and Mickey Finn in under 1 minute. Sunflower did it and she collapsed. One hour later, she didn't know what she was doing. She grabbed Peashooter, and started to make out. They had a baby!

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Once upon a time our politicians did not tend to apologize for our country’s prior actions! Here’s a refresher on how some of our former patriots handled negative comments about our great country. These are quite good JFK’S Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was in France in the early 60’s when De Gaulle decided to pull out of NATO. De Gaulle said he wanted all US military out of France as soon as possible. Rusk’s response: “Does that include those who are buried here?” De Gaulle did not respond. You could have heard a pin drop. When in England, at a fairly large conference, Colin Powell was asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury if our plans for Iraq were just an example of ‘empire building’ by George Bush. He answered by saying, “Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.” You could have heard a pin drop. There was a conference in France where a number of international engineers were taking part, including French and American. During a break, one of the French engineers came back into the room saying, “Have you heard the latest dumb stunt Bush has done? He has sent an aircraft carrier to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims. What does he intend to do, bomb them?” A Boeing engineer stood up and replied quietly: “Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can treat several hundred people; they are nuclear powered and can supply emergency electrical power to shore facilities; they have three cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a day, they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water from sea water each day, and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck. We have eleven such ships; how many does France have?” You could have heard a pin drop. A U.S. Navy Admiral was attending a naval conference that included Admirals from the U.S., English, Canadian, Germany and France. At morning tea the Frenchman complained that the conference should be conducted in French since it was being held in Paris. The German replied that, so far as he could see, the reason that it was being held in English was as a mark of respect to the other attendees, since their troops had shed so much blood so that the Frenchman wouldn’t be speaking German.

When he got out of the car to do his business, my mother stared straight ahead. But I turned to watch. There was always something wild and charismatically uncaring about my father’s demeanor in these moments, some mysterious abandonment of his frowning and cogitative state that already meant a lot to me, even though at that age I understood almost nothing about him. Paulie had long ago stopped whispering 'perv' to me for observing him as he relieved himself. She of course, kept her head n her novels. I remember that it was cold that day, and windy but that the sky had been cut from the crackling blue gem field of a late midwestern April. Outside the car, as other families sped past my father stepped to the leeward side of the open door then leaning back from the waist and at the same time forward the ankles. His penis poked out from his zipper for this part, Bernie always stood up at the rear window. My father paused fo a moment rocking slightly while a few indistinct words played on his lips. Then just before his stream stared he tiled back his head as if there were a code written in the sky that allowed the event to begin. This was the moment I waited for, the movement seemed to be a marker of his own private devotion as though despite his unshakable atheism and despite his sour, entirely analytic approach to every affair of life, he nonetheless felt the need to acknowledge the heavens in the regard to this particular function of the body. I don't know perhaps I sensed that he simply enjoyed it in a deep way that I did. It was possible I already recognized that the eye narrowing depth of his physical delight in that moment was relative to that paucity of other delights in his life. But in any case the prayerful uplifting of his cranium always seemed to democratize him for me, to make him for a few minutes at least, a regular man. Bernie let out a bark. ‘’Is he done?’’ asked my mother. I opened my window. ‘’Almost.’’ In fact he was still in the midst. My father peed like a horse. His urine lowed in one great sweeping dream that started suddenly and stopped just as suddenly, a single, winking arc of shimmering clarity that endured for a prodigious interval and then disappeared in an instant, as though the outflow were a solid object—and arch of glittering ice or a thick band of silver—and not (as it actually approximated) a parabolic, dynamically averaged graph of the interesting functions of gravity, air resistance, and initial velocity on a non-viscous fluid, produced and exhibited by a man who’d just consumed more than a gallon of midwestern beer. The flow was as clear as water. When it struck the edge of the gravel shoulder, the sound was like a bed-sheet being ripped. Beneath this high reverberation, he let out a protracted appreciative whistle that culminated in a tunneled gasp, his lips flapping at the close like a trumpeters. In the tiny topsoil, a gap appeared, a wisp entirely unashamed. Bernie bumped about in the cargo bay. My father moved up close to peer through the windshield, zipping his trousers and smiling through the glass at my mother. I realized that the yellow that should have been in his urine was unmistakable now in his eyes. ‘’Thank goodness,’’ my mother said when the car door closed again. ‘’I was getting a little bored in here.

