Drought

Hello, insomnia. Might as well write out the thoughts.

I've been watching the "volunteer" trees that fringe the yard try to cope with the reality of drought this summer. A full-grown tree should not have wilted leaves, day after day. If I were still in Arizona, the tree would receive water by flood irrigation, but it's a foreign concept to people out here, and the yard isn't shaped to retain water. Instead, when it rains, water rushes over everything because we're at the bottom of the hill, then it drains into the sewer and is gone.

It did actually rain, a bit, over the weekend. The force of the storm ripped down half of one of the volunteer trees. It's currently resting against the neighbor's garage. I'm going to have to do something about that, and about the other recent large tree limbs that I've temporarily stuffed onto the compost pile. Probably just move them to the curb for green waste pick-up. I'm concluding that coping with branches is beyond my capability here, too, despite the desire to keep organic material as local as possible. Green waste pick-up stays at least reasonably local.

The oak trees still look all right, however. If they started showing signs of drought stress, I'd be more inclined to do something about it in their case, as opposed to the volunteer trees.

One of the improperly planted crepe myrtle trees that crowd the driveway is also looking the worse for wear. I don't know enough about them to know if I should bother with trying to do anything about it. Plus, the trees crowd the driveway.

The garden is holding on as well as one could hope for this time of year. I'd love to get mulch over everything, but that involves getting the mulch from somewhere, and I've been reluctant to spend all that much time out in the sun recently. It's still strange to me to consider strawberry plants as annuals.

I'm convinced that this is the book that gardeners here need to be reading, even though I haven't read it yet, myself.

Mmmm, protein...

Not too long ago, while reading the Sports Nutrition Guidebook, I read Nancy Clark's encouragement to athletes to focus on carbohydrates as a primary fuel source.

Today, I'm learning about why, while learning more about transamination, which is, in a nutshell, a reaction that allows an amino acid to pass off its nitrogen group to another molecule. This allows it to transform into an intermediate somewhere along the way to the citric acid cycle (aka Krebs cycle). The citric acid cycle is a process by which molecules are broken down to make energy available in an easily-used form in cells.

Hopefully you can recall that amino acids are the building blocks for proteins; there are 20 of them. Your body requires some quantity of amino acids on a regular basis as it constructs proteins; however, the vast majority of Americans consume WAY more protein than necessary to fulfill this requirement. So, this is where the rest of that excess protein goes, and the nitrogen gets excreted as urea. As Nancy Clark points out, it does NOT go into building more muscle, faster.

Now I see why she encourages athletes to focus on carbohydrates. Shunt those nutrients straight on in to glycolysis and burn those carbs as fuel!

Of course, this has to be balanced out to some extent by the fact that most organisms, including humans, respond more strongly to protein intake than carbohydrate intake, meaning that we'll stop eating sooner (and thereby consume fewer calories) if we eat foods with a higher ratio of protein-to-carbohydrate. So if your concern is weight management, you may still want to pay attention to your protein consumption.

Man, biochemistry is cool stuff.