Turnout at the gym was very light this morning. This surprises me quite a bit because weekends before were always packed. Not only that, the place was running a promotion last week whereby those who signed up by a certain date were charged only one dollar for the first month. I myself saw fifty new people being shown round the premises after having agreed to join. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, since gym memberships are often adopted by people who have no real desire to put out the effort to show up or if they do, they quickly grow weary and stop attending altogether. One could always justify sporadic attendance by rationalizing that the membership only costs ten dollars a month.
I hope the coconut cream pie I made goes over well at meeting tomorrow. The recipe called for either corn starch or flour and I prefer corn starch because I find it to be a much more effective thickening agent. The other side of it is that it tends to scald quickly and easily. Fortunately I saved the filling before too much damage was done, but I really wish for printed accuracy with recipes. This one instructs you to blend the ingredients for the filling on the range top at medium high heat. That was clearly too high. Within five minutes the mixture began to scald and stick to the bottom of the saucepan. Conversely, the recipe mentioned that the finished pie with meringue topping ought to be baked for no more than fifteen minutes. In reality, it took twenty-five minutes to thoroughly brown the meringue and cook the filling.
Aside from that, I took an editing test required for being employed by a technical writing firm. The first three sections involved a lot of revision and polishing of very poorly written text, so I did well on those. The fourth involved very technical scientific knowledge, and I wasn't sure whether I needed to know much about the particulars of the experiment in question. The fifth section involved a research citation that required one to have prior knowledge of a style manual I had never used. Hopefully they'll be willing to overlook that section and acknowledge that I do, in fact, have marketable skills. I had to completely fabricate five years worth of editing experience that I don't have, but I think they'll buy what I wrote.
This job doesn't pay a tremendous amount, but I might be able to cobble together enough part-time jobs to relocate sooner to DC then I was originally planning. As it stands now, if I can make it back by the end of the summer, I'll be satisfied.
I hope the coconut cream pie I made goes over well at meeting tomorrow. The recipe called for either corn starch or flour and I prefer corn starch because I find it to be a much more effective thickening agent. The other side of it is that it tends to scald quickly and easily. Fortunately I saved the filling before too much damage was done, but I really wish for printed accuracy with recipes. This one instructs you to blend the ingredients for the filling on the range top at medium high heat. That was clearly too high. Within five minutes the mixture began to scald and stick to the bottom of the saucepan. Conversely, the recipe mentioned that the finished pie with meringue topping ought to be baked for no more than fifteen minutes. In reality, it took twenty-five minutes to thoroughly brown the meringue and cook the filling.
Aside from that, I took an editing test required for being employed by a technical writing firm. The first three sections involved a lot of revision and polishing of very poorly written text, so I did well on those. The fourth involved very technical scientific knowledge, and I wasn't sure whether I needed to know much about the particulars of the experiment in question. The fifth section involved a research citation that required one to have prior knowledge of a style manual I had never used. Hopefully they'll be willing to overlook that section and acknowledge that I do, in fact, have marketable skills. I had to completely fabricate five years worth of editing experience that I don't have, but I think they'll buy what I wrote.
This job doesn't pay a tremendous amount, but I might be able to cobble together enough part-time jobs to relocate sooner to DC then I was originally planning. As it stands now, if I can make it back by the end of the summer, I'll be satisfied.