It was definitely not an auspicious start to the day. While preparing breakfast I was also cutting up apples intending to produce a filling for an apple pie. I mix a cup of sugar with three tablespoons of cornstarch, dissolve it in a quarter cup of cranberry juice inside a deep pot, then drop five to six cups of chunky-sliced apples into the pot, and stir over a moderate heat until the liquid becomes thick, and the apples cooked but not mushy. These are apples from the lot I have stored down in the basement, given to us by our daughter, picked off the apple tree that sits beside her house. They're neither sweet nor juicy, tending to be hard, but we don't know what kind of apple they are. They do make very good apple pie filling.

Trouble was, while I was busy doing other things like cutting up and preparing vegetables for a chicken soup for dinner later that evening, and eating breakfast, I'd forgotten about the apple pie filling, only recalling that I'd left it to cook on the stove between stirrings and could smell something obviously burning. The bottom of the pot was dreadfully scorched, in fact, once the apple filling was scooped out, I could see the interior bottom of the pot was slickly carbonized. Wonderfully, the pie filling was fine; I added two tablespoons of butter and a heaping tsp of cinnamon and set about making the crust. The pie was delicious, with more than a hint of carmelization.

Later, in the afternoon, when I was cooking a small amount of rice to have with the chicken soup, I'd answered the telephone and became so engrossed in conversation I forgot about the cooking rice, too. Two pots with heavily carbonized interiors. I soaked them, mixed vinegar and baking soda and poured boiling water into them, scoured them with metalized scouring pads, and was unable to clean them. I decided to soak them in a baking soda-vinegar solution overnight. No dice. My husband took them downstairs for a few minutes after breakfast this morning and soon brought them back up to me, clean and shining. He'd used an electric buffer fitted with a scrubber of some kind.

In the early afternoon yesterday we'd gone out for our usual ravine walk before embarking on the rest of the day. There were high winds gusting enormously, ferociously, bringing down detritus from the forest canopy above. The day before had given us an all-day rain, and it had been quite cold. But yesterday wasn't cold, just balmy, and with the gentler temperature that nasty wind. Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were all affected by the wind's by-product; downed trees and inoperative power lines.

Our daughter was among the hundreds of thousands of homeowners who were forced by such circumstances to forego the normal use of anything requiring electricity to get through their day. When, in the late afternoon, I tried to use my computer it kept flickering and fading out, and I kept being kicked off the Internet. Today's weather is far more tolerable, and we're grateful for that. And I'm glad to have my gleaming, clean pots back in use.