Rock and Rolls

Huzzah, the wedding is over. Our guests they hath gone home, and soon life shall be back to what passes for normal around here. Saturday was a very long and almost entirely good day. The market got off to a wonderful start when I found the perfect wedding present for Kayleen in an art dealer's booth. Note to self: Deliver wedding present at next opportunity. The market went very well, I ended up selling every last cookie once again. If I keep baking more each week, I'll eventually start having leftovers, right? Okay, so I sold the last four bags to Mom for use as lunch refreshments, but a sale is a sale, right? I also found some nice polished pieces of Brazillian agate at another booth and bought a handful to use as paperweights. I don't know agate from Agamemnon, but they're pretty and they hold down things they're piled on, so all in all a good deal. I also managed to trade a cup of my special punch for some half-loaves of bread from the Volker's Bakery booth. They're based out of Utah, but I like their bread a lot better than the Great Harvest bakery here in town. GH is a little too hippie/yuppie for my taste, their bread isn't bad but they fancy it up with sunflower seeds and low-carb wheat and all kinds of things that make it feel like their place is as much a cause as a bakery. Volker's is probably every bit as healthy, but they focus on making good european-style bread rather than trying to make you feel good about their bread. Their focaccia is wonderful stuff, I used a half-round of it for dinner tonight. Spread it with garlic butter, top it with swiss cheese, melt it under the broiler, and Life Is Good...

I'm pretty proud of how the wedding reception went last night too. When I was ready to go out there I tossed my chef coats and a few scarves in a box, grabbed my nephew Jonathan, and headed out to the church building it was being held in. It took a while to get things settled so we knew what we were doing, but by the time the reception was ready to begin we had the kitchen worked out and two more helpers recruited. Jonathan, his sister Caitlin, and Kayleen's little brother Quenton are all in their early teens, old enough to think on their feet but young enough to still take direction. If there is one truth I have learned, it's that if you give a kid a chef coat and a job to do, he will happily work his tail off. I am not a great chef, and I don't have the ambition to become one. But I will say this, I am getting pretty good at organizing a catering kitchen, and between that and my helpers and the planning abilities of my sister and her daughter the bride, we rocked the reception. The food flowed out in a steady stream, there was rarely a real shortage of anything, and nobody walked away hungry. By the time the party started to wind down, I Was Beat. But dang I felt good.

For now, we're just slowly putting our house back together and eating up the leftovers. There's a bowl of lasagna in the fridge that I've got my eye on for breakfast, and there's still some little cheesecakes floating around begging to be filled with a bit of strhubarb jam and eaten slowly. There's something else I'm planning for tomorrow, that I am really going to be ringing the Goddess of Fate's bells about tonight. I don't want to talk about it too openly to avoid jinxing myself, but it involves a possible business opportunity, and if I pull it off it'll be the bravest thing I've done in years. Wish me luck!

The Evil Overlord does not condone the harming of animals unless it's A) fictional, and B) funny. This message brought to you by the Greater Council for Enlightened Chaos.