2 week update

Dear Spartan Foods of America,

I would like to point out several major and minor errors in one of the recipes on the back of the Mama Mary’s 7″ pizza crust packaging. In Apple Crunch Dessert Pizza, the second ingredient should be 1 tablespoon of butter (as is referred to in the instructions), not 1 teaspoon. You also list “1/3 pecans, finely chopped” and it probably should read 1/3 CUP pecans. There should be a period after 450 F in the first line of the instructions, and the comma between butter and Layer in the second line should be a period instead. In keeping with standard recipe style, pecans should be listed before the egg in the ingredient list, because that is the order you say to use them in the recipe. The second time you refer to butter in the recipe, you should say 1/3 cup because there are two listings for butter in the ingredients. Also, you don’t say what to do with the brown sugar-pecan mix (I cleverly deduced that you sprinkle it on top of the pizza, but you don’t actually say what to do with it in the recipe.) I am a cookbook author and so I tend to notice when there are errors in recipes. I am also a graphic designer and shudder to think that something with so many errors got sent to the printer.

Thanks for your attention.

Posted by Katy, 8:56 p.m.

Evil! Eeeeeviiiiillll! that’s me. Guess who hasn’t written an entry in her blog in, oh, TWO WEEKS? The evil me, that’s who.

The busy me…

I’ve been up to a lot lately, but that’s no excuse. Being up to a lot means merely that I should have more material to write about. Less time, perhaps, but what is time, really? It’s just something that I waste when I exercise, or sleep, or play games on the computer. All of which are certainly life-enhancing activities (even the exercise I guess), but I’d have more time if I didn’t spend time on those things.

OK, so we did a garage sale the other weekend. Those things are a lot of damn work. you sit outside all day, haggle with people over a dollar or two, get sunburned, and hopefully make a few bucks. The good parts about it were that it was an exceedingly nice day, quite sunny and cool-but-not-too-cold, and we had coffee and a box of pastries in the morning (thanks Tamarah and Kathy!). I busted an 8-year-old shoplifter (very diplomatically, thank you very much), not because of the value of the 50-cent item I’d watched her tuck into her pants, but because Stealing Is Wrong and her parents, in this particular case, quite obviously didn’t care. We sold an old Mac and printer at the very last minute for a bargain-basement price, simply to get rid of it and hopefully to give it a good home. We made a little bit of money; maybe not enough to justify all the setup work and then sitting out there for eight hours, but it didn’t turn out too badly in the end.

We had a nice Thanksgiving holiday. Mom and Dad and Bob came into town. Mom brought up a whole bunch of food, and Doc and I cooked the rest. We also had eight friends over eating dinner with us. Doc’s turkey turned out awesome for the 2nd year in a row. He’s really good at that. Also I could eat his sauteéd asparagus all day, and I didn’t even know that I was that fond of asparagus. The way he makes it, I turn into an asparagus-addict.

It was nice to have a few days off. I used a lot of the time to bust ass and get my 2nd DVD project practically finished. I say practically because I got it done, burned it to disc, took it downstairs to watch, and immediately realized that I had forgotten to keep a lot of my graphics within the graphic-safe area of the workspace, so everything ran off the edges of the TV. So I’m redoing parts of it and will try again. I think it’s good; I think it’s funny; but I’m so sick of this whole project that I can’t really tell anymore. I just hope that my friends like it and don’t think that it’s a stupid idea or something that they’ll never watch.

We also had a really nice anniversary (3 years!). We went out to dinner at our usual place, Kostas. We had decided not to buy each other gifts, but Doc gave me a very sweet handwritten note, which I can tell you that I treasure more than anything he ever could have bought for me.

At work, I did get a promotion and a small raise, finally after weeks of talking about it. In theory I’m not supposed to be doing tech support for the office anymore, but in reality not much has changed. I guess I just have to keep on people about not bringing their problems to me anymore. Things change veeeeery slowly around here, if at all. I also have a new boss in Media Relations, as of today. She seems very nice and reasonable, but she has big shoes to fill.