Tumultuous January

In the middle of January we received some upsetting news – Amy had been told that my uncle Willy might have to be put in hospice care. He’d been in the hospital for months battling cancer so I booked emergency plane tickets to visit him with my parents. It turned out that he was in quite good spirits for the situation, and thankfully had the same mischievous spirit I expected although he was a bit slower than I'm used to. He had started to grow a beard in competition with his buddy Johnny, and was driving all the nurses nuts, so I took that as a good sign. We also got to visit with Angie and her cute kiddos, who are growing like weeds. I left feeling quite hopeful, but still worried. Willy was let out the week afterward to go finally go home and pet his dog.


This happened to coincide with a performance of Flash's at Cornell, which was terribly convenient... I hadn’t seen her performance in a while and had forgotten how clever it was. Afterward, we drove around with Flash to visit Taughgannock – the first time I’ve seen it frozen, very cool - and some wineries as is traditional.


The next we took a bread class at Enrico Biscotti that I had given Peter for Christmas. We had originally booked it for the previous weekend but the staff was kind enough to let me switch. It was pretty entertaining – over a HUGE brunch spread, Enrico himself told us the history of the world as according to bread, from ancient Greeks and Egyptians to current day. I wasn’t completely sold on his schpeal – it was told with too much certainty to be historically accurate – but it was fun to listen to anyway. He then pulled out great vats of dough and showed us how to roll a nice skin on a loaf and use the brick oven they have. We also all made foccaccia with various toppings and learned some dough tips. Throughout, Enrico rattled off an impressive array of bread-related stories. A very pleasant morning with tons of food! We brought back two giant loaves each of bread and foccaccia. Pretty neat.