18.0607-0900 We cannot do the 100%/100% Vow.
@25.0426-2113.32 Atx
Dear Marla,
Hevea and I should have tried 100%/100% for a while before committing to it!
Yikes! We simply cannot do the hood all of the time. It just doesn't work. There are just too many real-world problems. It's more than we can deal with.
Our 99.5% hood -- the one with the microperf holes -- is enjoyable for a few hours but not much more than that. The big problem we encounter is when our head and face start to sweat, it will inevitably get into our eyes and cause real problems. The 99.5% hood is even more problematic because it also removes air circulation from our eyes, so they cannot dry out.
We have (ahem) 'talked' about the real-world impossibility of wearing 100% coverage latex, 100% of the time. It's just too much for us. Maybe if we were several decades younger we could make a go at it, but, at our age stuff like that just doesn't work.
"Oh, I might have a solution," said Hevea.
(Hevea is a tulpa, so, theoretically, she can 'talk' in English. Since she is a part of us, we guess that means we are talking to ourselves! ;-)
I took the bait. "What do you suggest?"
"Well, the EMT Burn Coverage Chart says that the head is about 10% of the total surface area on the body. If you covered everything else, from the neck down, that would give you 90% coverage. Do you think you could wear 90% all of the time? If so, we'd need to figure out how to earn the extra 10%."
We considered this. "What about extra garments? For example, what is our apron worth? It's latex. Would that give us the extra 10%?"
"That's an interesting thought... But don't forget that we also have ~3 hour daily bath times that put a big hole in our HITEz-earning time. In fact, let's do the math. We'll start by assuming we'll have two baths each day of 1 hour each."
"Wait," we said. "Realistically, an hour is probably not enough. We need to spend a good half-hour actually soaking in the bathtub each time. LatexLadyII thought that was one of the keys to Living In Rubber. And, as donning and removing latex is both laborious and not done quickly, we think a half-hour on each side of the bath is adequate."
She continued, "OK, that means we will be in our suit only 21 hours a day and that suit will be only 90% coverage. 21 hours at 90% equals 18.9z. (We'll round that up to 19z.) So, there is a daily deficit of 5z. Somehow we need to recoup that."
"We already talked about Ordeals as a way of earning extra HITEz. We could do that, we suppose."
"Are you sure? Think about it, Thalia. That means we would need to do one or even two Ordeals to meet our quota of 24z every single day. Do you think we want to do that? There is an alternative." Said Hevea.
"An alternative?"
Hevea smiled. (Ever see a tulpa smile?) "Or, we could wear TWO - 90% suits! Could we do that, do you think?"
"So, you're saying that we're going to be in layered suits for the entire 21 hours each day, day in and day out? Each suit would earn 19 HITEz. That's 38z! That's 14 surplus HITEz. That more than enough!" I said.
"Not so fast! There is the problem of diminishing returns. We know that the first suit feels great. So does the second suit, but it's not quite as much as the first. And the third?" She asked.
"Oh, I see where you're going with this! I agree. We could say that the second suit has, oh, maybe 50% of the 'presence' of the first. Maybe the 3rd suit would be only 33% of presence. Does that sound resaonable?" I asked.
Hevea agreed.
"We are going to have to come up with a spreadsheet to manage all of this.