Lately

I am currently knitting this snood to take with me to Norway in the fall. Seems as if it would be useful, plus it's an easy knit and that is nice to combine with the more complicated Seychelles that I am slowly working on.

Blue Skies Woolstok, Earth Ivy

And I made another Cherry Clafoutis, yum, half recipe since no one else in the house likes it and I get to have to eat it all by myself. Poor, poor me.

But I will NOT be making any more jam. At first I did think it tasted ok, but it really doesn't. It wouldn't jell as quickly as I thought it should (a no-pectin recipe) so I would add more lemon juice, and then I would think that it would taste too lemony and I would add more sugar, and it made for the weirdest sweet sour jam. It just doesn't taste very good. It is edible, in the sense that someone desperate for sustenance would probably eat it, but I will leave jam making up to the professionals. My attempt at blueberry jam does not compare to this:

It's so good that I ate it all! On my second batch of crumpets. But not to fear. I bought more.


Speaking of desperate for sustenance, I have finished reading The Best Land Under Heaven, by Michael Wallis, and what a terrible story. Of course cannibalism is a terrible choice to make, and some did not choose to eat cannibalized peers. I guess I had always thought of the choice as the result of sort of a reasonable conversation amongst reasonable people, but starving people aren't necessarily reasonable. Some were so starved that they hallucinated, and others truly went mad. It's no wonder that they did what they did.

However, each person did agree not to partake any of their own cannibalized family, but I'm not sure that that even held up as time went on. One young boy was seen eating a live mouse he had just caught; others ate raw organs as they were taken from the bodies. Necessary? I guess they thought so. I don't know why others survived without resorting to cannibalism.  

On a lighter note...sort of...Abraham and Mary Lincoln were good friends of one of the couples who went on the trip and these friends, the Reeds, tried to convince the Lincolns to go too. Abe was fascinated by the idea of the west coast and had indicated interest in going, but finally decided that he was more determined to have a political career. Mary had no interest in leaving her comfortable life in Springfield, Illinois in order to travel in wagons through very difficult terrain, populated with native Americans---some friendly, some not.

Imagine how different American history would be if Lincoln had gone on the journey with the Donners and Reeds.

The End!