you'll never believe what's happening to your favorite cooking sites!!!

Hello, I'm here to complain again!

I'm tired of the Buzzfeed-ification of what used to be my favorite cooking website: The Kitchn. They post like 15+ posts a day, and I used to read almost all of them. They had delicious-sounding recipes, informative tips, and these great weekly meditation pieces on Sunday mornings that were kind of philosophical about cooking. Sounds like voodoo, but they were great.

Now, we have this stellar content:

Serious Journalism Alert: A Guide to the Flavors of Pop Rocks (actually I kind of want to read this but only ironically you guys)
9 Essential YA Series to Read on the Beach This Summer (what....does this even have to do with food?)
4 Steps to a Pristine Picnic Table (??? please I'm dying to know how to sanitize a picnic table tell me more now)
What Bizarre Thing Should We Spiralize on Facebook Live? (nothing. you should spiralize nothing, and you should stay the heck away from facebook live.)

And like every other article has a number in it:

5 tips for this...27 side dishes for that...7 ways to...a 3 ingredient...4 steps to...[pristine picnic table!]

My other favorite cooking sites (Serious Eats, Food52) have generally managed to save their dignity and avoid the clickbait-y-ness but all of them are falling into Pinterest-ification. All of their front pages are just a matrix of food pictures, which, I can't believe I'm complaining about, but for some reason I hate it. It's overwhelming and confusingly ugly. I need more words!

ALSO: huge pet peeve of reading ANY online article, not limited to food sites: ads in the middle that make me think the article's abruptly over when it's not. It's so distracting and makes me feel like my attention span is even shorter than it is. I get that people need to get paid somehow but...can we just put all the ads at the beginning of an article or something? I would much rather just get them all out of the way at first so that I can seamlessly read. I especially hate it when the interrupting ad is a link to another article on the site. Why are you sabotaging your own content? Now you've ruined my experience of reading your article by trying to interrupt me and have me read something else. Why? Can't I finish reading your own article in peace?

Disclaimer: I know nothing about what drives online clickzz, and there are probably valid reasons for all of these things. (If you know what they are, enlighten me!) I freely admit to sucking the fun out of most things-don't get me started on superhero movies.

at least aaron took really good care of me

This photo is for you, Amanda. :)

Today I felt like yuck all day and came home from church and threw up. This is after I've been sick with a cough all week and haven't slept through the night since last Sunday. I'm really disappointed because I was planning on making a skillet cookie + ice cream this evening to take to a party at someone's house in our branch, but alas. Vomiting has dissuaded me. 

Unrelated, but I think I'm going to be a pretty horrible pregnant person to be around. I hate feeling nauseous (well, okay, I guess no one likes feeling nauseous but I'm a little more vocal about my dislike), and I am no good at tolerating pain. This afternoon post-puking I also had a mildly throbbing headache and I just laid in bed writhing about, thinking how this was the WORST thing EVER. However, I don't think I've actually ever experienced legitimately awful pain. I've never had a migraine. I've never broken a bone or needed stitches. One time I had a root canal done without any anestesia, and that was pretty bad, but that's all I got. The worst pain I ever felt was a root canal, how pathetic is that?

I guess the point of this is I'm a complainer, and I feel bad I can't go to that party after I told the person at church that we were excited to come. Oh well. WOE IS ME.

bugged

I don't see the point of "liking" a pin on pinterest. If you "like" it so much, why don't you just pin it to your dang board, random stranger? (If you are my friend, this doesn't apply. Maybe we have some inside joke or some shared experience represented by the pin, and in this case it is perfectly appropriate to like it.)

Also, while I'm talking about things that bother me, how about the phrase "'nuff said." Would it kill you to type out "enough?" I hate it sooooo much, I don't even know why.

That's all I had to say. I know, deep thoughts.

who only takes checks and money orders?! this is the 21st century, there's an app for debit card transactions!

I am really loving living here, and Aaron and I have done a lot of fun things, but the traffic/driving in general is just not fun. And after a particularly horrendous afternoon at the DMV (we had to find a place to get a money order, the money order wasn't for the right amount, a fight broke out in the parking lot and everyone started freaking out, we left without Pennsylvania drivers licenses), I have to vent.

There is a Target 1 mile away from our house. Guess how long it takes us to get there? Back in Utah, it'd be 3 minutes. Here, it takes us TWENTY. Basically, the lights aren't timed at all, so you stop at every single light at every single block. Because there isn't any street parking available, if people want to stop at a little shop or make a delivery, they just park their car with their flashers on in the right lane. This makes things even worse because everyone driving in the right lane all of a sudden has to get over to get around the dang car parked in the middle of the road! How is this legal, people?!

This is more odd than it is irritating, but because parking is so limited people park in the middle of the street, like in the median lane where people normally turn left. It was really weird seeing that for the first time. I expected to see drivers in all of these supposedly left turning cars, but nope, they were parked and driver-free.

Another thing that's sort of funny is that on really, really narrow streets all of the parked cars will have the rearview mirror on the street side pushed all the way in toward the car body so that cars that drive past don't smack it off. The cars that have the mirrors still sticking out have scratch marks and nicks all over.

