Week Two

Sunday
Well, I went to church and  I accidentally showed up an hour early so I got to talk to some old ladies. They were cute and they knew everyone because they have lived in the area forever so they introduced me to some people. There were only three people my age so I just hung out with the moms. Kara called me the mom of our apartment (since I cook, clean, check up on everyone etc) so it makes sense that I fit in with them.

Monday
More salad dressings. Nothing new there.
I found out I live within a couple miles of a prison. Pretty exciting. One of my coworkers told me that it is part of the reason the mall I live by is so ghetto. I live by thugs.

Tuesday
The vice president came today. It was interesting. I showed off my salad dressings which he liked. At some point during my presentation of the dressings he criticized my choice in shoes... I was a little confused why he even cared but I guess I won't wear those shoes to work again.
Went to institute. It was pretty fun, I met a bunch of people which was exciting. Turns out there's a bunch of things planned for the weekend. I just hope I can actually get to those places...

Wednesday
Had the worst night's sleep ever out of anticipation for my call. It didn't come. Hopefully I don't drive myself crazy.
I randomly hiccuped at work and I realized that I hadn't for awhile. I figured out the last time I did was about two weeks ago. Then I hiccuped about once every hour and it is still continuing.
An old man told me I looked nice at wal-mart today. That was exciting.
My salad dressings are finished! I made larger batches of the tests and they're going to be sent off to be taste tested. I am pretty proud of them, they taste great. They could save a company a whole lot of money (maybe a million dollars over a year!!) so I am pretty excited.

Thursday
I am not done with salad dressings apparently! My other dressing was a creamy one that is not shelf stable (needs to be refrigerated) so I'm making one that is shelf stable. It's more of a vinegar and oil based dressing.
For lunch I brought salad so I could use my dressing. It was absolutely delicious. One of my coworkers wants to take some home to keep in her fridge which means I did a good job.
I have learned all about brand name products this week. Some of the things I bought generic, and they do not have the same taste as name brand (which I knew). However generic products sometimes don't have the quality either meaning they go bad faster or become stale faster. Even for things where you wouldn't expect the quality to change it probably does. I bought some grated Parmesan cheese and just got the generic brand. We tasted it and decided there was a lot of filler. Compared to the Kraft brand, you could taste the difference, although Kraft still has some filler in there.

Friday
More work on salad dressings. I went to the store and bought a few so I could see what is out there. Mine tastes different from the few I bought. Although, the ones I bought all tasted quite different from each other. It will be interesting trying to figure out what I need to do.
I have also learned about the deteriorating levels of consumer acceptance. We now have much lower standards as consumers for almost all products. We accept things just because it's name brand or it's convenient not because it tastes good. A great example is Kraft mac 'n cheese or shells and cheese with velveeta. If you have ever had homemade mac 'n cheese it is about 1000x better. The Kraft stuff does not even taste like cheese to me. Everyone is sucked into the "blue box" and that's what we think of when talking about mac 'n cheese, our ideal is skewed.

Saturday
Surprise trip to West Virginia? Heck yes!! There was a tri-stake ysa spring festival down there. Someone had mentioned the festival at institute but I didn't realize it was so far away. I ended up talking to someone who knew about a carpool just a couple hours before it was leaving, so pretty spontaneous. The trip was good, a two hour drive that was fun. It was supposed to be a major ysa all day event but only twenty or so people were there. We played games and had dinner. With the few people it was nice, we got to know each other and I learned most everyone's names. The games were perfect with only a few people but when it got to the dance it was weird, even worse than a stake dance! If we had moved to a smaller room it could have worked but there was too much space in the gym for too few people. It made me miss the dance parties at sparks!!