Rainy day Monday. Rainy day, all day. I could hear it out there in the wee hours before the sun. This is the time of year, right before day light savings when the sun rises very late in the morning. It’s nearly seven AM and I can’t see a thing. This is what must have driven people to demand day light savings, which I was always told was done for the farmers. But once that change comes, we will enjoy more day light in the morning, but the poor evening will descend upon us so quickly after November 1st. I will be getting up even earlier for my morning calls and deciding it’s too late to ride a bike after 4:30PM or so.
We talked Mongols this morning. I tried to prepare for our drive by looking over the Korean history by maps book we’ve been using on these rides, but . . . they basically skipped the Mongol period. After fighting off Khitan and later the Jurchen as the Chinese too had to do, Korea was, like the rest of Eurasia, swarmed by the invading Mongols. 1231 the Mongols first invade Goryeo and by 1270, after China has already fallen and Kublai Khan established his Yuan Dynasty in Dadu, (Beijing), Goryeo surrenders to the Mongols and becomes a subject state, to the Yuan.
I hadn’t realized that it was also at this time, and not later, during the Ming, when the Neo Confucian ideas of the Song official Zhu Xi, become broadly promoted in Korea. It was also the time when the landlubber Mongols leaned on the seafaring Koreans to help them build an armada to continue their unstoppable equine-powered progression, across the sea and over to Honshu in Japan. Presumably a Korean boatswain or two raised the point about not sailing armadas during typhoon season but were told to shut up. The Mongol fleet was destroyed not once, but twice during two different years they attempted to invade Japan. Believing the divine wind, kamakazi protected them from attack, Japan remained inviolable until the U.S. fleet accepted Imperial Japan’s surrender in Tokyo Bay, in 1945.
I think our oven is an under-performer. I had that chicken in there for well over an hour at three-fifty-degrees. Used a sort of fig sauce as glaze. Had some small potatoes in there with it. But it just wasn’t done by the time the rest of the food was on the table. My older daughter had a class that was starting at six so the show must go on. I cut some pieces off that were ready to serve and left the rest of the bird to cook, but, as one does, I forgot all about it until later after my call, and it was now very, well done.
Monday, 10/26/20
No comments:
Post a Comment