To avoid dehydration, the Institute of Medicine reported in 2004 that women should consume about 91 ounces of water—or three-quarters of a gallon—per day, and men should consume about 125 ounces per day (a gallon is 128 ounces).90

One day, someone dared Sunflower to drink one gallon of mixture wine, liquor, beer, and Mickey Finn in under 1 minute.

The Moffat Tunnel is a cathedral to engineering. Its simplicity occludes its sophistication, with the creation of nothing from something—the deliberate absence of rock amid incalculable weight. The finalized engineering marvel has a ventilation system that performs a complete air exchange within the tunnel in 18 minutes. The seemingly endless stone archway has intricately designed and perfectly positioned “umbrellas” to disperse alpine lake seepage to either side of the tracks. During construction, on February 15, 1925, tunneling progress stalled 1,100 feet directly under Crater Lake as 1,800 gallons per minute of water began flowing into the tunnel. At the suggestion of electrician K.S. Weston, crews ventured to the lake, cut through three feet of ice, and poured in 10 pounds of chloride of lime. Shortly thereafter, the presence of lime was detected inside of the tunnel. In an attempt to close the seam, a stick of dynamite was tossed into the lake, and the flow rate dropped drastically to 150 gallons per minute and then slowed to a trickle. Multiple times per day, the visceral vibration of mechanical thunder reverberates through the bowels of the earth.

I’d get up early in the morning and milk the cows, Mother would prepare and bottle the milk, and I’d deliver it after football practice in the afternoons. We had ten or twelve customers, who paid ten cents a gallon. Best of all, Mother would skim the cream and make ice cream, and it’s a wonder I wasn’t known as Fat Sam Walton in those days from all the ice cream I ate.

We do not see fire; we rarely see coal or oil. We’re frequent flyers but we have no idea about the size of the bonfire that could be ignited with 20 tons of jet fuel. We buy our airline tickets online but we never have to check in the oil barrels that will carry us out into the world. Take the time I went to a two-day poetry festival in Lithuania, a journey of around 1,750 miles, the same distance as Chicago to Los Angeles. A barrel of oil holds about 42 gallons, so a single airline passenger burns through about three-quarters of a barrel on such a flight: up to one gallon every 60 miles.

First Officer William Warms had given the order. It is almost certain there would have been no fire drill if Captain Robert Wilmott had been in full command. Warms’s order directly contradicted a policy the master of the Morro Castle first instituted on June 16, 1934. On that day—in violation of the seaworthy certificate issued by the government’s Bureau of Navigation and Steamboat Inspection, and at the risk of endangering the lives of everybody on board—Captain Wilmott had banned all further fire drills. His order could lay him open to prosecution, imprisonment, and the certain loss of his master’s license. Confronted by the classic dilemma of the company man, Wilmott had acted in what he believed to be the Ward Line’s best interests. The basis for his decision was simple. In May 1934, during a fire drill, a woman passenger had fallen on a deck wet down by a leaking joint connection between a fire hose and its hydrant. She fractured an ankle and hired a good lawyer, and the Ward Line settled out of court for twenty-five thousand dollars. Captain Wilmott, after a visit to the shipping line office, ordered the Morro Castledeck fire hydrants capped and sealed; 2100 feet of fire hose was locked away, along with nozzles, outlets, and wrenches for each length of hose. Whether the captain received positive instructions from an executive of the Ward Line, or whether he acted independently, is not known, nor is it important. What is known is that as a result of Wilmott’s order, the pride of the American merchant marine, one of the fastest and most luxurious liners afloat, became from that moment on, a floating fire hazard in all but its cargo holds. If a fire started in any of the passenger areas, the only pieces of equipment readily available to fight it were seventy-three half-gallon portable fire extinguishers and twenty-one carbon tetrachloride extinguishers.

Then, in a blink of the eye, we invented the modern postindustrial world. Suddenly some of us can take it easy 24/7 in ways unimaginable to earlier generations. Instead of walking, carrying, digging, running, and throwing, we sit for most of the day in ergonomically designed chairs, stare at screens, and press buttons. The only catch is we still inherited our active ancestors’ thrifty genes that rely on physical activity to grow, maintain, and repair our bodies. Incessant sitting combined with modern diets and other novelties thus contributes to evolutionary mismatches, defined as conditions that are more common and severe today than in the past because our bodies are poorly adapted to novel environmental conditions.3 The twenty-first-century world, of course, is not without extraordinary benefits. Today, nearly seven billion of us live longer and healthier lives than most of our Stone Age forebears ever did, many of us enjoying comforts beyond the imaginations of pharaohs and emperors of yore. But just as we never evolved to cope with jet lag or guzzle gallons of soda, we never evolved to be persistently physically inactive.

