Thursday, March 12, 2009

Spring Break

Hot Damn....thats all I can say about the past two weeks. Spring Break was a whole lot of nothing. I was too broke and too lazy to do much of anything other than stay home and watch TV all week. Surprinsingly as much as I like going out, it was kind of peaceful. G-spot went on a cruise so me and Zigs took it easy. And by "take it easy" I mean played lots of Rock Band. Zigs has been challenging me to move from Hard to Expert. So far I've only succeded in doing that with bass. But it works.

But on to what you all should really care about....my trip to Petoskey. The drive up was pretty good. Nothin eventful, although there was just kind of a WTF feeling when US 131 stopped being a freeway. The past hour and a half or so was going back and forth betwee 60 mph and 35mph. Bleh

But the visits were fun. Friday afternoon I made it to Walloon Lake and met a little with Golan, the sous chef there. Mark (the executive chef who I had interveiwed with) was on a trip to Napa Valley so he set me up to meet with Golan. Golan just showed me around the country club and then explained what they do. A plus thing for me is that the two spots they're hiring for would be good for someone with minimal experience like me. Also both Golan and Mark are pretty good at accepting reccomendations from the cooks on possible items to make which ALSO works good for me since I seem to have 10 million ideas floating around my head. I guess it was left at that Mark is going to call me when he gets back and either we'll set up a meeting or talk on the phone.

Afterwards I went to my hotel, checked in and then explored town some. Kind of reminds me of Grand Haven with the "quaint little town on the lake feel."

The following morning I made my way to Bay Harbor Yacht Club to do a stage. That was actually pretty fun. This summer they're catering a wedding with an Indian (as in the country India) theme so they were working on recipes for that. So I helped with a few while they took care of lunch orders and then we tried some. That ended up being most the afternoon and then at the end I got the request that I knew would cement my fate. Dan asked me to make two different types of eggs of my choice. And then I shot myself in the foot by saying I only knew how to make scrambled and Hard boiled. To which the line cook standing next to me said "you shouldn't have said that." So Dan said, well make those and then try something else. I seemingly did okay, but I wasn't really happy with it.

Afterwards Dan pulled me in his office and we talked. Overall he said that he like my work habits of cleaning up after myself and that I worked well with others. But overall he didn't think I'd fit in there due to my lack of experience. He said that while I'd do okay that he wanted me to have an experience that I'd succeced and feel well about and that working up there for the summer probably wouldn't provide that. Mostly cause they go from being slow to getting their butts kicked in the cours of 3 days.

So yeah, it sucks. But I understood. Walloon Lake is still an option so when I talk to Mark I'll bring that up. The whole flip side to leaving GR for the summer is that if I stay, I can take summer classes and then be done by this December and explore my options then.

So yeah, that was spring break. My new lab started this week, and its intense, BUT I'll write about that later

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