Really! Rain again this morning, so I didn’t run. Indeed, having had a night of intermittent sleep, I went directly to coffee and hot breakfast, and to clearing email. Being prevented from running exasperates me particularly because I don’t enjoy it, because I do it for my general health; if I were just going to evolve into a potato, I’d rather it not happen just because the weather is bad. But that’s probably just my idiosyncrasy.
Speaking of hot breakfast, a while ago we had a visitor who cooked something in our cast iron pan, then washed it with hot water and detergent, perhaps even with steel wool (I wasn’t there, which — given my inability to conceal my immediate responses, is very much just as well). This disrupted the finish of the pan, and I turned to Jeff Ward (the blogger, not one of the very numerous other bearers of Jeff’s honourable name) (as is increasingly the case, of course, I couldn’t remember the name of Jeff’s blog so as to make the link, so I went to wood s lot (where I knew, correctly, that I would find him) and felt a wave of sadness that Mark is no longer doing the glorious work of finding and sharing noteworthy posts from around Blogaria — but it was good to click a few of Mark’s blogroll links and to learn that some of the stalwarts are still a-blogging, and remember the abandoned blogs of many who aren’t), as I say, I turned to Jeff, a man who appreciates tools and treating them with respect, and he gave me helpful advice toward nursing the finish of the pan back to its customary functional well-being. That was about six years ago, and the pan has been fine steadily, once it attained its useful finish. Last Wednesday, though, I must have oiled it unevenly (or perhaps a contaminant seasoning intruded on the ecology of the pan surface) and the pan started sticking again, for the first time in years. Ah, well, back to the remediation process.
I have to cook up a sermon for tomorrow, and I need to sort the readers’ version of the St Matthew Passion before Lent even begins, and I may have some other tasks I’ve forgotten — but I have my tutes arranged and room-assigned for the second half of the term, and Fourth Week hasn’t even begun, so there’s that.
Good luck re seasoning the pan. I enjoy that kind of craft myself.
Back in November I went through Mark’s blog again and added a number of still-blogging folks to my feed. Mark’s death was very sad and sudden but I’m grateful his blog will live on because it’s hosted on a public network that coincidently was also my first IP provider in 1992 when I moved to Ottawa. So although I almost met Mark once or twice, his presence looms large in my memory and my blogging life.
Pan-seasoning takes patience, something I’m not great about in the kitchen. I know enough, though, about respect for tools that I try to do what’s right by them.
It was a saddening visit to wood s lot; so many of our friends have moved to their flats in the high-rise towers of social media. Obviously this blog doesn’t range as widely as it once did, partly because — apart from you and Dave Rogers and a few others — there are fewer conversation partners than in our heyday. I’m pretty stubborn, though, and will stick with this project as long as I can. At least my grandchildren will know what the weather was like in Oxford and Abingdon, and that their grandsire was a feeble runner….
“The fitful tracing of a portal,” as it were.