an ounce can be volume OR weight?...oh yea...

Today started off pretty easy...and then just got funny.

First of all, Tara and I got in at about 7:00 AM to get some work done before heading up to the SUB for breakfast (I'm loving all the free meals that this job has to offer...). Anyway, we checked our emails and updated our project lists accordingly. While Tara was going crazy with her dish estimates, I got to highlight a sheet of recipes...little did I know that would later come back to haunt both Tara and me. More on the terror later. Tara and I went to the SUB for breakfast and then picked up our weekend food from the kitchen. We walked back to our residence hall to put away our weekend munchies and ran into the manager of the dining hall that is located in our reisdence hall. This dining hall is closed for the summer, so we had not been inside of it yet. The manager, Mitch, invited us in for a quick tour. He showed us 2-3 pieces of equipment that dated back to the begining of the hall--the 1950s! It is so neat to see that some pieces of equipment can be well taken care of and used for years.

When we got back to the office, Paul had done some processing to my highlighted list and started us off on our crazy assignment. Tara and I were instructed to change all of the portion sizes of these recipes from the bulk portions to the actual consumption portions. This is necessary to do because MSU is going to set up a nutrition information kiosk in the dining halls so that students can look up all of the nutrition facts on what they are eating at that time. If the portions were still huge (for instance, 1 gallon of ranch dressing instead of 1/4 cup of ranch dressing), the information in the kiosk would be incorrect.

Changing these portions was easy at first. I was so glad to have learned all about the #10 can (shout out to Mrs. Cox, foodservice and meal management!) and that I knew about "the gallon man" from elementary school. However, I got on an overconfidant roll putting these in, and failed to understand the difference between using volume measurements for canned fruit and weight measurements for whole fresh fruit (like grapes or berries). This is where my trusty new friend The Book of Yields came in handy. Tara found this book to very valuable as well, since she was assigned to change portions of uncooked pasta to portions of cooked pasta.

Through all of our crazy math mistakes and successes, Paul has been wonderfully patient and encouraging. I know that math is one of my weaknesses, so I do my best to work extra hard to understand, practice, and perform problems slowly so that I can get them done correctly. It's nice that Paul is willing to be interrupted in his work to come and help Tara or me understand these conversions.

Since we've worked some long days this week, Paul is letting us go early today! woohoo!!

Tara is from Montana, so she knows a few people who are living in Bozeman this summer. I got to meet them last night when we all went on a hike after work, and we have plans to celebrate one of their birthdays tonight.

I am planning to upload some pictures to previous posts this weekend...so stay tuned!

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