We have a get-together once a month with friends that we all call "Hair Day" (for the obvious reason that we all get our hair cut by Lin's friend Sheri). Lin and Sheri usually decide on the date after the previous month's event.

Back in June we got an e-mail announcing the date for July as being the 20th.

I've never forgotten July 20...specifically July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed and then walked on the moon. At age twelve I followed all the space missions and this was indeed what all the others had been building up to. The moon walk itself happened to coincide with an annual neighborhood event, the St. Mary's Church feast, which is a great weekend celebration (there are dozens of these feasts all over Rhode Island during the summer at all the Catholic churches: St. Bartholemew's, St.Rocco's, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, etc.); on a Sunday night when we usually would have left the main feast venue at Itri Square (the corner of Park Avenue and Cranston Street), air sweet with the scent of hot doughboys and pizza strips and freshly-popped corn, and the sound of the sideshow games and the band concert, and trudged up Park Avenue to Atwood Avenue behind the police station to watch the grand finale fireworks presentation, we were hurrying home to sit in front of our 19" Magnavox black and white television to watch the first moonwalk.

Our friends are of similar interests, so I immediately began plotting some way to celebrate the event with the food contribution everyone usually brings. We had brought the main dish last month, so my easiest option for a moon shape was, of course, a cake. One triple chocolate cake mix (with chocolate chips in it) baked in a springform pan, one container of chocolate frosting, one small bottle of silver sugar chips to act as moondust, one bottle of edible "moonrocks" (we found these at Michael's, in the cake-baking section; they're like M&Ms), and one play kit from Hobbytown to supply an astronaut, a command module and lunar module, and a gold moonrock, and we came up with this: our "One Small Step" cake.

James baked it, since I'm apparently incapable of baking even a box cake without it falling apart, and then I had fun decorating it. (You can click on it to see a bigger photo.) You can tell we don't do things like this often because we had no cardboard liner for the bottom of the cake, just waxed paper, which later presented a problem, since the hard part was carrying it to Ron and Lin's house. It turned out the lid of our Tupperware cake carrier was a little too small to clear the cake without scraping off the frosting and the "moonrocks" on the side, and we couldn't shift it to a bigger plate because all that was under it was waxed paper. So I put the cake still set on the bottom of the cake carrier in a larger plate and wrapped foil around it loosely and covered it during the night. This morning I gingerly carried it down to the car and held it like a baby until we got to the house. I was so glad to put it down!

Everyone enjoyed it, and it was tasty as well. A fun little project, and a fun morning and early afternoon! The Butlers supplied sandwich fixings and we also had cheese, a fruit and cheese tray, and a relish tray (black olives! yum!). James had no meetings today, so we were able to stay a lot later than usual, talking with Charles about his new cat, and giving Alex and Pat some advice about their upcoming vacation (like not to drive through New York City—take the Tappan Zee Bridge!).

So we were not home until three, having blown off stopping at Kroger because I didn't have the coupons for yogurt. Trouble was, since we went to Barnes & Noble and JoAnn last night and had no other coupons, there really wasn't anywhere else to go.

Meanwhile the sky got darker...and darker. We changed clothes and, in the process of tidying, I wandered by the dark and cool and slumbery looking futon in the spare room, and just the look of it suggestively called my name. I couldn't resist its siren song, and just stretched out on it, just for a few minutes, you understand. "Soft and snoozy, warm and woozy..." as Hilary Booth would say, and off I was in Dreamland.

Soon there was a sound of thunder. The next clap of thunder shook the house so that the handles on the dresser rattled. The third sounded like cannons on the Somme.

Next something furry touched my hand. I opened my eyes and found myself looking in a pair of liquid brown eyes that looked very anxious, belonging to a small dog who was desperately trying to join me on the futon. By the time she had tried several times to get on the futon with me, I figured there was no use trying to get back to sleep; besides I had to clean up the bit of wet carpet next to the futon. Apparently one can scare the piss out of someone, especially a small dog who's afraid of thunder.

Turns out James had felt sleepy, too, and being disinclined to just doze off on the recliner, had actually climbed into bed, put on his C-PAP, and finally fallen asleep, all to be woken up again by Willow trying desperately to get into bed with him. Having struck out with him, she had come to try me!

Schuyler, meanwhile, was just pissed off  because the rain had taken out the satellite dish. :-)

We'd had so many carbs at lunch between the sandwich breads and potato salad and the slices of cake that we just had some wings tonight, delivered from a Chinese place. Thankfully, they were very lightly sauced; that's the only thing wrong with Zaxby's wings—they're always glopped up with sauce. We got wonton soup, too, but I pretty much saved most of mine as the wings were very filling.

We saw a new Britcom on GPB tonight—incidentally, we didn't have to look out a window to tell that the weather was bad; GPB was coming in flawlessly on broadcast TV, where usually when the sky is clear the signal is so weak we can't get it.at all—So Haunt Me, about a couple who has had to downsize due to the husband losing his job. They and their teenage daughter and young son move into an older house that happens to be haunted by the former owner, a Jewish woman who died after her daughter left home with an inappropriate boyfriend. I see Jewish stereotypes are just the same in England: the ghost is a kindly but meddling type who appears to both wife Sally and the son. (They also have the cutest Corgi.) The Good Life (Good Neighbors) is also back on, followed by Keeping Up Appearances, Are You Being Served, and two helpings of As Time Goes By.

Labels: anniversaries, birds, dogs, food, friends, pets, television, weather

----------------------------------------------------------------
. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:37:00 PM

Comments: Post a Comment