A strange day

[hudebnik]

Baked a successful loaf of bread yesterday (the previous batch, made with starter that had been underexercised and underfed due to a week without an oven, was nearly inedible).

Also made sourdough croissant dough, which has now been shaped and left in the fridge overnight. This is the second time I've made croissants. The first time was a recipe that's basically pie crust plus yeast (with little cubes of butter cut into the flour before adding a little bit of liquid). I couldn't find that recipe this time, so I used a different one that calls for rolling out the butter on parchment paper, refrigerating it, then wrapping it in rolled-out yeast-raised dough, then folding and rolling several more times. It's much more work; we'll see this morning whether the results are possibly worth it.

shalmestere and I both spent way too much time yesterday chasing down genealogical links on ancestry.com. I found at least four ancestors who owned slaves, according to either U.S. census records or estate inventories; one early-18th-century estate inventory even included names and genders for most of the slaves (as well as estimated values -- 28 pounds for an adult male, 26 for an adult female, 5-15 for children of various ages). I had always assumed that most of my ancestors, even if they had wanted to own slaves, were too poor to do so or didn't live in a place where slavery was a thing. But no, this guy was a military Colonel, a lawyer, a substantial land-owner, a member of the Maryland House of Burgesses, and the owner of 13 slaves at his death. Anyway, this was sobering.

We also spent a while trying to record two shawm tracks of a four-part Renaissance piece (while listening through headphones to the two tracks we'd already recorded). We only have about half a dozen takes in us before we get too frustrated, lip-tired, or overheated (because we turn off the air conditioner before hitting the "record" button), and none of last night's worked.

This morning's adventure: I'll shortly take the granny-cart 2/3 of a mile away to pick up our biweekly CSA share, stop at a grocery on the way home, then spend some time fitting things into the fridge. Then probably mowing the lawn and miscellaneous household tidying.

Comments

[ilaine]

I've also assumed the ancestors of mine who were in this country when slavery existed were likely too poor, but haven't had the nerve to check for sure. They were farmers, in eastern LI, and there's about a hundred and fifty year window when somebody might have been a slave owner. That's the only branch that it could be possible, the rest of my family immigrated from potato famine times and later, all to the North.