Complacency rewrites that script entirely. The Allure of Complacency Complacency is finding comfort in mediocrity, in accepting things as they are, clinging to the status quo. It’s behind our tendency to check out, to zone out, to numb. If our highest aim in life is simply not rocking the boat, then why not eat the whole pizza, drink the whole bottle of wine, finish off the half-gallon tub of ice cream, play Candy Crush for three hours straight, or stay in bed all day? The questions driving our thought patterns are no longer How will God use

Paulson surveyed the market and saw one large competitor. There was a pipeline company called Williams Brothers, which shipped about a hundred thousand barrels of gasoline into the Minnesota area each day. Paulson knew that it cost about 6 cents per gallon to ship the gas from the Gulf Coast, where most American refineries were located. This meant that Koch had a 6-cent advantage over Williams Brothers that it could exploit. “I said, ‘We can expand. And we can dry up Williams Brothers,’ ” Paulson recalled. The strategy worked.

The use of gentleness and friendliness is demonstrated day after day by people who have learned that a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.

LATER, ONCE THEY HAD MARRIED, DORA FELT ALMOST GUILTY for the speed with which she had captured Ogden. She had made some rapid conquests in her day, but none so rapid or so complete as Ogden. Sitting awkward and frightened in her parlor that morning, drinking what turned out to be almost a gallon bucket’s worth of tea, Ogden became hers. Perhaps it hadn’t even taken that long. Perhaps he had become hers when she looked at him beneath the dripping umbrella on his wagon seat. Making him hers was so easy that it felt a little unseemly; but she had no impulse to spare him or even to slow her conquest. Ogden was awkward, even wooden, but at least he was all of a piece, and simple in a way that few men were. Blue was the love of her life, but Blue was too complicated; once, the complications had excited her, engaged her; now they just wearied her

I continuously see signs related to my dream home on a daily basis. My favorite book growing up as a child was the Secret Garden. I always wished I had a home that was filled with all the beautiful plants described in that book. And guess what? My new house is engulfed in pink, red, orange, white, and yellow roses. I also have fuchsia camellias everywhere. Birds of paradise line my backyard along with an entire wall covered in green vine. There are also palm trees. I never asked for a pool, but it also has this nine-foot-deep, blue, 40,000-gallon pool, which is a bonus that this house has that the black kitchen house didn’t. But the kicker is that one day I was walking around the landscape and noticed that I have a lemon tree in my backyard. This home is everything that I asked for and more.

Watch my shooting iron, will you.’ Jack turned and saw Reg rising to his feet, his hands holding onto the side of the vehicle as he began to swing his leg over the side. ‘No you bloody don’t,’ Jack shouted, before grabbing Reg’s foot and hauling him back into the vehicle. ‘Have a heart,’ Reg said, his face staring longingly at two women who were blowing kisses towards him. ‘No one leaves this vehicle,’ Jack shouted, as he stood swaying in the back of the half-track. ‘This butter’s bloody lovely,’ Ham mumbled, his lips smeared with grease. ‘You ain’t supposed to eat it,’ Jack said, as he shook his head in despair. ‘What are you meant to do with it, then?’ Ham asked, his face puzzled as he stared at the butter with suspicion. ‘You’re supposed to...’ Jack’s attention was distracted by Dan who was gulping greedily from a stone flagon, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he drank. ‘Give that here,’ Jack yelled, before snatching the bottle from the young soldier’s hands. ‘A drink won’t hurt him,’ Reg said, his tongue licking his lips as he stared at the bottle. ‘A gallon of it will,’ Jack replied, as he upended the bottle of raw cider over the side of the vehicle. ‘Here, what do yow think yow are doing?’ Jack looked down and saw Fred wiping cider from his chest, his face furious, before a Frenchman grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him in for an embrace, his lips smacking as they connected with his cheeks. ‘Get off yow foreign git,’ Fred shouted, before throwing the man into the crowd.

