Octopodial Chrome

I have added a short monograph on punch to my bachelor recipes page. It has the receipt for the punch I made myself while recently ill.

I didn’t believe that they actually existed, but rather considered them to be excuses for missing work—but it turns out that there is such a thing as a twenty-four hour fever after all: I just had one. I woke up at about 0300 Friday morning parched and burning, and now seem to have more-or-less recovered.

What really amazes me is how much energy one burns when under a fever. I normally try to eat 3,600—4,800 BTUs (900–1,200 calories—which incidentally aren’t calories at all, but actually kilocalories; so much for French units’ vaunted consistency); on Friday I consumed 18,417 BTUs (about 4,600 calories), more than four times my normal and 1¼ the energy in a pound. Not just that, I weigh nearly about 1¼ less today than yesterday. Considering that I was about equally dehydrated, with about the same food in my gut, one could estimate that I went through about 30,000 BTUs; I normally burn about 5,200 a day. Thus I was running at nearly ½ horsepower. Unfortunately, my physics is not good enough to back-figure how much my temperature must have been. One BTU will heat one pound of water one degree, and that I weigh 167 lbs., and that I was burning for almost exactly 24 hours, one could guess that my temperate went up 30,000/167/24 = 7½°, but I’ve no idea if that’s the right way to go about the calculation.

To tell the truth, I kinda wish that I’d not eaten, so that I’d burned off that much fat instead. But most of the energy came from a strong punch I made to soothe my throat (the recipe for which will come in another article), and it was a life-saver. Without it I’d be a wreck, and possibly would not have healed as quickly.