The more passionate among fans of The Old Farmer’s Almanac can sometimes be seen posing in front of the Almanac.com Webcam to create a souvenir of their drive through the Almanac’s home here in Dublin, New Hampshire. This morning I happened to be the first person in at the office – a victim of my body clock still being on Atlantic Daylight Time – and so I had my pick of parking spots and was able to park right in the middle of the camera’s field of view.

And so, here’s me, with my rental Toyota Yaris, at 6:59 a.m. this morning:

More than 12 hours later, after supper with colleagues, I popped back into the office to attend to some fiddly bits of advertising code, and so the camera captured me, again in an emptied parking lot, just pulling in:

I had the lucky chance to be able to share coffee with an insightful group of people last week, most of them dietitians, to talk about school food.

At one point in our conversation I admitted that I didn’t know what protein is.

Other than having a vague sense that I need protein to survive, and that I can get it by eating things like meat – he takes a moment to Google “sources of protein” – eggs, tofu, nuts, and beans, I had no idea why I might need protein to survive. Nor what eating more, or less, or better, or worse sources of protein would do to me.

Fortunately my dietitian friends greeted my admission of ignorance kindly; indeed one of them suggested that perhaps knowing about the ins and outs of protein might be a lot less important than simply understanding what eating “whole foods” is about.

But, regardless of their kindnesses, I decided I needed to learn about protein.

Fortunately I had, on my recent trip to London, come across the book Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ in the London Review Book Shop and purchased a copy. While the book isn’t about protein specifically – it has far more to say about the mechanics of poop – it does helpfully provide a well-worded short course on the fundamentals of food. And it has this to say about protein:

Having examined carbohydrates and fats, there is just one more nutritional building block to consider. It is probably the least familiar: amino acids. It seems strange to imagine, but both tofu, with its neutral-to-nutty taste, and salty, savory meat are made up of lots of tiny acids. As with carbohydrates, these tiny building blocks are linked in chains. This is what gives them their different taste and a different name: proteins.

Digestive enzymes break down these chains in the small intestine and then the gut wall nabs the valuable components. There are twenty of these amino acids and an infinite variety of ways they can be linked to form proteins. We humans use them to build many substances, not the least of which is our DNA, the genetic material contained in every new cell we produce every day. The same is true of other living things, both plants and animals. That explains why everything that nature produces that we can eat contains proteins.

That’s exactly the concise explanation of what protein is that I needed: it allowed me to take the disconnected bits of protein trivia I’ve been floating through all my life and to start to bind them together.

It also makes eating protein sound pretty important to success in life.

This is only one of the wonderful things I learned from the book Gut. Beyond the aforementioned poop mechanics, I learned about fats and carbohydrates, about the immune system, about saliva, about what the appendix does. And I’m only halfway through the book. It’s entertainingly written, well illustrated, and, as with the treatise on protein, provides just the right amount of information to allow one to start making sense of how food and body work together to support life.

As the story of protein continues in the book, it gets even more interesting:

Plants construct different proteins than animals, and they often use so little of a given amino acid that the proteins they produce as known as incomplete. When our body tries to use these to make the amino acids it needs, it can continue to build the chain only until one of the amino acids runs out. Half-finished proteins are then simply broken down again, and we excrete the tiny acids in our urine or recycle them in our body.

After reading that paragraph I went from simple connecting-the-dots to a sudden and profound shift in my world view:

When we eat plants and animals we are simply taking the stuff they used to make themselves, and using it to make ourselves.

That may be self-evident to you, but this revelation has just completely rocked my world.

I’d simply never thought of plants and animals this way, and never connected the notions of eating, plants & animals, and protein all together in a systematic way.

Amino acid swapping. That’s what it’s all about. That is amazing.

I’m so glad I admitted I didn’t know what protein was, and that I set out to correct that.

I landed in Boston 3 hours ago and it’s been pouring rain since.

Things died down a little as I stopped for supper at Mi Jalisco in Milford, but as I emerge, 30 minutes later, it’s raining as hard as I’ve ever seen it. Here’s a taste.

We visited the new Princess Auto store in Charlottetown for the first time tonight (it opened yesterday).

We had little idea what to expect. And even after visiting the store I can’t tell you exactly what business they’re in.

But I did buy a stethoscope for $13.

Why?

Because at the vet on Tuesday when Dr. Jameson was checking Ethan’s heart I distinctly remember thinking “it would be so great if civilians were allowed to have stethoscopes.”