Szechuan Ginger Beer The schizoid effect of ginger on the palate — at once hot and cooling — is reinforced in this recipe with an added kick of aromatic Szechuan peppercorns. This pepper, named after its native Szechuan province of China, is the dried berry of prickly ash (Zanthoxylum spp.) and is not related to the vine peppercorn (Piper nigrum) commonly served at tables. It has a fruity, floral fragrance that is a wonderful complement to the pungency of ginger. This recipe does not begin with a flavor base. Follow the complete brewing instructions to make one gallon of Szechuan Ginger Beer. TO BREW 1 GALLON 31⁄2 quarts water 4 ounces fresh gingerroot, coarsely grated 1 tablespoon Szechuan peppercorns 1 pound sugar 2 tablespoons unflavored rice vinegar 1⁄8 teaspoon champagne yeast (Saccharomyces bayanus) Combine the water, ginger, and peppercorns in a large pot. Bring to a simmer over medium heat. Let simmer for 5 minutes, then add the sugar and vinegar, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Remove from the heat and let cool until the mixture reaches warm room temperature, from 75 to 80°F. Strain out the ginger and peppercorns. Add the yeast, stirring until it is completely dissolved. Pour the mixture into sanitized plastic bottles (see here) using a sanitized kitchen funnel, leaving 11⁄4 inches of air space at the top of each bottle. Seal the bottles. Store for 3 to 5 days at room temperature. When the bottles feel rock hard, the soda is fully carbonated. Refrigerate for at least 1 week before serving; drink within 3 weeks to avoid overcarbonation.

grams kosher salt 2 teaspoons/14 grams pink salt 1⁄4 cup/50 grams maple sugar or packed dark brown sugar 1⁄4 cup/60 milliliters maple syrup One 5-pound/2.25-kilogram slab pork belly, skin on 1. Combine the salt, pink salt, and sugar in a bowl and mix so that the ingredients are evenly distributed. Add the syrup and stir to combine. 2. Rub the cure mixture over the entire surface of the belly. Place skin side down in a 2-gallon Ziploc bag or a nonreactive container just slightly bigger than the meat. (The pork will release water into the salt mixture, creating a brine; it’s important that the meat keep in contact with this liquid throughout the curing process.) 3. Refrigerate, turning the belly and redistributing the cure every other day, for 7 days, until the meat is firm to the touch. 4. Remove the belly from the cure, rinse it thoroughly, and pat it dry. Place it on a rack set over a baking sheet tray and dry in the refrigerator, uncovered, for 12 to 24 hours. 5. Hot-smoke the pork belly (see page 77) to an internal temperature of 150 degrees F./65 degrees C., about 3 hours. Let cool slightly, and when the belly is cool enough to handle but still warm, cut the skin off by sliding a sharp knife between the fat and the skin, leaving as much fat on the bacon as possible. (Discard the skin or cut it into pieces and save to add to soups, stews or beans, as you would a smoked ham hock.) 6. Let the bacon cool, then wrap in plastic and refrigerate or freeze it until ready to use. Yield: 4 pounds/2 kilograms smoked slab bacon A slab of pork belly should have equal proportions of meat and fat. This piece has been squared off and is ready for the cure. To cure bacon, the salts, sugars, and spices are mixed and spread all over the meat. The bacon can be cured in a pan or in a 2-gallon Ziploc bag. SMOKED HAM HOCKS

Recipe for Raspberry Vinegar A refreshing summer drink with a tingle like a carbonated punch. To make your own Raspberry Vinegar Concentrate: 6 cups fresh or frozen raspberries 1 cup white vinegar Pour vinegar over the berries, cover, and let brine for 2-3 days at room temperature. Strain out juice and discard the pulp. Measure the juice and add an equal amount sugar or honey, heating to dissolve. This will make about 1 quart concentrate. Pour a small amount in the bottom of a glass and fill with water. You’ll soon see what strength you enjoy! The quart of concentrate will make about 8 gallons of beverage but stores perfectly fine in a covered jar in the fridge for a long time. If you’re making a mega-batch (I often do 4-5 gallons of frozen berries at a time), you can preserve the concentrate by hot water bath canning quart jars for 15 minutes. Enjoy a taste of summer year ’round!

It’s been a long and trying day... but I’m still running with half a gallon of rage in my tank.

