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I’ve heard from a couple of people that my RSS feed is trying to sell them pharmaceuticals. I don’t know why that’s happening and I don’t know what to do to fix it. Boo hoo to me.

Happy Father’s Day to my two favorite dads:  the father of my son and the father of my self.

That title would work better in Spanish, where in and  on are the same word and thus punnier.

Anyway, my total friend James is going to be on total Jeopardy (I know there’s supposed to be an exclamation point there, but I can’t bring myself to do it mid-sentence) on June 23.  You can read an article about his experience if you like.

He is sworn to secrecy about how it all went, but James is one of the most data-ful people I’ve ever met, so I’m optimistic.  However, a high school teacher of mine was also on Jeopardy, and he said it was really more about buzzer timing than knowledge, that everyone was buzzing in on every answer, but you have to hit the button at just the right moment.

Still, I’m very excited to watch James.  I hope Alex Trebek did some of his annoying hyper-French pronunciations of words.  That cracks me up.

There are lots of movies I need to see this summer.

Brüno (7/10) because Sacha Baron Cohen is pretty fantastic.  Seeing Borat in a theater was one of the more memorable experiences of my movie-going life, and I want to see if this next iteration of his shock-comedy lives up to the hype.

I Love You, Beth Cooper (7/10) because it stars (stars!) my college friend and frequent theater collaborator, Paul Rust.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (7/15) because I’ve read the books and seen all the other ones.  What am I going to do, quit now?  I’m not the hugest Harry Potter fanatic in the world (because there is some stiff competition for that title), but there is something undeniably wiggly about sitting in a cold movie theater, trying not to eat my popcorn until the actual movie starts, and hearing that “doo-da-dee-DOO” theme music.

The Time Traveler’s Wife (8/14) because the book was so good.  The trailer makes it look like basically just a romance movie, but the book was so much more than that, and I hope they incorporate those other elements.

Inglourious Basterds (8/21) because my friend Paul is in this one too.  I guess his character wasn’t in the original script, but Quentin Tarantino wrote a character just for him after meeting him.  I’d see this one anyway, though, because it sounds weird and cool, and I like Tarantino.

I don’t know how I’m going to get all this movie-watching done, considering my current one-movie-every-six-months schedule, but I’ll try to work it out somehow.

I am making a cake.

Or rather, I am glorifying a cake.

I’m going to admit something here:  I’ve made cakes from scratch a handful of times, using cake flour and everything, and I’ve never had one come out with that lovely uniform, light texture of a boxed cake mix.  So you know what?  I’m using a freaking cake mix.  Sue me.  Can we move forward?

Aside:  Why is it spelled forward and not foreward?  Every other word I can think of with that prefix (even the homophone foreword) has an e.  What gives?

Anyway.

I am making a cake.  It’s a chocolate cake, and I wanted to jazz it up a bit, so I added a tablespoon of orange extract to the batter.  If what I licked off the beater is any indication, it had a really nice effect.  I was also all psyched to make a filling out of a layer of orange marmalade and a layer of chocolate ganache, but then I picked a bunch of strawberries from our garden and I wanted to get those involved, too.

Daunting was the task of layering those three items, but I came up with a brain flash to melt down the marmalade and coat the cut-up strawberries in it.  Then I drizzled the melty ganache on top of that.

Next, I made the frosting (cream cheese with a little orange extract in there too) and applied a crumb coat.  Confession #2:  I’ve never actually done a crumb coat before.  I know all the fancy bakers do it, and all those trijillion food blogs I read say you really, deeply must do it.  I decided to give it a try this time around, since it’s my first time using my Grammy’s fancy cake stand and I want it to be really pretty.

Right now my crumb coated cake is chilling.  I’ll report back when I’ve completed the next step.

——-

Update:  Oh my god, you guys.  I was a fool to have ever skipped a crumb coat.

Seriously.  It was kind of a pain to apply, and it looked like crap, but that was actually kind of freeing.  “Don’t worry,” I told myself.  “It’s okay that it looks like crap, because no one will see it.”  I got the thin coat of frosting on and stuck it in the fridge while I watched part of So You Think You Can Boogie Woogie on Tivo.

When I got back some 40 minutes later and applied the real frosting, it went on like a dream.  It coated easily, I didn’t pull off chunks of cake with the offset spatula, and it didn’t glob off onto the sides.  I also used a trick I read about on a food blog to stick pieces of parchment under the cake on the cake stand.  That way I could pull them out when I was done and the stand would be all tidy.

It looks all cute (if a little lopsided) decorated with my garden strawberries.  Tomorrow I’ll update with a picture of a slice of the cake, featuring its orange/chocolate/strawberry goodness.

And here it is with a slice cut out, as promised—actually two slices.  Denny and I each had one, even though I wanted thirty.

This blog has been rife with technical issues lately.  I recently got an email from my hosting service saying my account had been deactivated.  There were no further details provided.

The first thing Denny asked me was whether I had any naked photos of Miles posted (I don’t think so—I generally only allow that sort of thing under private status on Flickr).  That was a horrifying thought, that I might be accused of being a child pornographer.  Then my mind flitted to some possibly copyrighted material I might have hanging around, Greta Garbo photos and stuff.  Still, I would have expected a cease and desist (to which I would have gladly complied) rather than a complete and abrupt shut-off.

As it turns out, my site got pwned (or it might have actually been Denny’s site, which runs off my same hosting account, since he was running an older version of WordPress).  I got more details out of my host, and they said there’s an exploit in older versions of WordPress that can wreak havoc.

Anyway, I deleted the offending file and Denny upgraded the site to the latest version, so I think we’re good now.  However, those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed may need to update.

Whenever this sort of thing happens to other sites I visit, it takes me months to get the new feed, because I just think the person is lazy and hasn’t been posting, since I almost never visit blogs using a regular old browser.  We’ll see if my readership goes down from this.

Mostly I was worried that the site would still be down on the 7th for Miles’s 17 month birthday post.  I hope nothing rude happens between now and then.