The delay factor

The delay factor

I am age 66 and went to Georgia Tech for my undergraduate school. I presently live on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee at around 2,000 feet of elevation. I think I still maintain an active lifestyle, though certainly less active than in my younger years. I have around a square mile of land and two cottages, a barn, and many sheds and boy toy machines to maintain, and that provides me a lot of exercise type activity. The mailbox is a quarter mile away, for another example.

I have two personal stories about the “delay factor” that I have experienced in the last five years.

First story…..

I make my own electricity. I use both water power and solar power, though this coming story is about my water power stuff. I use a micro hydro turbine with two nozzles going into it to make it spin and make electricity. One nozzle and feeder line uses water that depends somewhat on the weather, mostly rain and snow and resulting surface runoff on the way downhill. Why is that important to me.  Mostly it is because I can overcharge my batteries which can ruin them. As they are they have a shelf life of around 8 years, and weigh around 550 pounds. So the delay factor is from the time the rain or snow ends (snow has to melt and that takes time depending on the weather, too), the surface water flows through the forest, and then enters the pipe to feed one of the nozzles. All in all, this takes about a day to a day and a half, and is just a fact of life to me. So that delay factor is about a day and a half. I start monitoring battery voltage before then to best change my settings, too.

Second story…..

I daily take warfarin to help thin my blood to a best setting.  This method is considered conventional wisdom these days. And warfarin is also used for rat poison, and you can get it at the local hardware store, too. Now that always bothered me some.  So once a month I have to get my blood thickness or thinness checked, and as required adjust the daily warfarin ingestion level. Now during the month I use my own ways to check, which is mostly how much, if any, of a free bleeder I might be. Trust me, at least I do check that way, and there is some correlation there. So that delay factor during the month between more formal medical checks monthly is about a day; like adding or subtracting 1 mg per day, will usually show up in results a day later. So I have to add that into my calculations, and report same to my doctor to.