The Chocolate Cake Clock..‪.‬

When I was a teenager, I spent my vacations in my father's farm. In that period of time, about 30 to 40 days, I had nothing to do except things for fun: riding horses, swimming, hunting, fishing, farm activity, barbecue parties with my brothers, cousin and my best friend Marcus Aragao Vergne. In that period, the time has stopped. None of those activities required me to have a wristwatch, I had no time for anything. Of consequence, I lost completely the sense of time, did not recognize if that moment were morning or night wherever. I was lost in time. I did not know in what day or month we were but I realized only specific days and hours: Saturdays 9:00 AM, because my punctual family left the farm heading to the nearest town to do shopping and groceries. My notion of time moved accuracy weekly, I mean, between two shoppings, I was lost in time.

Recently, I am passing through a similar experience. Due to being sick of Parkinson's and being disabled, I do not work anymore and rarely leave from home. Of consequence, I lost the sense of time. Today, I no longer have a family going shopping on Saturdays 9:00 AM, but I have something happening regularly every week. The Episcopal Church gives me a chocolate cake on Tuesdays 9:00 AM, but I got a problem: how to realize when is Tuesday 9:00 AM? In order to resolve the problem, I used the problem as a solution for itself. I'll explain; I got a brilliant idea: Just cut the cake in 21 slices, where each slice has been eaten in a period of 8 hours, because my stomach clock is infallible. Then from the reminiscent of slices, I could estimate the accuracy of time and I built a diagram that shows the correspondence between the time/hours and the reminiscent number of slices. Easy, very easy. What is easier than that is only an hourglass. This is diagram of the regressive or count-down to understand the works of the Chocolate Cake Clock.