Here it is, Florida’s most famous frying pan. Italian made and on sale at Publix for half the price of the flea market. I was unable to find one that had a matching lid. I have several that are a good match. It is cast aluminum and as Wallace pointed out, the exact size for making fried eggs in Alaska. He imitated how they flip the eggs up and catch them in the pan. Kitchens in Alaska with high ceilings.
Eric was over to give us the news that the hurricane was heading for the gulf side of the state. His new cat, Holly, is due to arrive this upcoming Thursday. When he took Sam in he knew something was wrong but was not expecting the worst. Eric knew his hands were not steady enough to be giving the cat shots. That and the thousand dollar vet bill. He’s lucky, as the vet knew a lady that wanted the cat and in return wanted to trade a three year-old female cat. According to Eric the new cat could be Sam’s sister. I was just putting an apple pie in the oven when he arrived. I told him to conjure up his favorite recipe in anticipation of Peggy’s new cookbook. There was also some banana bread and a loaf of bread machine mix I’ve learned to make in the regular oven. All this was while Wallace and I played crib and during which I got my highest scoring hand this year: 17 points (J-J-K-5-5). Despite the fact that Wallace got a 24 hand (4-4-5-6-6), I won that game.
With the luxury of staying indoors all day, I divided my time between reading and writing. Now, if only I could find time to think, ha-ha. Seriously, it cannot be denied that some of the greatest advancements, projects and learning in my life have occurred when not feeling well prevented me from doing anything else. One of the things I looked at today was a “dictionary” of Windows XP terms.
It was written by Mitch and Ingrid Tulloch, knowledgeable authors who lamentably follow the deplorable Microsoft pattern of lack of useful examples. They suffer from the dreaded COIK syndrome (Clear Only If Known). I read descriptions of simple topics that often required cross-referencing every other term. I have been able for years to describe advanced computer concepts to technicians without using words like “encapsulation”, “inheritance” and “administrative permissions”. It is just not necessary to talk like a Martian to get an idea across.
How I hate to give up a summer Sunday cooped up. The hot days have returned, along with the weather people taking longer to talk about a hurricane than the storms themselves last. The rain brings cool weather and Wallace has noticed the even the worst rain will not take that film of dirt off your car. It is late afternoon and we’ve had the air conditioning running all day.
A quarter of the way through the potato famine book and I hate the British bureaucracy more than I did before. I wonder where America would be by now if we’d thrown out the bureaucrats along with the tax collectors. The relief directors were more worried about one Irish person getting a free meal than thousands starving to death. It was also used as an opportunity to, you guessed it, have the Catholic priests make up lists of every person in the parish. Not just count them, but hand over their names and family relationships. How do we just know the Englishmen had a privacy policy, saying the lists would only be used once for statistical purposes and then destroyed?
Ireland was exporting food during the famine. Pigs, cattle, wheat, barley. The problem was that the poorest laborers existed only on a potato economy and did not recognize other forms of food. When the harvest failed, they had to work on government projects. They were paid in money that was only enough to buy cabbages and potatoes. When those ran out, they could not possibly afford the expensive food and went just as hungry. So unaccustomed to money they were that pawn shops reported peasants pawning large bills like a ten-pound note for a few pence, often not bothering to redeem the tickets.
I always wondered, how could people without money for food get across the Atlantic? The answer, as with most conditions in the 1800s, is Napoleon. The importation of timber from Europe was cut off and the British found, to their surprise, it was cheaper to import timber in from Canada. Nearly 2,000 timber ships sailed empty on the westward leg and were only too glad to give berths to passengers at two or three pounds a head. That is correct, it cost $6 to sail to North America and all you had to say is you intended to settle in Canada.
It is a matter of record that in 1843 (before the famine) nearly 21,000 Irish shipped to Canada. A year later, only 288 of them were still there, mostly in Montreal. This form of immigration to the United States has remained popular ever since.
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