Ah, fresh apple pie right out of the oven. However, this is not happening until tomorrow, so you will have to return for the details. The crust was from a mix and the filling from a can, but all the rest was home-made!
Success at the shop, although business was lousy. All systems go except a few nuisances. I took the trouble to standardize all the computers and their operations. Will was in for a look-see and to point out changes to his new blog. The lack of walk-in traffic is very serious indeed. It was a nothing day for everyone and we need some French-Canadiens to bolster the locals into a spending mood.Later in the day, I biked home past a couple of Jamaican guys playing guitar on the sidewalk. I grabbed by bass and jammed with them for about an hour. A drummer came by and stopped. It was just a sidewalk party. I haven’t done that for a while, and yes, I disobeyed my rule to go straight home until this sore throat goes away. Staying home lets me start the strangest projects. Tonight I spent twenty minutes examining magnified disks to see if there was any easy way to tell by looking if a disk was a CD or a DVD. Nothing I can find.
As predicted, the shelf life of Windows Vista was almost as short as Microsofts attention span. A product they are calling “System 7” is due for release, is it next month? That brings up my next prediction. If they are wise they will revert to a Windows XP type format, putting things back into familiar locations. No way is Microsoft smart enough to fix the known problems, I am merely predicting they will do some backtracking. So don’t throw away those old XP manuals just yet.
Later, I delved deeper into the book about the potato famine. The facts are astonishing. For instance, within twenty years of introduction of potatoes, the Irish priests were recording that the housewives had lost the culinary art of cooking anything else. They did not know what corn was when they saw it. Here’s a more sinister fact: the English cut off food aid early because they feared the population would “become dependents”. This forced the Irish farmers to eat their seed potatoes.
That in itself was not as bad as what ensued. Once those seed potatoes were gone, it would require “nearly a ton” of new seed potatoes per acre to be rapidly distributed throughout most of the country so as to start over. Nobody in Ireland, including the government, had the means to buy, store and distribute such huge weights, nor was there any road system to transport it.
The fungus is not hardy and requires exacting (temperature and moisture) conditions; then it practically explodes overnight. I stand informed it is still the single worse crop disease in North America and has wiped out crops as recently as 1958 “with particular severity”. The fungus spores can wash down through the soil and attack underground potatoes Sneaky.
Peggy the Chef has invited us to dinner at her place on a day of our choice soon. Peggy is a total individual and has the energy of three people. She is also a published author and this is not to be overlooked nor underestimated in my rulebook. Along with the dinner it is agreed we will discuss the possibility of co-authoring a book with the endorsement of her publishers, World Wide Press. That isn’t very clear, let me reword it. These publishers have reviewed her proposal for the book she has in mind, and have already expressed interest in it.
The plan she describes is loosely based on a recent successful book called “Secrets”(?). Instead of discussing Karma, she gets the favorite recipes of 25 bachelors and has correctly surmised each will have a story along with the ingredients. I’m all for it and it wouldn’t be the first time an author has resorted to writing a cookbook just to get published. Personally, I have nothing against cookbooks and hope to be able to contribute more than my method of preparing perogies.
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