Final Day at Metheny Weir

Sigh, the last day helping out at Metheny Weir. While the beginning of the day was one spent exchanging goodbye gifts (and a request to continuing helping over the summer!) the rest was one of happy work. Mrs. Metheny was off away at a house painting kitchen cabinets "Old Ochre" and Mrs. Weir continue to work on the Nature Center rain barrel. I worked on creating paint samples.

still more to go but getting there

Each Annie Sloan paint color is presented on a slab of molding, then divided in half, one side with dark wax and the other with clear. This gives client an idea of what their finished product will look like depending on the wax they use.

like this

Yes, the work was trivial. I had to get out every single color (which is a lot mind you), clean all the brushes between pieces of wood, let it dry, apply a second coat, let it dry, tap the wood into two sections, apply clear wax on one side, let it dry, reapply, then do the same thing on the opposite side with dark wax. It seemed to take forever! But then I got to remove the tap. Now let me tell you, never has a simple activity given me so much fulfillment. When I removed that yellow tap, revealing a clean cut between two different shades of the same color... so satisfying. It looked good. It looked great, if I do say so myself.

~Laura

Good Greens Day 10

Today when we came into the office, we met with Keith again and explored further video ideas. This was a joint brainstorming effort and we came up with a few ideas that we will explore in the summer, as we are both working there. After this brainstorming session, we went to lunch with Ms. Cho's entrepreneurship class. While there, we answered some of their questions and encouraged them not to give up on their ideas. After lunch, we were tasked to run a few errands for the office. We picked up water for their cooler and then picked up information cards from Jak Prints. Days like today make me happy to be working for a small company because in the morning we were working with the CEO on one task and in the afternoon we were doing something completely different. It is great to have this variety because it keeps things exciting and keeps everyone on their toes. It's awesome to be able to work with the founder so often because we are learning incredibly important information that will be extremely helpful down the road if we choose to pursue careers in business. 

~Stephen and Ryan

Good Greens Day 9

Today we presented our draft of the video to the CEO Keith. We had shown our video to a few people in the company and they all loved it. This isn't saying very much however, because Keith has a very strong conviction and does not hesitate to tell you what he thinks. Stephen and I knew this coming in because of prior work for him but it still is tough to hear negative reviews about something you worked very hard on. Ignoring all of these negative thoughts, we went to the conference room with the rest of the employees and presented our video.

To our surprise, he loved the video. He had a few critiques but in general thought it was a neat and interesting way to convey our product. This was also a great experience to witness a legitimate company meeting. It is a venue for everyone to share what they're working on and to give positive feedback. I think that meetings are crucial to a successful company because communication is vital for business and and meetings always keep everyone on the same page and up to date with what's going on.

Today was great. I was able to prepare my chicken from scratch to proportions to serving, along with my bacon bits and my croutons.  Not to mention mincing all my tomatoes, onions, hard boiled eggs, and cucumbers and such.  I also made the Caesar dressing this morning too.  I actually feel like I made a from scratch dish and it is really cool how it all turned out/ tasted because I made myself a chicken cob salad.  We also got a new ice cream in called coffee chocolate chunk and it is truly amazing so I had that with my salad.  I am liking the experience we are getting and hope to move further down the line next week.

week 4

Chef let me use his knifes today! I was able to use two hundred dollar knives today to do my various tasks and it was pretty cool.  The knives were balanced differently for each task I had to do and they were very very sharp.  I was able to cut through my tasks for prepping the salad stand like it was nothing!

                Today was weird because we had to start weighing the salad we were giving out and making sure that we weren’t under or over portioning people’s foods.  It made things a lot more difficult because I kept using the weigh bowl for house salads and I would have to retar the scale and wipe out the bowl completely… it stunk because I used a lot of towels throughout the day. 

week 4

This is the final stretch of our project and I am excited for it to come to a close so I can start experimenting with cooking at my house and lunch and such things.  I am also sad to realize that I haven’t been able to do many different things but I realized that I am getting the best possible training. Experience.  The time I am using to prepare the food, cook things on the spot and under pressure, keeping an eye out for multiple things like soup with melting cheese on it and fries dropped in the fryer and the amount of onion rings I am putting on the salmon salad, all are things training me for when I am off on my own cooking and preparing a full 3 course meal.  I am excited to really secure my abilities as a cook.

week 3

Thursday and Friday of this week were pretty regular and I am not sure if it was a good idea or not to do the four and a half week project.  I wanted to get more involved as we progressed through this project but it seems like we are all specializing in prep and creating dishes.  Non of us have been able to experience the grille yet and It is sort of upsetting.  I was again on fry duty but I started in the back and learned to make the new soup, Gazpacho.  It was interesting to do because I had to do some additions to the final product to make it better tasting judged by the chef present.  It is tedious work to add a pinch of salt to over two gallons of soup.