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saturday was asli’s going away party – she’s moving back to turkey this friday – and i promised her a better than sex cake. i got up early on saturday to go buy eggs and realized that i’d been putting off culling my pantry for far too long. i threw away two garbage bags worth of stuff. i threw out anything that was past its expiration date, looked questionable or even more frightening – i couldn’t remember buying in the first place. i rearranged the shelves a little too. i bought eggs and some other things at the grocery store around the corner then made the cake. i used eric’s stand mixer, and i have to admit that i’ll probably buy one of those. super handy and time-saving; i cleaned stuff up while the batter mixed.
once the cake was done (or all that could be done before i got to jon & andrew’s for the party) i hopped on the train. the weather was beautiful and the sun was really bright. when i got to the party i walked into the house and the kitchen was a flurry of activity: asli rubbing chicken with jerk seasonings, josh kneading hamburger mixture so vigorously it required him to have his foot up on a chair next to him for extra leverage and soon thereafter, me spreading caramel and whipped cream on the cake. matt brought a huge bowl of his sun-dried tomato pasta salad, there were more kinds of meats, vegetables, a keg of leine’s and a second cake for grace’s birthday that was served as dessert after round 2 of overeating.
as expected, the better than sex cake was a good conversation starter – after some discussion josh and i decided that it’s better than bad sex (what isn’t?) and better than a hand-job but the certainty sort of ends there. probably not better than actual decent sex. thus, in the future i’ll have to parenthesize it or something to reflect its new title of ‘better than a hand-job cake’.
i got a lot of great photos that day. sadly, no photo of “the four biggest nerds at the party” sitting on the couch together (josh, matt, lucas and i), josh elbow-deep in hamburger or the big jam session that happened in the basement. i also made sure to have other people take pictures of what seemed to become the highlight of the night (at least to some of the guys) – almost all of the girls on the couch, then four of us on the couch in various stages of sleep. a lot of admittedly adorable photos from that stretch of time, including a really good one mark took of asli.
sunday i tried my best to sleep in but i couldn’t sleep past 8am. disappointing. i just need a mortgage or some car payments and i’ll be a real adult. i spent the morning dusting and sweeping my apartment and doing some laundry. in the early afternoon charlie, travis and one of travis’s roommates, chase, picked me up and we drove up to the chicago botanic garden. it was a really nice drive and the parts of the garden that were in bloom and not drained due to ‘shoreline stabilization’ were beautiful. i believe charlie referred to it as ‘eden’. we walked all over the garden and only left once it got so cold/windy that we couldn’t stand it anymore. i got some more good photos of the guys smelling (all of the) flowers and posing with a replica of a giant pumpkin.
after the garden we went to ted’s montana grill for bison and cherry lemonade. much discussion of borax and whether travis and chase were on a date (no, but i bet the waiter thought so – shared check, shared to-go box, shared meaningful glances…wait no, not that last one).
post-dinner charlie and i dropped off travis and chase at the blue line then went back up to andersonville for ‘the sopranos’. after that antonio, charlie and i watched ’empire records’ and then charlie and i watched ‘major league’ which i didn’t realize starreddennis haysbert. from pedro cerrano to the allstate guy? odd.
i’ll post photos from the weekend over the next week or so!
photos: asli’s party, botanic garden