BTW, I don’t know if you still have that mirror and whatnot put aside for me after all this while. Either way is fine, but if you still have them, I’d like to work on clearing that stuff out of your way.

[Mail sent. - Cam]

When I was a kid, I had Steven Caney’s Playbook. It’s a great book, with a lot of projects for children who aren’t television-obsessed: you can learn to make a knitting frame, a wave machine, pomanders, a salt garden, paper whistles, cardboard boomerangs, and all sorts of good stuff. One of the projects is a solar heater made out of scrap cardboard, glue, aluminum foil, and paper fasteners. I never got around to making it because it sounded so fiddly and we almost never had enough cardboard or any paper fasteners around the house. (It never would have occurred to me to say, “Mom, would you go buy me some cardboard and paper fasteners?”) But it sounded fascinating.

Okay, I am exaggerating a little when I say 25 years. I did forget about it for a few years. And then several years ago I got interested in solar whatsits again, and started reading about how to make the ovens. But making them appears to me to be just slightly too far over my own personal pain-in-the-neck threshold.

How I’d do it without looking, though… Hm. Well, I think you could do it pretty well just by knowing the date, time, and latitude, and having a very finely-tuned sense of which way is which. That’s practically all I’m going on, since I’m having trouble getting a good visual identification of whether or not it’s focused, and it’s working out fairly well all the same. There are talking oven thermometers now, aren’t there?

It occurs to me now that if I wind up doing a lot of solar cooking, and if I ever replace the bark paths with stone or tile, it would be insanely awesome to have a compass rose large enough for the solar oven to sit on. I could probably work out the math find somebody to work out the math to determine which angle and direction are optimal for which time, and write some little program that tells me what to do. Plus, it would look extraordinarily cool.

As for the roast plums, I don’t spice them at all. Roast plums are what you get when you’re trying to dry plums in your oven and run out of patience. I guess you could do all sorts of fancy things — thread them on to herb stalks, drizzle them with honey — but the most I myself would want to do is to top them with a dollop of cream when they’re done.

Two local meals may just happen this week! I have a whole quart of shelled peas from the backyard in the fridge. Hmm! If I got some tomatoes and made some paneer… *plot plot scheme*…

The solar oven looks really neat. I’m trying to think of how I would focus it without using shadows. Hmmm.

Glad you’re feeling better!