Not So Easy Bake Oven

Maddog received an Easy Bake Oven for her birthday last week. Of course she's going to be a little baker like her auntie, right?

I'm all for kids baking and cooking--it's therapeutic, good for the math and science skills, and creates delicious goodness. But Easy Bake Ovens, even though we all wanted one when we were kids, are not very practical.

I know, I know, I sound like a total hater. I'm all for toys. But if you are going to learn to bake, it is not going to be by just adding a tablespoon of water to a packet of mix and "baking" it with a 100W bulb. And what really baffles me is that the 100W bulb has to "preheat" for 15 minutes. I can preheat my real oven in that amount of time! I can just as easily teach Maddog how to bake a real cake. It doesn't require that much more work than boxed cake mix. And at least regular cake mix requires adding some ingredients in addition to water. And you can make enough for the whole family.

I will say, though, that the Easy Bake chocolate chip cookie (singular, as only one can be baked at a time--we had to split it 5 ways) was much better tasting than we expected.

IHNIWTM (I Have No Idea What That Means)

I work in a field that is acronym-centric. My institution, my department, my division, and pretty much everything else has an acronym or abbreviation.  Even though we are reminded on a yearly basis, I will never remember what RACE stands for (in case of fire):

     Rescue
     Activate the alarm
     Confine the fire
     Evacuate (I always think "Escape!")

We also live in a society of txt spk. I have a hard time deciphering it (look, I still write out my to-do lists, okay?), and the niece and nephew are not quite old enough to translate for me so I have to rely on Dirty and his 20yo interns. LOL, LMAO, NSFW, TTYL...that's about all I understand at this point. Someone at work hit "Reply All" to an email and sent a message to about 800 people that said "FML."  The saddest thing is, no one in my office knew what the hell that meant. (we looked it up: "f*ck my life".)  Yeah, we're old.

But as bad as I am, my friend Jamie is even worse. It is a running joke that he does not get acronyms.  "Let's meet in the WV for HH."  His response? "Why would we go to West Virginia?" Um, that would be the West Village. For happy hour.

To Do...

I openly admit that I am not particularly tech savvy. Sure, I blog, I Google like nobody's business and I am a pro at online shopping, but I have only just noticed that there is a specific camera button on the cell phone I've had for the past two years. And I can barely use my little digital camera.

My friend Westchester is all about the electronic. At least 2 Apple devices go off when he gets an email, and he seems to control everything with his iPhone. It's scary. When I mentioned to him that I still keep a paper calendar (I ♥ my Moleskine) and honest to god paper To-Do lists, where I gleefully cross things out with a marker, he almost had a seizure. It got worse when I mentioned I will probably stick with my old (paper loving) ways even after I get the new iPhone in a few months.

Yes, yes, I know it is bad for the trees. But will using an electronic device lessen my carbon footprint more than pen and paper?

Also, old habits die hard. I think handwriting is a dying art. I spent all that time in grade school honing my special print (cursive was definitely not for me.) When is the last time you saw a friend's handwriting? I think for a large majority of people I've befriended in the last few years, I would not recognize their handwriting. In fact, I may never have even seen their handwriting. There is something to be said about a personal, handwritten note; text and email--as much as I love it--just doesn't quite make the cut.

Luckily, I have a small coterie of friends who love real mail as much as I do, and we send each other cards and postcards.  I am fairly certain I could identify them by their handwriting alone. I think that is a testament to our friendship, no?