(no subject)
Nov. 24th, 2003 01:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liralenI've always been mildly suspicious of anything that reads "Homeopathic Remedy", and the Zicam commercials on TV gave me very little confidence. Something that can just beat down a common cold?
But on Saturday morning, I could feel Jet's cold starting to really bite. Sniffling nose, start of a sore throat, and I had enough of a headache to wonder if it wasn't really a fever. John had to go out to buy a new oven lighter piece, he'd actually pulled the oven out from the place it rested, went to the Web to find a blown-up diagram of the oven itself, and pulled the ignition unit out himself. There's another unit that lights the broiler, but it had a different connector, so we couldn't just swap them; but we did have an ohm meter that pronounced the good one to only have 60 ohms across it, while the bad one was pretty much an open circuit (life is good in a house of EE's).
So he had to go out anyway, and he had a grocery list of things that we needed to patch up the rest of the feast for Sunday, so I asked him to go ahead and buy a box of the Zicam nasal gel applicators. It couldn't hurt.
And it didn't. Surprised the hell out of me, but within hours, all my symptoms were gone. I was able to make stuffing, cut tomatoes, make cranberry sauce, and prep all the steamed vegetables for 150 people. No problem. We even went to the church in the driving snow, and delievered all the prepped food, salad, and rolls we had and then came home and made another gross of rolls in the now fully functional oven.
The lunch, itself, went great. The two things that John paniced about, the salad and the rolls, were WAY over, as I'd thought, but I'm a real sucker for assauging someone else's fears. John had bought an EXTRA eight pounds of salad, and we were a good 12 pounds over. Luckily, the OUR center, in Longmont, takes even fresh salads as food donations, as they run a soup kitchen that can use the stuff on the day it's donated. The vegetables were way under, as was the fresh cranberry sauce. I'm so used to taking the sauce to dinners and having people completely ignore it I wasn't at all prepared for it to run out so quickly. The salad helped make up for the vegetables. Especially when only four of the five ladies we called for green bean cassaroles brought them. The variety of vegetables really worked in my favor, though, as people could make up for it.
The three-quarters pound of butter and one pound of margarine looked pretty pathetic at the start, but we had a knob of butter and a quarter pound of margarine at the end. Wow. The gravy was exact. The stuffing had only two cups of the vegetarian variety (vegetable broth instead of chicken) left.
Turned out that there were actually 200 people that showed up.
Whew.
Some folks asked who the caterer was. I was mildly pleased and puzzled by that, but evidently enough people loved it and assumed it had to have been done professionally. Hee.
Zicam got me through it. It helped to see the clinical study done with it, too. I hate testimonials without a double-blind test behind it. Scientific bias, I guess.
But on Saturday morning, I could feel Jet's cold starting to really bite. Sniffling nose, start of a sore throat, and I had enough of a headache to wonder if it wasn't really a fever. John had to go out to buy a new oven lighter piece, he'd actually pulled the oven out from the place it rested, went to the Web to find a blown-up diagram of the oven itself, and pulled the ignition unit out himself. There's another unit that lights the broiler, but it had a different connector, so we couldn't just swap them; but we did have an ohm meter that pronounced the good one to only have 60 ohms across it, while the bad one was pretty much an open circuit (life is good in a house of EE's).
So he had to go out anyway, and he had a grocery list of things that we needed to patch up the rest of the feast for Sunday, so I asked him to go ahead and buy a box of the Zicam nasal gel applicators. It couldn't hurt.
And it didn't. Surprised the hell out of me, but within hours, all my symptoms were gone. I was able to make stuffing, cut tomatoes, make cranberry sauce, and prep all the steamed vegetables for 150 people. No problem. We even went to the church in the driving snow, and delievered all the prepped food, salad, and rolls we had and then came home and made another gross of rolls in the now fully functional oven.
The lunch, itself, went great. The two things that John paniced about, the salad and the rolls, were WAY over, as I'd thought, but I'm a real sucker for assauging someone else's fears. John had bought an EXTRA eight pounds of salad, and we were a good 12 pounds over. Luckily, the OUR center, in Longmont, takes even fresh salads as food donations, as they run a soup kitchen that can use the stuff on the day it's donated. The vegetables were way under, as was the fresh cranberry sauce. I'm so used to taking the sauce to dinners and having people completely ignore it I wasn't at all prepared for it to run out so quickly. The salad helped make up for the vegetables. Especially when only four of the five ladies we called for green bean cassaroles brought them. The variety of vegetables really worked in my favor, though, as people could make up for it.
The three-quarters pound of butter and one pound of margarine looked pretty pathetic at the start, but we had a knob of butter and a quarter pound of margarine at the end. Wow. The gravy was exact. The stuffing had only two cups of the vegetarian variety (vegetable broth instead of chicken) left.
Turned out that there were actually 200 people that showed up.
Whew.
Some folks asked who the caterer was. I was mildly pleased and puzzled by that, but evidently enough people loved it and assumed it had to have been done professionally. Hee.
Zicam got me through it. It helped to see the clinical study done with it, too. I hate testimonials without a double-blind test behind it. Scientific bias, I guess.
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no subject
Date: 2003-11-24 01:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-24 08:08 pm (UTC)Thanks for the congratulations, too!!
John and I were thinking about changing to catering, right after. It would be kind of cool. The more experience we get the better we'd be able to prepare. That would be pretty fun. It would be quite the break from high tech stuff, and the gratification for a job well done would be pretty much immediate, as it was this time. So that would be really neat.
It would feel a bit odd, too, though. Kind of like throwing away my BSEE and MSEE; but it would be work that I'd love. Which may well count a lot more.
In other words, yeah, we're thinking about it.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-26 01:41 pm (UTC)Luck, if you choose to do it!