Historians Will and Ariel Durant have written in The Story of Civilization: The Reformation that at the time of Luther, “a gallon of beer per day was the usual allowance per person, even for nuns.” This may help to explain why beer figures so prominently in the life and writings of the great reformer. He was German, after all, and he lived at a time when beer was the European drink of choice. Moreover, having been freed from what he considered to be a narrow and life-draining religious legalism, he stepped into the world ready to enjoy its pleasures to the glory of God. For Luther, beer flowed best in a vibrant Christian life.

I’ve gone maybe ten steps when I realize that I should have asked Gary for a gallon jug of water before I left. Between what I sweated out into Anders’ sheets and what’s coming out of me now, I’m gonna wind up shriveled up like a slug in salt before I make it home.

The sun was warm on my face. I knew we were safe at last. The vast bottle of Champagne, that had sat like some Buddha at base camp for three months, was ceremoniously produced. It took four of us almost ten minutes, hacking away with ice axes, finally to get the cork out. The party had begun. I felt like drinking a gallon of this beautiful bubbly stuff, but my body just couldn’t. Sipping slowly was all I could manage without sneezing, and even like that I was soon feeling decidedly wobbly. I closed my eyes and flopped against the rock wall of the mess tent--a huge smile plastered across my face. Later on in my tent, I put on the fresh socks and thermal underwear that I had kept especially for this moment. First change in ninety days. Heaven. I sealed the underpants in a plastic Ziploc bag and reminded myself to be very cautious when it came to opening the bag again back home.

Going out on a date was very cheap in those days [1962]. I borrowed my father's station wagon, put in a gallon of gas for 29 cents, went to the movies for 50 cents a ticket, bought a pack of cigarettes for 25 cents, and had a McDonald's hamburger for 19 cents apiece. It was very doable.

Twelve barrels of water are required to make one barrel of bitumen. This produces 400 million gallons a day of toxic wastewater at the tar sand mines.

For that voyage, Frobisher packed one pound of biscuit and one gallon of beer per man per day, one pound of salt meat (beef or pork) per man for each “flesh” day, as well as one dried codfish for every four men on fast days. Each man was supplied with a quarter pound of butter daily, along with a half pound of cheese, as well as four bushels of peas (pease) per man during the voyage.

pollution and public health. In 1908 Gotham’s 120,000 horses deposited 60,000 gallons of urine and 2.5 million pounds of manure on the city streets every day.

She decided to make salmon baked in a touch of olive oil, topped with pine nuts, and served over spinach flash-fried in the salmon-and-olive-oil drippings. She added brown rice that she had slow-boiled with the herb hawthorn. Just as she finished, Cordelia arrived with a woman she had found standing in the sidewalk out front. "My husband has high blood pressure," she explained, negotiating the stairs down into Portia's apartment with care. "He's never happy with anything I make for supper, so I should tell you that you probably don't have anything that will work for me." Cordelia took a look at the meal, raised an eyebrow at Portia, and then turned to the woman. "This is the perfect meal for your husband's high blood pressure. Fish oil, nuts, hawthorn, whole grains." Next, a pumpkin pie went to a woman who couldn't sleep. "Pie?" she asked in a doubtful tone. "Pumpkin," Portia clarified, "is good for insomnia." An apricot crumble spiced with cloves and topped with oats and brown sugar went to a woman drawn with stress. Then a man walked through the door, shoulders slumped. Cordelia and Olivia eyed him for a second. "I know the feeling," Olivia said, and fetched him a half gallon of the celery and cabbage soup Portia had found herself preparing earlier. The man peered into the container, grew a tad queasier, and said, "No thanks." "Do you or don't you have a hangover?" Olivia demanded, then drew a breath. "Really," she added more kindly. "Eat this and you'll feel better." He came back the next day for more. "Cabbage is no cure for drinking too much," Cordelia told him. He just shrugged and slapped down his money for two quarts of soup instead of one.

Every day, in the sun, at breakfast time I sit on my balcony with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.

Yes, I believed without a doubt that if I had a thousand gallons of blood in my body, I would willingly spill it all for the sake of the Lord Jesus!