And apparently we are.

It turns out that a stethoscope is essentially a tube with a tiny snare drum at the end. I had no idea (I’m not sure what I thought a stethoscope was, but it wasn’t that).

For the benefit of future residents of 100 Prince Street, reading this on your holoreaders, here’s a photo of the replacement tree that was planted the City of Charlottetown on Monday, May 30, 2016 in front of the house.

I hope you are enjoying its shade.

Granite Island: A Portrait of Corsica is the subject of the next The Happy Reader issue so I got myself a copy.

And, now that the ink is dry, I have a bookmark.

I’m not sure how Rukavina became Rukàvinà, but, setting that aside, my colleagues at the Internationale Gutenberg-Gesellschaft in Mainz know how to give good envelope.

Spending time in Berlin with my friend Morgan reignited my interest in learning more about Chinese cooking.

To the point where, sitting in Morgan’s living room, I ordered a copy of Every Grain of Rice from Amazon; it was waiting for me when I arrived home to Canada.

Step number one, working my way through the book’s introduction, is to stock up our pantry; I was greatly aided in that effort by the opening of a new Asian grocery store a few blocks from our house.

Top Fresh Asian Market is on Grafton Street across from Holland College. It’s very well stocked, and I was able to find everything on my list, from Chinkiang brown rice vinegar to fermented tofu. They’re open most days from 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

I suspect I’ll be a regular customer.

I’ve been making a concerted effort – although, to date, with somewhat lackluster results – to wean myself from Twitter, Facebook, et al., given their increasingly low signal to noise ratio.

Facebook’s not a big issue: I don’t write anything there, and I’ve found it not-too-difficult to live without pictures of the baby goats of that woman I once had the crush on in the mid-1980s. 

Twitter, though, is proving harder to kick. I have, after all, tweeted more than 33,000 times over the last decade, so it’s become something of a habit built in to my daily flow.

But, spurred on by the POSSE crew, I’ve come to realize that I don’t need to quit cold turkey: I can revert to the pre-2006 style of using this blog as my exclusive place to write on the web, and push as needed to other services to syndicate what I write to people who can’t, or won’t, drop by here.

Sort of like John Steinbeck in The Guardian in the 1940s.

Twitter’s ace in the hole, posting-wise, is its excellent Android client, which makes posting photos quite easy. I wanted to continue to be able to post photos, but I didn’t want to have to open a mobile browser, login to Drupal, and navigate through the process of creating a new post in that tiny environment.

So I decided to create a workflow that would allow me to post here via email.

Here’s how I did it.

I host my email with Fastmail, and Fastmail makes it very easy to set up new email aliases, so I set one up: a dedicated email address that would exist solely to receive and forward new posts for this blog.

Next, I created a new Postmark account and set up a new “Server” and then setup an Inbound webhook, allowing me to receive email at a special inbound.postmarkapp.com email address and forward it on as JSON via HTTP POST to a web service of my choice:

A new Postmark account includes 25,000 “credits,” and each inbound email processed uses a single credit, so I should be good posting-by-email until pretty close to the end of time with my available balance.

Back on Fastmail, I set the “forwarding address” for my new blogging email address to this new Postmark webhook:

And, finally, I created a PHP script to be the target of the webhook and strapped it to a secure server: the script receives JSON from Postmark, pulls it apart, finds any photos in the body and resizes them if needed and moves them into place where Drupal can find them, and finally creates a new Drupal node using the email’s subject line as the node title and the body of the email as the node body.

As a result, the flow for posting a photo here by email is as simple as this:

I sent that email and, a few seconds later, this post resulted.

A few important things to note:

1. There’s no authentication involved: anyone with the email address can post here. And so I use a hard-to-guess email alias. That said, sharing the email with a trusted friend is an easy way to allow someone else to post, no fuss no muss (that’s how Olle was able to post this photo).
2. I recently updated the script to look for MP3 files in the email too; if it finds one, it creates a new “sound” node. Like this one, created by email from Street Food Thursday in Berlin.
3. Another recent update: the body of the email is now assumed to be Markdown, and it’s converted from Markdown to HTML before being posted to Drupal.

This workflow has proved very satisfying. It’s now as easy to post a photo (or sound, or note) here as it is to post it to Twitter. And whatever I post ends up on Twitter anyway, via an IFTTT recipe that echoes all posts to new tweets:

And to Facebook as well:

My digital emancipation continues.