Venison: Medium Rare to Raw

We try to eat venison at least once a week.  Why, you ask?  Unless it's been made into delicious fresh or smoked sausage it's exceedingly healthy.  It is free-range and all-organic.  It is local. It is also plentiful.  And it is renewable.  Just recently I was looking out the kitchen window to the east before sunset and I stopped counting at twenty of the number of whitetails congregating in my neighbor's hay field.

Anyway, one of our favorite meals is grilled venison(rare to medium rare) with a side salad and baked tater with all the fixn's.  Good eats!

The dog found a fresh coyote kill in the woods recently and scored some nibbles and a bone.  Raw but palatable because of the cold temps.   

Good eats.  

If you're a dog..... 

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*By the way, it's a Leap Year this year.  My pop was a Leap Year baby.  If he was alive today he'd be the ripe old age of 25.  Happy Birthday, dad!

 

Making the Hurdle

My pop was born on February 29 making him a leap year baby.  As a consequence he only had a birthday every four years.  The inside family joke was that he didn’t technically attain adulthood until 80 years of age.  In any event – what’s the story behind this calendar oddity?  Why an extra day every four years – and why February? 

We happen to owe this to the Egyptian civilization that was among the first to conclude that the calendar year and solar years did not completely mesh.   That is because it takes the earth slightly more than 365 days to circumnavigate the sun.  365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds, to be exact.  If you neglected this circumstance for 100 years our calendar would be off by roughly 24 days.  The answer to this was to periodically add an extra day to solve this conundrum. 

It was the Romans that first designated February 29 as leap day – but the 16^th century Gregorian calendar came up with a more precise solution.  This identified February 29^th at leap day only in those years divisible by four – 2020, 2024, etc. 

The solution persists to modern time. 

Leap Year

A complete orbit of the earth around the sun takes exactly 365.2422 days to complete, but the Gregorian calendar uses 365 days.  As a consequence of this a leap year - where an extra day is added to the end of February every four years – reconciles the solar system's disparity with the Gregorian calendar.

So leap seconds - and leap years - are added as means of keeping our clocks (and calendars) in sync with the Earth and its seasons.

All the other months in the Julian calendar have 30 or 31 days, but February lost out to the ego of Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus.

Under his predecessor Julius Caesar, February had 30 days and the month named after him - July - had 31. August had only 29 days.

When Caesar Augustus ascended to the throne asEmperor he added two days to 'his' month to make August the same as July.

So February lost out to August in the battle of the extra days.

Happy Leap Year.