08:32 – Barbara likes the new mattress. She says she slept very well last night. So did I, but then I almost always sleep very well. When she was at the store choosing the mattress, the guy asked her about my preferences. She told him that it didn’t matter because I was happy sleeping even on the floor. Which is true. I’m a mattress agnostic. I’ve spent more than a few nights in my life sleeping comfortably in the woods after just scooping out hip and shoulder troughs and piling pine needles to sleep on.
Page A4 of the paper this morning had an interesting full-page article/graphic. I’d known that near the end of the War of Northern Aggression General Stoneman and his cavalry had spent a couple of weeks pillaging and burning western North Carolina, but this page lays it out graphically and day-by-day. Stoneman’s raid was purely gratuitous because the war was very nearly over and also because western North Carolina had tended pro-Union throughout the war. Stoneman’s forces faced some opposition, mostly by teenage boys and wounded Confederate soldiers, but they were welcomed with cheering upon their arrival most places around here. (The fabled Tarheels were mostly from central and coastal North Carolina, where there were many plantations and tens of thousands of slaves. Slaves were relatively uncommon in the western parts of the state, which was mostly smallhold farms. The few slaves held by these family farmers were often treated as members of the family.)
More kit stuff today.
10:49 – The prevailing opinion seems to be that brown sugar isn’t suitable for long-term storage. Everyone including the LDS church says so. I’m not sure why that should be true, but then I’ve never tried storing brown sugar so I’ll assume that these sources may know something I don’t.
Not that it’s a real problem. Granulated or powdered white sugar can be stored essentially forever. The LDS church says 30 years, but the truth is probably closer to 300 years if not 3,000 years. The same is true of molasses, which is basically what’s left over when natural brown sugar is refined into white sugar. It’s easy enough to make up your own brown sugar on the fly by mixing one tablespoon of molasses, give or take, with a cup of white sugar and stirring until they’re completely mixed. So I’m not storing any brown sugar. Instead, I’ll store a couple bottles of Grade A unsulfured molasses.