Sunday = Freeday

So Sunday is the one day a week when I have absolutely nothing to do. I have classes and tutoring from Monday-Thursday and I work Wednesday-Saturday. Needless to say, this leaves Sunday as my running around day... Today I ran to Walmart to get some stuff I've been missing (extra bath towels, stuff to wash my car, a bowl to hold fruit, and food). Then I washed my car and watched a bit of the South Park marathon that Comedy Central had going on. Now I'm sitting in my room blogging... Ok, so maybe my day wasn't as eventful as I thought it was...

I don't have too much to talk about... I might decide to post a recipe tonight, but don't hold your breath. I'm not in much of a typing mood today. haha

Jumping on the band wagon

So I went on Verizon's website to see if I could somehow end my plan now that my 2 year contract with them is up, but like an idiot I clicked on the upgrade my device, just for shits and giggles. I saw that I could get a 16GB iPhone 4s for a lot less than it would have been a week ago. I could have gotten an 8GB iPhone 4 for free, but I figured, what the hell? Let's go with 4s... So now I'm thinking about selling my iPod touch. After all, if I'm gonna have an iPhone, what's the point in having the iPod touch? They're basically the same thing, the iPhone just has more capability.

Anyway... I'm excited about the upgrade, but at the same time I'm regretting it... Mainly because instead of $60/month to Verizon, I now have to pay $90/month... I guess the bright side is that I have a pretty decent job and get regular hours. Now that I think about it though, this is actually gonna save me $15 a month, cause once my iPhone gets here, I can cancel my Straighttalk service, which costs $45/month... Yay! I did something good! haha

So! Off on a rant!

Last night was a huge pain in my ass. We were doing a prime rib dinner, so the menu was limited to most of the guests. The guests in the a la carte dining room were all given the prime rib menu, which only had two, very easy to make salads to choose from. The people in the casual dining room were given regular menus (no big deal). Anyway, the night went smoothly and, as per usual, I started getting ready to clean up around 8-8:30 because our last table was just served. Lo and behold, a 5-top AND an 8-top both come in at 8:45 when we close at 9, so now we're stuck waiting for them. The 5-top rung in around 8:55, but the 8-top didn't ring in until 9:15, with the fire entree ticket not coming in until 9:25... Due to clean-up, we didn't get out of there until an hour later than we were supposed to... Normally, I wouldn't mind that one bit, but I had a paper due last night at midnight, and I didn't get home until 11. Needless to say, I didn't get the paper finished in time. I submitted it half complete because I forgot what the professor said his policy on late work was and figured better to submit incomplete than late. If he tells me I can turn it in late for only a few points off, then I'm gonna redo it and resubmit it.

Needless to say, I hate people who come 15 minutes before a restaurant closes. It's just plain rude. How would you feel if you were in the middle of wrapping up at your job, and then all of a sudden your boss comes over and says "Here, do this. Don't leave until it's finished." and drops an hour's worth of work on your lap. I think it's safe to assume that you would be upset.

People suck... Except you guys. You guys don't suck as much

Advertisements

So it's very possible that advertisements will start showing up on this blog. I realize that since almost nobody follows me, it won't really matter, but I figured I'd give a heads-up to the people that actually do. You aren't obliged to click on the ads, but the Google claims that the ads will be relevant to my blog... Hopefully that means it'll be advertisements that relate to chefs and foodies, so if you follow me for those reasons, then you might just take advantage of the ads.

I just want to be clear, the main reason I signed up to have advertisements is so I can get some extra cash without having to devote precious time to a third job... And before you say anything, yes, even though I get less than 10 hours a week, I consider the peer tutoring a job. They are paying me after all.

I can promise this: if anything, having ads on here will just motivate me to make posts much more often. After all, the only way to draw in more followers is to become more regular with posts.


That being said, I'm most likely gonna start sharing recipes and doing educational posts and shit like that. That way I can try to draw in some of my followers on Twitter (follow me @ben_christman if you want), and possibly get some sort of recognition as a foodie if not a chef.


Now that I'm thinking about that though, I still don't know if I want to be calling myself a chef yet... I mean, yeah, I've gotten my Associate's Degree in Culinary Arts, I have my CC from the ACF, and my job title is Pantry Chef de Partie, but I still don't feel like I can consider myself a chef... I guess that's the mindset I'll have for a while. After all, those things all came to me within the past 6 months...

As you've probably noticed, I changed the bio I have at the top of this blog. I think it more accurately reflects who I am.


