Starting From Scratch

I’ve love chocolate chip cookies. As far back as I can remember, my dad always had us help him make cookies on the weekends. My mom has a picture of me, Siri and Dad making a batch—Siri and I are each standing on chairs to reach the counter top, and I’m wearing yellow “footie” pajamas. I still remember how important it would make me feel when my dad would drape the kitchen towel over my shoulder. It served as a symbol of rank, like those dangly yellow tassles naval admirals have on their shoulders. In our family, the one with the kitchen towel on his shoulder was in charge.

“Boy, do I go for those! Why they’re great on… or even plain.”

We always made our cookies from scratch. I don’t know whether in those days EVERYTHING was made from scratch, or if we were just too poor to do it any other way. To us there was no other way. The cupboard next to our stove (no matter which house we lived in) was always stocked with sugar, flour, and chocolate chips.

“Come and get it! The victuals’ on, the table’s set, it’s all a-waitin’ to be et!" (ibid)

Half way through college my roommates and I discovered the cook and serve, pre-made Otis Spunkmeyer chocolate cookie dough in the frozen foods section at Costco. No more powdering my nose with flour, no more picking egg shells out of the mixer, just place the dough on the cookie sheet and, oujalah, you’ve got piping hot chocolate cookies ready for the eating.

Once I moved in by myself, I decided to go back to the old fashioned way of making the cookies from scratch. I’m not as pressed for time as I was back when I had homework and intramural games tugging at my schedule. But I’m finding that its hard to remember everything from that recipe that I could have thrown together in my sleep at age 11. Making anything from scratch is hard work.

“It's gone.”
“What?”
“I said it's gone. The whole investment. The whole shebang.”
“Oh, gosh!”
“Not the beach, Dad!”
“Under water. All of it.”
“His face told the tale. One phone call and the Pfeiffer fortunes had landed on the continental shelf. So of course, being neighbors, there was only one thing we could do:”
“Waiter? Double steak sandwich - make it fast, huh?”

I lost all my blog files today. I don’t know what happened. I was writing one of the greatest blogs of all time about the Valentine’s Day weekend. I started on it before the weekend began and I spent all my free time on it this morning. I had it all but finished—all it needed was a final paragraph and to verify one Back to the Future quote. I keep the files on a jump drive (its easier that way to work on it at both home and work). When I got home the files weren’t there. So I figured it must have saved to my work computer instead of the jump drive. But when I got back to work, it wasn’t there either.

“Now, look at this next entry, it’s the kicker. ‘White rabbit object.’ Whatever it did, it did it all, but with the keychecks off, the computer didn’t file the keystrokes, so the only way to find them now is to go through the computer’s lines of code one by one.”
“How many lines of code are there?”
“About 2 million.”

I tried every way I could think of to recover that file. It wasn’t just the Valentine’s blog that I lost. It was the file where I put all of my ideas on ice until I have a chance to write about them in blog form. Topics like exploring the limits of sanitation hazards when I have to work at the desk of a co-worker when she’s on vacation, a study of my awesomeness within the context of using Ebay to find things that I had assumed were non-existant, and exploring the vast similarities between Heath Bryant and Kevin Arnold.

Today’s mishap was more than just a guy losing a computer file. Today the world lost an historic document full information vital to the future of mankind, we have lost a volume of wisdom to which our children and theirs ought to have had an inheritance. The gap this loss will leave in the historical records of this planet will be remembered as a tragedy comparable to when Martin Harris lost the first 116 translated pages of the Book of Mormon or when the majority of the 1890 U.S. census was incinerated in the 1921 U.S. Commerce Department fire.