That's all for now, folks. My mom is flying in tomorrow night, and we are going to go to the Rodin Museum! I am recreating my French experience here in Philadelphia, people. I can't help it.

if it kills me

I SWEAR I'M NEVER GOING TO GRADUATE.

That's all I have to say about that.

Actually, I have a lot to say about that, but it hurts to much to think about and then I'd have to pull up my life plan excel spreadsheet and start rambling off on chemistry classes with scary names, and study abroad, and ballroom tours, and it just wouldn't make any sense to anyone but my mom (and maybe Josh).

Let me just complain once again about how nervous I am about this semester and what I'm supposed to be doing and blah blah blah blah blah.

I need a nap.

vous ne risquez pas d'être un légume

Sometimes it feels like French is a private club for members who are either from there or served missions there, and I will never gain membership. I take the classes, I read the Book of Mormon in French, I talk with my mom, but this is not enough. This will not make me fluent. And I keep ignoring that and pushing it aside, but one day it will become very embarrassing for me to say I was a French minor and yet can't carry on a thoughtful conversation with someone. (I mean, I could carry on a conversation about food, or airports, or families, or school subjects, or house-related things "la chaise est verte!", but anything that actually matters? describing situations and events? politics? religion? okay, actually I've upped my gospel vocab a lot by reading scriptures in French, but I couldn't bear my testimony or anything. Maybe. Have yet to try.)

Usually I assuage my concerns with the desperate hope that one day I will get to France and I will stay there for a while and I will become fluent if it kills me! And usually I'm fine after I think that to myself.

But every so often reality is shoved in my face in my inability to understand French tourists in San Francisco and I want to cry. It's impractical, it's expensive, and what exactly would I do? I don't think my language skills are where they should be for an internship, I travel with the ballroom team at the same time as all the French study abroads, and I really don't have anyplace to go.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean for this post to be one long whiny rant. I'm a little discouraged.
Don't take me too seriously. After all is said and done I still believe it will all happen. Somehow.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

The good, the bad, the Shakespeare

To Whom it May Concern:

We recently dined at your ********* Pizza Factory location. Living in ********, we've been to the ***** and ****** Pizza Factories many times and have thoroughly enjoyed our dining experiences there. We were looking forward to a similar experience as we went to the Shakespeare Festival in *********.

We were disappointed.

First, your waiting area has a TV with trivia and advertisements playing as guests wait. The slides are all out of order. We were informed that Mount Vernon is the cause of tsunamis, the average mosquito has George Washington amount of teeth, and the most popular boardgame in the world is "Baywatch".

But it didn't end there. Our meal started out with very bland, irregularly-shaped breadsticks. The delicious butter/garlic basting sauce that we've come to love and expect at Pizza Factory was spread over a thin ribbon of the enormous and bulging breadstick. Our waitress then brought out our salads which were drenched in so much dressing that the lettuce was soggy and the entire course was unappetizing. Perhaps leaving the dressing on the side so the diners may use it at their discretion would be a wise choice? Our pizza and pastas then arrived. The alfredo sauce was the most bland alfredo sauce I have ever tasted. At this point we were all wondering whether your kitchen stocks garlic at all. I asked for salt, pepper, parmesan cheese, and garlic powder (surprise, you do have some) which I used to give the dish at least a little more flavor. The marinara sauce tasted like pureed tomatoes with, again, no spice. The pizzas were delicious, although the cooks messed up our order the first time.

It is disappointing to us that the original Pizza Factory is being surpassed in quality by its secondary branches. Our suggestions: figure out your trivia, invest in a spice rack, and for goodness sake cut back on the dressing.

Sincerely,
Austi
Jody
Kim
Katie
Megan

P.S. blog readers, account of Shakespeare Festival to come :)
Actual city names will be filled in when I mail this to the company. :P

so much for "arrested development" and ice cream...

Why can't I just let something go? I swear I'm only being argumentative for a principle, like I'm looking for reasons to be angry.
And why do I have this awful hunch that my birthday's going to suck?

Oh yeah, because I've got an o chem quiz.
And it's one more day that I haven't studied for my Saturday test.

Someone get me a service project. Maybe I should move to Sudan?

Or study instead of writing pointless posts.

AWOIeFNBadhcaksdfjhoiHEGBASKJBHDGalkjnfa!

(translation: this is how i spend my last night as a teenager? pathetic!)

Life in Technicolor

I'm home!
Tour was awesome; being on the team is just fabULouS.
Sometime in the next week look for a post filled with photo evidence of this fact and another about proposition 8 and some related thoughts about that.

Wish me luck with catching up on school. I'm considering changing my major. :P

(Ok, not seriously, but it's nice to fantasize about having facile homework for once)

And it was really fun to mess with FoNtS and colors on this post, as well as typing a bunch of one liners. Time to go to bed for sure.

Sometimes, I just don't feel like being very peppy. :P

Just a couple thoughts:
Guys, it's probably not a good idea to tell a girl she looks tired, even if she does. You're not winning any points there...
Also, being excessively complimentary is not neccessarily a good thing. Hyperbole is only effective if used in small amounts. The more overly dramatic compliments you give out, the less they mean.
That's my opinion anyway.