Throughout the Day Trace Mineral Drops ~1/2 tsp (mix w/ gallon of water to sip on throughout the day) - Phases 1-3 With Breakfast Magnesium Malate ~200mg - Phases 1-3 Cod Liver Oil ~900mcg / 3,000 IU - Phases 1-3 Bee Pollen ~½ - 1 tsp - beginning with Phase 2 Beef Liver ~1,500mg - beginning with Phase 1 Boron ~1 - 3mg - Phase 3 Iodine ~ 1 serving - Phase 3 Mid-Morning (away from food) Adrenal Cocktail 1 serving (mix in OJ or water) - Phases 1-3 Whole Food Vitamin C-complex ~400mg - Phases 1-3 With Lunch Magnesium Malate ~200mg - Phases 1-3 Whole Food Vitamin E Complex ~ 1 serving - Phases 1-3 Beef Liver ~1,500mg - beginning with Phase 1 Mid-Afternoon (away from food) Adrenal Cocktail 1 serving (mix in OJ or water) - Phases 1-3 Whole Food Vitamin C-complex ~400mg - Phases 1-3 With Dinner Taurine ~500mg, - Phase 3 Evening Magnesium Glycinate ~200mg - Phases 1-3 Topical Magnesium 1 application - Phases 1-3 Right before bed, or first thing in the morning (away from food) Rice Bran ~1 - 2 tsp - beginning with Phase 2 Diatomaceous Earth ~½ - 1 tsp - Phase 3.

Whether it’s running a mile, reading a chapter, writing a paragraph, eating breakfast, or drinking a gallon of water: find something that will help you improve yourself and do it every day for a year. That’s how you build a work ethic.

Joining Jesus on his redemptive mission is what I mean by the term “missional living.” “Missional living” is simply living each day as if it were a mission trip. The difference, of course, is that instead of being on a mission trip to a foreign land, we are on a mission trip to our own community. We are Neighborhood Missionaries. The word “missional” is simply a descriptive word indicating that each part of our daily lives can now be seen as part of Jesus’ redemptive mission in our community. Going out to get the mail, going to the store for a gallon of milk or going to the school to pick up our kids now has mission potential.

Yellow onions (2) Dairy Buttermilk, low fat (1 small carton) Cheese, Cheddar, shredded (1 cup) Cheese, feta (¼ cup) Cheese, mozzarella, shredded (½ cup) Cheese, mozzarella, fresh (½ pound) Cheese, Parmesan, grated (¾ cup) Cheese, white Cheddar, shredded (¾ cup) Eggs, large (26) Milk, skim (½ gallon) Tofu, extra firm, 1 (14-ounce) package Yogurt, nonfat fruit-flavored Greek (2 [6-ounce] containers) Yogurt, nonfat plain Greek (1 [32-ounce] tub) Meat, Poultry, and Fish Chicken breast (1½ pounds) Fish, white (cod, haddock, or tilapia) (2 pounds) Pork tenderloin (2 pounds) Tuna, albacore (1 [6.4-ounce] pouch) Turkey, ground (3 pounds) Canned, Bottled, and Dried Goods Beans, black, no salt added (3 [15-ounce] cans) Chickpeas, no salt added (2 [15-ounce] cans) Crackers, whole grain (1 small box) Juice, apple (1 small bottle) Marinara (1 [24-ounce] jar) Olives, kalamata (1 small jar) Purée, sweet potato or pumpkin (1 [15-ounce] can) Red peppers, roasted (1 small jar) Salad dressing (1 small bottle) Soy sauce, low sodium (1 small bottle) Tomatoes, diced, no salt added, fire roasted (1 [10-ounce] can) Frozen Peaches (1½ cups) Vegetables, cooked, any variety (2 bags) Grains

Fix a leak A leaking tap can waste up to 26 litres of water per day, and a running toilet can consume a whopping 200 gallons per day. Time to call the plumber!

The electricity you use at home each day requires 250 gallons of water per person, not just more than the actual water you use at home in the kitchen and the bathroom but two-and-a-half times more.

The typical American flushes the toilet five times a day at home, and uses 18.5 gallons (70 liters) of water, just for that.5

We are concerned about the environment, but we avoid thinking very much about the gallons of clean hot water we use every day and the toxins in our cleansers that we pour down the drain. Living up to our hygienic standards takes huge amounts of energy, but cleanliness is such a sacred cow that to be told “cut down on your washing” would be even more repugnant than being urged to restrict our driving.

Back in the good old days, before gasoline topped six dollars a gallon, at least they had the decency to dump their dead out in the desert