wanted: taste tester for doughnuts.

Living the dream is called being paid thirty dollars in cash to be a famous local doughnut corporation that shall remain nameless taste-tester for one hour.

Last week I heard from a temp in the doc’s office where I work part-time that the doughnut brand we'll call Crinkly Custard was hiring ‘townspeople’ to test their newest potential line of doughnuts. I called the hotline, spoke to a nice little woman who shall remain nameless and was, in fact, assured that I would be paid cash to taste five doughnuts. Immediately I agreed and signed up for 3:00 Wednesday.

Today I drove fifteen minutes to the middle of nowhere/High Point, NC region and arrived at the CC Factory location. Went inside to find a few of my friends (who I turned onto this coveted wage labor) and was ushered into a board room of comfortable black leather swivel chairs, mini water bottles and small piles of saltine crackers.



The woman in charge entered the room once the test group was all seated and informed us that we were participating in a “market research study” to determine which of the potential doughnuts would take flight if introduced to the general doughnut-consuming public. She used very official language, which made me laugh because we were tasting doughnuts.

Instructions such as “We suggest you take bites or a bite of each doughnut so that you don’t get so uncomfortably full that you don’t enjoy the last samples” and “We suggest that after each sample you sip the water, eat a cracker, and sip the water once more in order to cleanse your palate.” Meanwhile, I’m staring at the bajillion CC posters from years and years of epic fried dough advertising. I swear this is all true.

Next, this chick in a very short hot pink dress comes out with a tray hoisted above her shoulder of individual doughnuts on doilies, delivering them like a 1920s waitress on skates. My three friends and I couldn’t stop laughing, which apparently aggravated the woman in the row ahead of us because she kept turning to look over her shoulder and give us the eye. Anyway, this very adorable girl delivers the most ornate, enormous doughnuts I've seen in a long time, along with forks and knives, for tasting. This occurred five times over the course of the hour.



Near the end, my cell phone alarm (which I did not set, thank you) went off, probably botching the whole study because it disturbed the taste-testing zen, and to which my friend hissed, “they told us to turn those off!”

How’d I get the pictures? You’ll be glad to know, bloggies, that I snuck my camera into the taste test because it was just too good to be true. I needed to prove it. Thanks local doughnut mecca that shall remain nameless!

Lessons learned:
-Don't judge a doughnut by its frosting.
-Sometimes life does get handed to you on a silver platter.
-We weren't wrong. Getting paid to taste yummy food really is the best job on earth.

weekend in beaufort, sc.

June 2008: Evans meet Pratts in Israel.

May 2009: Evans see Pratts at Evans wedding.

August 2010: Evans visit Pratts at beautiful, waterside home in Beaufort, SC. (see below)

6/08


5/09


8/10










Thanks, Pete and Nancy! We love you like family :)

this post doesn't make sense unless you read the last one.

I decided to take a risk. I shut Dora (my incredibly perfect, brilliant, internet savvy MacBook) and shoved her white little self in my bag, got up and left Starbucks without purchasing a darned thing.

Started walking around the corner of the city block, and just as I did, MY CELL PHONE RANG. Did my husband secretly stick it in my shoulder bag as I exited the Jetta? Probably. Anyway, it was a text message from my brother asking me if the initials R.A.B. in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince stand for Regulus A. Black.

Feeling much better about leaving my pick-up point, I continued the CFA search. Truth: I looked up from my cell phone and found myself staring through the Chick-fil-a window!

OH.MY.GOSH.

Walked inside.

They were out of Lemonade.

irony - i am laughing.

On one of those unbearably long road trips from Fort Myers, FL, to JMU after a summer of driving no more than twenty miles to hit the beach at Sanibel Island, my mom said something totally uncharacteristic that I will never forget. "On road trips, I live to eat."

Mark and I are, as I type, in the thick of a road trip. I sit in a Starbucks on Trade Street in Charlotte, NC with incredible natural lighting as a result of the number of windows. This Starbucks has great ambiance and I have just been sitting in a green velvet chair reading Stephen King's memoir, On Writing. We are headed to Beaufort, South Carolina for the weekend to visit dear friends we met traveling in Israel. They are precious, in their fifties, just moved from New York state to the shore in Beaufort because they wanted to. They're delightful and happy and the last time we saw them was at our wedding 2 Mays ago.

We got to leave early today because Mark has an appointment for work here in Charlotte. Here is where all of these facts come together.

I really want a large Lemonade from Chick-fil-a. I have been craving these lately, but I can't justify spending $2.22 any old day. But a road trip justifies a nonconventional drink purchase, right? When the GPS system said we were 15 minutes from our destination, the place Mark was headed for this appointment, we started looking for a Chick-fil-a where I could be dropped off to purchase a Lemonade, hang out, refill said Lemonade, hit the bathroom, until he returned to get me.

We scoured the GPS to find the closest CFA, but there wasn't one, hence I sit in Starbucks, but I do not want coffee.

Just a second ago I was sitting here and looked up out of these incredible windows, and there was a man, sauntering past, holding a Chick-fil-a cup! No. It cannot be.

Turns out, there is a Chick-fil-a somewhere around here... internet says it is within 0.1 miles. Here's the catch... I didn't bring my cell. Mark said he'd just come back for me.

Do I go get the Lemonade and search for a pay phone?

simon and garfunkel and movies.

Simon and Garfunkel stimulates such aching nostalgia for me about growing up it takes my breath away. Literally. Last night Mark and I were watching the movie ("moomie" as Jonathan, my nephew would say) Bobby, a 2006 flick nominated for a couple of Golden Globes and Academy Awards about the day that Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, a watching which carried on until entirely too late an hour considering our alarms would sound at 5:45 this morning. We have trouble conceptualizing cause and effect relationships: i.e. if you stay up til midnight, you will be tired at 5:45. Nevertheless, we continue to pretend we're at college and that watching late night movies during the week is a good idea. I digress.

The movie is brilliant - one of those surprisingly entrancing performances with a stacked cast of five star actors and actresses that makes you proud to be an American because even though we live in a young country, we've got some pretty massive history. Senator Kennedy's death at the end of the movie is obviously no surprise, so you sort of anticipate it the whole time you're watching, which gives the whole story a grave poignancy, though when the gunshot is delivered in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel it is still shocking. My head had been on Mark's knee, and I sat bolt upright as the images flashed between the real 1968 footage and the movie footage from 38 years later in Hollywood, amazingly grafted together.

"The Sounds of Silence," a song that sails me to six years old in West Chester riding in my dad's car on a summertime Saturday morning to the hardware store, watching dust and lint particles glisten against the windshield and the feel of the polyester fabric against my skinny little legs. Simon and Garfunkel, Billy Joel, James Taylor, the Oldies FM station... the first entries in my musical memories. And although I still love that music, truly, it stirs me up so much to hear it now - makes me want to be there again - small and spindly and young, unaware and mostly happy. No shoes, wild hair, playing with my big sister in the creeks and muddy woods. Perfectly, the haunting song plays behind a speech of Robert Kennedy, which plays overtop scenes from the news that day.

This is just to say that I haven't seen a really good movie in a while (except Inception) and Bobby is a really good movie.