tomorrow, alex heads back down to philly after break from dancing & classes.  all six of us had dinner for the last time probably until katie’s birthday in a few weeks.

mom told her story again about great grandma ackerman’s sister, who worked at grand central station as a reservations agent, memorized the timetables for the entire united states rail system.

i also whipped up some apple sauce raisin cake.  mom and pop’s wedding cake.  from the recipes of grandma eliza taylor ratcliffe (1900-1986), edited by mom and eva taylor barclay in 1993:

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 1/2 cups applesauce (homemade or McIntosh store bought)
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon and a little more
• 2 cups flour
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
• 1 cup raisins
• Pinch of allspice
• No eggs

1. Preheat oven to 325o - 350o
2. Cream butter and sugar, add applesauce and spices.
3. Add flour.
4. Bake in greased and floured 13”x9” pan until cake leaves sides of pan and springs back when you touch the top.  Leave in pan.
5. When cool ice with white butter icing.

“I’m sorry, I don’t measure very much, so can’t help you too much, experience is the best teacher, do it when you are not having company. 

Lots of love, Grandma”

Aunt Eva says Grandma always put a good meal on the table even though dinner was always being interrupted by people coming by to talk to Grandpa because he was in politics.  Many evenings dinner was rushed because Grandma had to have her sons, Bob and Jackie, dressed and ready to go with Grandpa to the Preakness Farmers’ ball games.  Grandpa managed the team and Uncle Roy played on it.  Grandpa always had to have his sons along with him at the games.

Last year was our first flat-screen, Apple TV, AirPort Extreme, networked printing and NAS.

Adoption was slow.  I was the only one who used the 160GB drive hooked up to the network as well as the printer.  Same w/ the Apple TV, pretty much.

These days, Katie brings downloaded episodes of various shows home from her computer down @ Rutgers (I had gotten her and Betsy a Slingbox years ago w/o realizing that they couldn’t use it).  I either take thumb drives or get DropSend files from Katie and convert them, dump into my library so Apple TV syncs up.  The process is pretty simple.  Just tedious and, depending on file size, a bit slower than we’d like.

Enter a year of living with this tech and, now, Boxee.  Yesterday, I hacked our Apple TV to get Boxee running on it and sent invites to the entire family.  Now anyone can dump any format of media onto the NAS and automatically play it in the living room from their own computers.  We can stream the best web content and each have our own personalized settings.

About 14 years ago, Mom got rid of cable television in our house.  Today, I’m pretty confident it’ll stay that way.  The future has arrived.

jratlee:

my family’s strange (but sort of expected) connection to the jonas brothers continues.

while having drinks at gaslight with friends for my last days of being 25, bill (who, btw, gave me an awesome book) mentions that while at EC, joe jonas had the same locker that bill and i shared during my first year at eastern christian (‘93-‘94).

one day i’ll meet these kids in person and steal their souls.