Baking Again

I am making chocolate chip cookies. I haven't had the energy for baking in a while. Work has been really hard on me. But tonight I'm making brownies for home and cookies for work! People have been hinting a lot lately. Hehe! It feels good to be appreciated like this.

However, I have toyed with the idea of teaching others to bake like me. Like little one on one classes. I think good food should be shared with everyone but I don't have what it takes to run a bakery. So maybe if I shared the skill with others they could share with more people than I can on my own. It makes me sad when I try biscuits or cookies that someone has made and they made some very common mistakes. They think it tastes fine but I want to share with them how wonderful things can taste.

Anyway. Enough of tooting my own horn.

I think I'm about to start another crochet cycle. I made a baby hat for a baby shower I went to on Saturday. It got the itch going again. That, plus the cooler weather, well, yeah. Also, I joined Ravelry.com. That's where I found the hat pattern. It has earflaps and tie strings to hold it on the kid's head. You know how they are about pulling stuff off their heads and feet and what-not. So I think maybe I'll make some of those mittens on a string and some booties. Then the baby will have matching cold weather gear. Everyone will coo and smile. There will be sunshine and rainbows and bunnies.

Maybe I'll find patterns to make hats and mittens for all the kiddos I know. I am an honorary aunt to the kids in my boss's family. They'll need Christmas presents.

Did I talk about that yet? I work for a family-run company. One of my bosses has a two year old girl, Paisley, that thinks if you give her something, then you're an aunt or uncle. The whole family thinks it's cute and now I'm an aunt to her and to her cousin, even though Maggie can't even talk yet. But I am really happy that my bosses think highly enough of me to perpetuate the aunt thing. They could have just laughed nervously, like I did, and let it go. And since I'm not going to be a biological aunt for at least a few more years, this is good practice. I see the girls for maybe 10 minutes at a time every month or so.

I already talked about all the things that aren't work. Work isn't bad, just lots to do all the time. I'm starting to take on some more responsibilities. By choice, not by request. The production center doesn't communicate well with the stores. I'm not really sure why either. So I'm starting to call the stores on my own to ask questions. Today I saved some butts because an email didn't go through and everyone was waiting on everyone else but no one was calling anyone. The sender of the email should have done one of those things where it lets her know when the message was read. And then called when it hadn't been read in a couple of hours. She's on a really tight deadline. And as it is, she's not getting her job tonight like she wanted. She's getting it Thursday. To make it worse, it's one of those annoying jobs that is on funky paper that we have to special order, then the press doesn't like it and the ink won't stick. Also, it's for a really special event with lots of high paying donors.

There's a law that the more complicated and rushed a job is, the more things are going to go wrong. And guess what! We specialize in rush jobs! Yay! At least we're a small enough shop that I can be aware of things that are happening all over the place and try to stop problems as they come up. That's kind of a daunting thought. Maybe I'll just try to fix the problems that cross my path, like I have been doing.

I ate too much cookie dough and now my stomach hurts. Ugh.