Last week Nestle Toll House responded to my complaint that their caramel morsels were really butterscotch, I had a Gardyn party with Tryazon, we put things in motion to set up a 504 Plan, and I decided to make one last Slave Leia costume and share the pattern so other people can make it.

I’m trying to get back in the habit of my weekly round-up after going back through my blog and updating all my old posts. I liked reading all the little things in the round up posts. To save valuable space in the title, I decided to leave out the intro words I keep changing. I started with Weekly Round-up, then tried Keane Interest and ended up with Editor’s Picks. I don’t think anybody will miss the extra words.

Week in Review: January 15 – 21

Nestle Toll House Responds to Complaint

I made some cookies during Christmas that were supposed to be caramel flavored, and I used Nestle Toll House Caramel Morsels. Unfortunately, the chips smell and taste nothing like caramel, and totally like butterscotch! I made three dozen cookies that tasted wrong.

You can read the full story here: Nestle Toll House Caramel Morsels Taste Like Butterscotch

I wrote them and complained, and they sent me some coupons to get even more morsels for free. I do like their chocolate ones at least!

As a side note, the day these coupons arrived, I had just been watching Queenpins on Netflix and that’s how the main character starts down the slippery slope of pink collar crime. I haven’t finished the movie yet, but there’s a lot of coupons involved.

My Gardyn Party

Tryazon and Gardyn sent me a full-size Gardyn hydroponic indoor garden to try out, and part of the campaign is a sort of PR party where people can check out the Gardyn, see it in action and ask questions.

My initial idea was to do a salad bar and herbed spreads with the harvest, but my plants were still too small. For some reason, my seeds took a while to sprout. I got my Gardyn set up right away when it came in, but the seeds took a couple weeks to sprout, and were a bit slow to get growing.

I’m still learning how to use it and will be doing a full review once my plants have gotten larger. One thing I did notice is that they grew faster when I thinned out the seedlings. I think I might have waited too long to do that, so they were stunted. Lots to learn about this new system, as it is totally different than any hydroponic set-up that I’ve used.

For the party, I still did a salad bar and herbs, but just used what I was growing to show what a harvest from the Gardyn could look like. I was pretty proud of my fancy herbed cream cheese spread on bread with the little tomato and chive flowers!

I did at least get to use the microgreens. Those grow really fast and are really great on top of salads and meals.

Click here to check out The Gardyn on Amazon

or Click here to save $100 on the Gardyn website

The 504 Plan

This Friday is our meeting at school with my son’s teachers, guidance counselor and school psychiatrist. We’ll be discussing implementing a 504 Plan to help him in school due to Primary Tic Disorder, OCD and ADHD. I’m both anxious about and looking forward to the meeting.

Click here to catch up on why we are doing the 504 Plan and what that actually is.

The Last Leia

I wrote about how I was making one more Slave Leia costume last week. I have the first tutorial done and just need to edit it and put the clips together. I also have the patterns ready for the gold plates at the bottom of the costume. I want to get that up this week, but it’s all moving very, very slowly.

I don’t want to make the costume anymore because it is very time-consuming, but I worked pretty hard on my patterns so I’d like to share them so people can make it for themselves.

And that’s the updates from last week! This week I have an event called Animania coming up Saturday night, 1/27, at the Museum of Science and History (MOSH).