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Opening Thought
How can I turn an ordinary weeknight meal into something more elegant?
What is a good replacement starch for potato?
I need a really light meal.
And me, a plate that is easy to eat.
Something done in ten minutes.
And delicious.

Pesto Sauce.

A bunch of basil, 2oz of pine nuts, 4oz extra virgin olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper.
All into a food chopper and blend into a Pesto, I mean a paste.
Put it into a bowl, add a copious amount of Romano cheese, and toss the pasta of your choice into it.
Serve with grated Parmigiana Cheese.

Serve it hot or cold.
Serve it alongside a main course.
Serve it as a main course.
Serve is as an appetizer course for a more lengthy dinner.

So easy.
Do the shopping.
Make it the night before you need it.
Damn, it’s good.

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Tagging Today
Friday, February 8, 2019

My 302nd consecutive posting, committed to 5,000.
Time is 12.01am.
On Friday, Boston’s temperature will reach a high of 54* with a feels-like temperature of 46* with a bit of morning rain.

According to the Blog’s “Winter Calendar, Jan2 to Feb13,” we have only five days remaining to our winter.
The “Winter-Spring Shoulder Season, Feb 14 to April 7” is our next calendar; our next measurement of time as we march the thirteen plus years to the 5,000th and final posting

__________________________________Answer to Question
Who was Florence Nightingale?

Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organized care for wounded soldiers.
She gave nursing a favorable reputation and became an icon of Victorian culture, especially in the persona of "The Lady with the Lamp" making rounds of wounded soldiers at night.

In 1860, Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment of her nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London.
It was the first secular nursing school in the world, and is now part of King's College London.
In recognition of her pioneering work in nursing, the Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses, and the Florence Nightingale Medal, the highest international distinction a nurse can achieve, were named in her honor, and the annual International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on her birthday.
Her social reforms included improving healthcare for all sections of British society, advocating better hunger relief in India, helping to abolish prostitution laws that were harsh for women, and expanding the acceptable forms of female participation in the workforce.

Nightingale was a prodigious and versatile writer.
In her lifetime, much of her published work was concerned with spreading medical knowledge.
Some of her tracts were written in simple English so that they could easily be understood by those with poor literary skills.
She was also a pioneer in the use of infographics, effectively using graphical presentations of statistical data.
Much of her writing, including her extensive work on religion and mysticism, has only been published posthumously.

Florence Nightingale's most famous contribution came during the Crimean War, which became her central focus when reports got back to Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded.
On 21 October 1854, she and the staff of 38 women volunteer nurses that she trained, including her aunt Mai Smith, and 15 Catholic nuns (mobilized by Henry Edward Manning) were sent (under the authorization of Sidney Herbert) to the Ottoman Empire.
Nightingale was assisted in Paris by her friend Mary Clarke.
They were deployed about 339 miles across the Black Sea from Balaklava in the Crimea, where the main British camp was based.

Nightingale arrived early in November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks in modern-day Üsküdar in Istanbul.
Her team found that poor care for wounded soldiers was being delivered by overworked medical staff in the face of official indifference.
Medicines were in short supply, hygiene was being neglected, and mass infections were common, many of them fatal. There was no equipment to process food for the patients.

“This frail young woman [...] embraced in her solicitude the sick of three armies.”
— Lucien Baudens, La guerre de Crimée, les campements, les abris, les ambulances, les hôpitaux , p.104

After Nightingale sent a plea to The Times for a government solution to the poor condition of the facilities, the British Government commissioned Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design a prefabricated hospital that could be built in England and shipped to the Dardanelles.
The result was Renkioi Hospital, a civilian facility that, under the management of Dr Edmund Alexander Parkes, had a death rate less than 1/10th that of Scutari.

Stephen Paget in the Dictionary of National Biography asserted that Nightingale reduced the death rate from 42% to 2%, either by making improvements in hygiene herself, or by calling for the Sanitary Commission.
For example, Nightingale implemented handwashing and other hygiene practices in the war hospital in which she worked.

During her first winter at Scutari, 4,077 soldiers died there.
Ten times more soldiers died from illnesses such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds.
With overcrowding, defective sewers and lack of ventilation, the Sanitary Commission had to be sent out by the British government to Scutari in March 1855, almost six months after Nightingale had arrived. The commission flushed out the sewers and improved ventilation.
Death rates were sharply reduced, but she never claimed credit for helping to reduce the death rate.
In 2001 and 2008 the BBC released documentaries that were critical of Nightingale's performance in the Crimean War, as were some follow-up articles published in The Guardian and the Sunday Times. Nightingale scholar Lynn McDonald has dismissed these criticisms as "often preposterous", arguing they are not supported by the primary sources.

Nightingale still believed that the death rates were due to poor nutrition, lack of supplies, stale air and overworking of the soldiers.
After she returned to Britain and began collecting evidence before the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army, she came to believe that most of the soldiers at the hospital were killed by poor living conditions.
This experience influenced her later career, when she advocated sanitary living conditions as of great importance.
Consequently, she reduced peacetime deaths in the army and turned her attention to the sanitary design of hospitals and the introduction of sanitation in working-class homes (see Statistics and Sanitary Reform, below).

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Good Morning on this Friday, the 8th day of February.

We talked about Pesto Sauce and time, weather, and temperature.
And we talked about Florence Nightingale.
We’d like to talk more but it’s time to go.

Che vuoi? Le pocketbook?

See you soon.

Love

Dom