Well, enough about that... Does anybody have any way to deal with procrastination? I really need solutions that work better than a self-reward system.

This is a witty title

Things have been going fairly decently the past... wait... 8 days? Really? Huh... could've sworn it was longer... Oh well... That's what happens when your days begin to blend together.

That's a fascinating phenomenon I've discovered since I started working.. Whenever you have a job (A real job, not like babysitting or having a paper route), then your days start to blend together and you have a hard time remembering what happened on what day... That's how it is for me anyway. I can remember almost everything that's happened in the past month, but I can't tell you when in the month it happened, and there's a distinct possibility that I'd get everything out of chronological order.

I've also realized that I'm having a slightly harder time remembering when certain assignments are due for school, which is not good when paired with the fact that I almost always procrastinate. For example, I had a paper due for history last night at 11:59 (submitted online), and I had completely forgotten about it until class that day. Then, of course, I have to procrastinate at least a little, so I spent from 4-7 playing Fallout: New Vegas. Then I got dinner, made myself a martini with the shaker that Alex, my roommate, had purchased that day (He made himself one, too, cause we both wanted to break it in), got out my accounting homework, and put Wilfred (Awesome show, BTW) on Netflix for background noise. I didn't finish my accounting homework until 11:55, and completely BSed my 2 page history essay just in time to submit it 40 minutes late.

Needless to say, that experience has taught me a valuable lesson... Don't try to do accounting homework while watching Wilfred, cause it'll take twice as long as you want it to.


Seriously though, I'm gonna try harder not to procrastinate. It's a challenge for me, especially when all I wanna do on my days off work is relax and play some video games or watch stuff on Netflix, but I need to go back to the whole reward system thing that I did Freshman year.... I should also start forcing myself to do Rosetta Stone instead of playing Fallout... But damn it, it's just such an addicting game!

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After re-reading that entire post, I've come to the conclusion that there's too much that I want to be doing right now... I want to be doing Rosetta Stone so I can learn to speak German, keep up with homework, have a steady job, be a peer tutor, and work on the novels I've been trying to write for the past four years...

I should probably start another blog just to keep the 8 of you who follow me (And probably 3 that actually read this thing) up to date on those novels.

For those of you who are aware of, and care about, my novels: Bleeding Hearts has been completely scrapped and Eternal Darkness is most likely going to be restarted again, this time as a possible series. In addition, I've also gotten started on a Sci-Fi novel that's yet to be named and I'm considering doing some sort of Culinary related novel, though I haven't gotten any ideas for a plot yet... Just a basic concept of the characters that would be involved (Taken from people I know and stories I've heard).



That's about all I can think to write right now. I just needed to get that stuff out in the open somewhere, and that's why I kept this blog for so long. (Also a reason why it's called "Rantings of a chef-in-training")

Books and Random stuff

So I finally got my two paychecks deposited into my bank account... Only took three days longer than I hoped and a week after I needed it. What make it worse: Price of books before I got my money: $190 Price of books after I got my money: $270 And to top that off, the two books I needed the most (My Intro to Hospitality book and my workbook for accounting) are on order, so I need to wait until they get to the bookstore before I can get them. On a slightly different note... I have my first session as a tutor tomorrow. I went into the office today to type up some of the notes I had for the subject I'm tutoring (Product Purchasing and Identification, one of my strongest subjects, grade-wise). What made me chuckle though was the fact that I put more effort into that than I ever put into my homework... I'm not sure if it's because I pay to do homework and get paid to type up notes, or if I just care more about helping people than getting a grade... Either way, I put more effort into the tutoring stuff than I've put into homework. More good news: I finally got everything I needed for my desktop computer to be fully operational. That include, keyboard, wifi adapter, speakers and a webcam. The webcam was the only thing I didn't buy, and it's the one thing I didn't really need, which makes it all the more awesome that I got it as a gift from my roommate, Sean, for being his ride into Charlotte when he has class on Tuesdays and Thursdays or work on Fridays. Haven't tested it out on a video-call yet, but it seemed to work fine when I installed it along with Skype. Well, that's about all I've got for now... TTFN!

I'm probably going to die this year

So I've been looking at my schedule and realized that I'm barely going to have any free time this year. I'm working at the Charlotte City Club, I was just hired as a Peer Tutor, and I'm doing 13.5 credits worth of classes. Granted, that's only three classes, but the workload is fairly high in two of them, and next term I'm bumping it up to four.

This year is gonna be interesting to say the least... At least I'm gonna have off every Sunday to be able to relax.