Tinkers and Damns

So a couple years ago I picked up a couple of lovely tinned copper cookpots at the White Elephant Sale for only a couple dollars each, thinking that they'd make nice nearly-medieval-looking pots for my camp kitchen. The tinning was a bit patchy -- it looked as if the pots had been brillo-scrubbed by someone who didn't quite understand that tin behaves differently from steel or aluminum -- so I figured I'd have to get them re-tinned at some point. I finally decided to start using them in the camp kitchen anyway this season, and there isn't any significant effect on the food taste so far, but I still wanted to do that re-tinning. And then this lunch hour I went off to the 4th St gourmet ghetto to pick up a nice card for my cousin's 25th wedding anniversary this weekend and did my usual just-browsing pass through Sur La Table, and what did I spy right next to the copper cookware section? Looking as if it had been sitting in a back storeroom for the last decade there was this package proclaiming, "Copper pots need retinning? Voila!" Sure enough, it's a do-it-yourself pot re-tinning kit: basically a little jar of acidic flux and a sheet of food-safe lead-free tin. You clean the pot thoroughly, flux the area to be retinned, put in a snippet of the tin sheet, heat until the tin starts melting, and then roll it around in the pan until it covers the affected area. The brand name is "Tin Lizzie" and it lists the kit manufacturer as: Aux Cuisines Inc., 43 Saddle Ranch Lane, Hillsdale NJ, 07642. There's also an e-mail contact given. I'll report on the project further after I've tried it out.

And on the "damn" side ... when did it become so difficult to schedule plans to get together with people? Is there really a plan-smashing front moving through (as thread_walker seems to be experiencing)? Are significantly more people getting sick suddenly these days? Do people tend to make commitments more casually and break them just as casually? For any given fall-through there always seems to be a good and sound reason -- and certainly when illness is involved, one doesn't want to raise any guilt-trips -- but ever since I started my various programs of trying to initiate more social events and contacts, it's seemed like swimming through molasass to line things up and carry plans through as originally conceived. The immediate trigger for this gripe is that my date for tomorrow has been suffering from the flu since last week and will most likely be cancelling. I haven't tried to line up an alternate since it's the last minute (and since I'd really rather hold out for her being up to going). But there's a real possibility that I'll end up giving away my second ticket to Arlo Guthrie on the steps of Zellerbach tomorrow evening.