#toadthewetsprocket @antones
"The most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never in the budget—is employee morale. If you have low morale, for every dollar you spend, you get about twenty-five cents of value. If you have high morale, for every dollar you spend you get about three dollars of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale."
— Brad Bird, Pixar
Day 35: Friends and walking are good for the soul
This afternoon I met my friend, Heather, at Town Lake for a walk.
We’re both looking for jobs right now, so it was nice to get her perspective on things. We took the five-mile loop and, after making a good amount of sweat, we headed over to Maoz (pronounced mouze - like mouse but with a Z).
Maoz is a vegetarian restaurant that serves mainly falafels. It’s wonderful! It has a variety of sauces and a salad bar to add whatever toppings you’d like. They also offer regular fries, sweet potato fries or a mix, which can be dipped in a curry ketchup sauce. To drink, choose from tea, lemonade and Arnold Palmers.
It was a nice relaxing way to spend an evening—with a friend, catching up, getting exercise and sitting on a patio with good food!
Day 33: The book
First off—I can’t believe it has been more than a month since my last day at CI. Time has really flown. You’d think I’d be really bored by now, but that isn’t the case. There are just always so many things to do!
Today, I began placing some of the paintings for “Jump Little Cake, Jump!” in InDesign and playing around with the text. It took the majority of the day. It’s pretty exciting! It’s going to take a lot of work before I’m completely content and then, of course, Antonio and Lindsay will get a chance for their input. So, we’re not done with the layout, but we are getting closer.
Last night, we recorded several of the characters for the audio part of the book and it was really fun listening to everyone. All the people who helped us out really seemed to be enjoying themselves and that makes me happy! One of our main goals in these books is to bring joy to others’ hearts, so we feel like we are already accomplishing some of that by bringing others into the project. The audio book is going to be great thanks to the 18 or so voices we’ve recorded over the course of about two weeks.
I think what people enjoy about recording is the freedom to play around with their character and try new voices and inflections. I guess it’s the same for actors and actresses—you’re excited to share what you’ve created with others, but it’s also freeing just getting to play around in ways you wouldn’t in normal conversations.
If you’re curious about the book I keep yammering on about, you can check it out at jumplittlecake.com. We are taking pre-orders and it will be coming out in the fall. 
Weekend Fun, Part II
On Sunday morning, I get started working on my cupcake recipe early. I’ve just begun when Antonio calls and asks if I’ve started my recipe. He volunteers to bring breakfast tacos from Taqeuria Arandas and to take photos of the cupcakes. He gets totally distracted eating breakfast and misses most of the cupcake making. That’s OK, because I realize we’ll only get one photo in the cookbook anyway.
I finish with the cupcakes much later in the day—after going to the store for confectioners sugar and teaching myself how to pipe frosting onto a cupcake without it looking sad. Then I begin the photo shoot (results are here). My roommate comes in and comments on how many photos I’m taking. I blame Antonio and his picky-ness, but honestly, I’m kind of the same way. The ones outside turn out best, of course, but are tricky. At one point one of those wispy white pollen things floats on one of the cupcakes. It would have made for a beautiful picture, but then no one would ever eat my cupcakes again.
Essentially what I’m saying is my whole Sunday went toward making cupcakes, perfecting the recipe, photographing them and eventually submitting our recipe to the Austin Food Blogger Alliance for the cookbook coming out this fall.
In case you didn’t know it, Antonio and I have a blog OhSpooning that very much needs to be updated. Once I get Photoshop on this computer, I will be a food blogging machine!
Weekend fun!
We made our Kickstarter!!!! Yay!
On Friday night, someone put in $25, which made us $1 from our gaol, so Caitlin put in the final $1 to cross us over the finish line.
Saturday morning, Antonio and I went to the Farmer’s Market for breakfast and afterward picked up some cupcakes to take to Zack and Caitlin for helping us get to the $7,500 mark. We’ve had a few friends and family pre-order books since then, so we are sitting at $7,625 right now with 7 hours on the clock.
It’s been a really long, but exciting month and a half. If you ever plan to do a Kickstarter, let us know and we’ll walk you through it! It’s quite a bit more intense than you would think!
After dropping off the cupcakes, I went home to get some things done around the house. I bought stuff to make cupcakes (there’s a theme here). I was about to start making the cupcakes when Antonio called to let me know that the dinner he was playing at had room for me to come, too! He was basically singing for our supper, which was well worth it!
The meal began with champagne. Never a bad start. Appetizers were smoked salmon canapes. Instead of just cream cheese, she had added orange zest and honey for the spread-yum!
Then we went inside for pea soup with a scallop crouton. It was truly amazing! Creamy and smoky and lovely.
That was followed by a crab salad, with heirloom tomatos served in a big ice cream float dish, served with a white, fruity wine.
The main dish was some sort of lemon pasta with grilled shrimp.It was no where near as plain as that sounds! Some of the pasta was died black/purplish from squid ink, if that tells you how elaborate it really was. It was served with a dry white wine. Both were splendid!
Then we went on the patio for some entertainment from Antonio and got asked a bajillion questions about our coupledom! It as kinda hilarious because the other guests were three sisters, who were closer to our parents’ age than ours.
“Are you guys going to get married? How long have you been dating? Have your parents met?”
They were pretty excited about “Jump Little Cake, Jump!” too and want to buy books!
After a bit, the dessert came out and it was so good! It was berries and shortcake with limoncello drizzled over it. Yeah.. limencello. And limencello was served with it, too! Oh my goodness! We had a great time and thoroughly enjoyed dinner!
