Book Review: Julie and Julia

In Julie and Julia, Julie cooks her way through every recipe in Julia's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days. Julie is from Austin but living in The City with her husband, in a dead end temp job that turned into a permanent job. The book is laugh-out-loud funny, and some of my favorite parts is where Julie yells and cusses at Julia about her commentary on "easy" recipes in MtAoFC.

I love Julie's relationship with her husband and how he encourages her in her crazy, random goal and even helps her cook through the recipes. He knows when she is on a rampage and he needs to duck out of the way and he knows when she needs to be calmed or helped. (Sad that they are now divorced, but that happened post-book. :() OMG Their kitchen sounds so gross, especially since they are constantly feeding friends and even TV crews out of it... the part where Julie found the maggots under the dish rack made me almost nauseous and reminded me of other vivid scenes of maggots (The Dante Club definitely takes the cake - I literally felt sick to my stomach and had to put the book down; the CSI: Miami episode where maggots from a dead body in a condo come through the light fixture to the condo below takes second place).

Throughout Julie's cooking project, she blogs about her trials and tribulations and gains a wide-spread reader base (hence the book deal later). She has regular readers who become a part of her life and are very worried about her if she takes short breaks from her blogging. Her mother reads her blog and at first is very concerned and tries to convince her to stop the Julie/Julia Project. By the end of The Project however, her mother comes around. One of my favorite parts of the book is when Julie goes home to Austin and cooks for family and friends and notes that even her Texan mother was appalled at the amount of butter she was cooking with. LOL Totally like my Texan family... seriously, the only thing you can ever count on finding in their fridge is butter, multiple tubs of butter.

By the end of the Julie/Julia Project, Julie is still in her dead end job, but has found a sense of passion and purpose in her life. (And gets a book deal!) This book made me want to try some more adventurous recipes in the kitchen instead of my usual easy faves... and it probably helped that I was reading this when we tackled the Pupcake Project in Florida!

Letter to AIG Execs

Dear AIG Executives,

I hate your stinking guts.
You make me vomit.
You're scum between my toes!

Love,
Tera



Name that movie!

Running in the Dark

I know, I know... I shouldn't run in the dark. (But you also shouldn't run on a stomach full of Swedish Fish and that didn't stop me either.) But last night I got home from work and put my running clothes on and sat down for a second and the sun went down way faster than I expected. And it wasn't totally dark when I headed out. And running in the dark was kinda awesome! I ran by one house that totally smelled like pot; I'm not even kidding! But according to The Economist, 5% of the adult population of the world takes illegal drugs (same percentage as a decade ago btw), and I ran by way more than 20 houses, so really I should have expected to smell more weed, right?

New Favorite Picture

How true is this picture?!I stole it from Adam's blog, which is also very true.

Facebook

I like updating my Facebook status with things like "stupid St Louis" or "sucky gloomy weather" or "I hate this city"... somehow griping to the world makes me feel better about it. But now I'm friends with a client and a local team member on Facebook so I can't publish those things anymore. So for those of you now in the know, just assume that 10 days of every month I am thinking those things.

Client Analogies

One of the main clients I work with loooooooooves analogies. And she comes up with really good ones too. The funny thing about working for her for almost 4 years is that they start to repeat themselves in totally different contexts (still making a lot of sense though). My absolute favorite of her analogies is relating to what the IT group of my client company actually delivers when compared to what was scoped for a project (woah, did I just totally IT-consultant-nerd-out on you with all those words in one sentence?!). One of the systems that IT built had it's first birthday not too long ago, and my client decided to get them a birthday cake. What she wanted to get them was a box of cake mix, but she decided to be nice instead. The reason being that working with IT and asking them to build you something is like if you went to a bakery and ordered AND PAID FOR this:

And then 7 months after the agreed upon date, what they hand to you over the counter is this:

It's funny cuz it's true.

This is when you laugh and say, thank God I'm not an employee of this place.

Airline Confusion

I almost always fly American Airlines, so imagine my confusion when I woke up from a nap yesterday evening on the plane to see this:


Not sure if you can make out that logo from the stealthily and quickly snapped photo of the beverage cart locker in the flight attendant's little kitchenette (I didn't want anyone to notice I was taking the picture, because well, who does that?), but that is the Continental Airlines logo.

.......?

Yeah, I was confused. I was pretty sure I had boarded an American Airlines plane. In fact, here is a picture of my boarding pass:


That is an American Airlines logo in the corner. I guess either the plane had been bought and sold or parts traded around... but I was still confused.