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prototype cake
Tuesday, November 4 2003
Gretchen is assigned to make the wedding cake for David the Rabbi's wedding (which is coming up soon; one of my ten more important goals in life is to make it the last wedding I ever attend). This will be Gretchen's most ambitious wedding cake yet - it has to feed 200 people. Not wanting to leave such a huge project to the whims of chance, Gretchen made a smaller prototype of the cake this morning. The prototype was a rather large cake on its own - easily as big as any one of the four individual cakes Gretchen made for Ray and Nancy's wedding. It ended up as an object of beauty, looking more like a precious Greek artifact carved out of marble than a cake.
Gretchen called up a variety of people and invited them over to devour and criticize her prototype. The only people who made it were our two elderly downhill neighbors, the parents of the guy who sold us our house. They sat around with us eating the cake and drinking sherry (the same sherry brought as a housegift by our recent visitors from the United Kingdom). Conversation quickly turned to politics. We all agreed that the situation in Iraq was yet another great American military folly, doomed from the start. We also agreed that the cake was delicious and that Gretchen shouldn't vary from this prototype in the slightest. It was an autumnal cake featuring gingerbread layers, a special sliced-pear goop between the layers, and an elegantly-decorated butter-cream frosting.
At 2pm I had to go to the big stone house down on Hurley Mountain Road and begin work on installing a local area network. It's a big house built in the 1820s and the owners were particular about how things should look, so it didn't have the makings for an easy job. Luckily, the timbered construction made drilling holes between floors incredibly easy - the actual depth of wood between living spaces in some places was as little as a single inch-thick pine plank.
Nonetheless, I had to leave at 4:30pm because I had another housecall to attend to in Woodstock. That went really well. By really well, I mean I was only there twenty minutes and in that time I converted yet another harried internet user to Mozilla.
This evening Gretchen and I drove into downtown Hurley to do the democratic thing and vote. The level of this particular election was so excruciatingly local that I couldn't recognize any of the people on the ballot except for the judge who had performed our wedding ceremony back in May. At times like this, the party affiliation is the only thing you have to work with. Having seen what Republicans have wrought, I voted straight blue dog Democrat. If there was a blue dog on that ballot and he was a Democrat, he got my vote. Since Gretchen was operating on the same principle, this hypothetical blue dog would have gotten her vote as well.
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