Sigh.

For your edification, shock, and awe, a few links today. Take what you need, want, or like, and leave all the rest.

Start with the execrable Ernest Hemingway who spent a quarantined summer with his wife, his mistress, a sick toddler, and a nanny.

Take a break with Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Anne Porter’s novel about the 1918 Spanish flu.

Keep going with Luy Irvine’s memoir Castaway (here’s just a sample) or E.M Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” about a society where people live underground in individual cells and communicate only by screens. Written in 1909.

Console yourself with this one-bowl chocolate sheet cake with fluffy peanut butter frosting (pictured above). CAUTION: This cake requires more than a 9″ x 13″ pan. It overflowed my entire oven and required many minutes of frantic fanning to avoid setting off the smoke detector. The dip in the middle indicates this interrupted baking time (you cannot open the oven mid-bake without consequences), but we are none of us perfect.

But it was, in the end, slathered with frosting and FUCKING DELICIOUS. I made changes, of course. I used my gluten-free flour blend, and the frosting was one stick of butter (really soft), 1/2 cup of peanut butter, a splash of vanilla, some salt, and enough powdered sugar, added a cup at a time. Really, you could use any cake and just add the frosting. Jesus. So good.

And also, before you go, listen to this lovely little song: “I Wish You Love.” The singer might surprise you.

Anyway. Today is Friday, in a long string of what have now become meaningless name markers of days.

What was interesting, infuriating, or rather lovely about your week?