A scurvy knave am I, a thing of chills and sneezes

...Oh, all right, it's not scurvy. But they just had an outbreak on HMS Surprise, and Stephen went ashore for greenstuff and came back with a sloth. This is a Very Important Moment, in the history of this house (our clubhouse, as I'm sure you know, is named The Debauched Sloth; we have example everywhere), so scurvy is much on my mind.

And I do, it would seem, have a cold. It appears to be a deconstructed, anfractuous cold: I had the headache last week and the tight chest after, a sole asthmatic night; last night I barely slept, this morning I slept through the boys' breakfast (! - but fortunately K was at hand to make all good), and today I meant to go to the library and grind haggis-meats and make marmalade and all sorts, and all I want to do is drowse on the couch with Stephen and Jack and occasionally Barry.

Heat, applied and theoretical

For the record: ten pounds may be slightly too large a batch of Sevilles to marmalade comfortably in my stockpot. For ten pounds of oranges demands ten pounds of sugar, plus the water of boiling thereof, plus the cheesecloth-wrapped innards of the oranges (I might have said offals); and it may only be that this only happened because I am sick and was not paying attention, being under a cat at the time and engaged in conversation with m'wife, but the pot overboiled and there is burned marmalade-syrup on the stove and ain't that going to be fun to clean up?

Talking of which, even after three years of living here and five years of visiting, I still carry English habits to this American stove. Like I expect the oven to divide between hot (at the top), medium (in the middle) and cool (at the bottom), and it just doesn't. Its efficient construction means that it is more or less equal-tempered all through; and yet I continue to shift things up or down in expectation of hotter or cooler, and it really doesn't work, and stuff gets burned at the bottom and fails to sizzle freely at the top, and *sigh*...

(In an interesting side-note, I find that an unstirred pot of boiling marmalade can vary by ten, fifteen, even twenty degrees F. from one spot to another. Once stirred and homogeneous, it is always disappointingly not as hot as I wanted.)

For the curious:

Ten pounds of Seville oranges, plus ten pounds of sugar, plus water to cover, less lossage due to a couple of hours' evaporation while boiling, less the oranges' offal (for only the peel and the pectin remain in the syrup) equals eight and a half kilos of marmalade, as near as calculation can finger it. (And yes, we could totally land a robot on Mars, thank you for asking. And march a Roman mile to a Greek institution, counting steps in Phoenician all the way.)