Cake Wrecks, Sausages, and Board Games

Last weekend my friend Kathrine came to visit, and besides reveling in the glory of Supermoon, we spent some time wandering around Philadelphia. Our best discovery by far was a bakery straight out of Cake Wrecks:

Yes, that is five full tiers of icing stalactites and misshapen clowns with broken necks.

"I will haunt your dreams."

They also had wedding cakes:

Those are plastic gift bows on the bottom tier, lest their expert frosting-work trick you into thinking they are icing or anything else that actually belongs on a cake.

After (despite?) viewing those confectionery delights, we were hungry and decided to have sausages in the Italian market. We over-reached.

Those are theoretically each for one person.

Or rather, we didn't anticipate how truly huge an authentic Italian sausage sandwich would be.

Kathrine looks cool and collected...

... but you can see the fear in my eyes.

After being utterly defeated by encased meats, we went home to await supermoon. In the mean time, a bunch of Ben's grad school friends came over for board game night. One of them brought a new game called "Power Grid." You can tell how fun it is from the box!

We spent about 45 minutes trying to set up the board, which has four separate areas for tracking natural resources, turn order, each player's power plant number and status, and the location and connectivity requirements for all potential power plants. It also requires a degree in nuclear science and engineering from MIT. We were entirely unable to complete even the first round of turns, so we eventually gave up and just played Apples to Apples instead. Usually in that game the people who know each other the best win, but Ben's lab friends all did terribly and Kathrine and I dominated, despite neither of us really knowing anyone but each other. As she so aptly put it, it probably had "something to do with the majority of robotics-y people being language deficient." Too true.