Twice the rice

Monday was a tough day at the Seminary. They’ve been facing an incredibly tight budget and now they have a personnel problem as well.

It was frustrating for me, because I wanted to purchase web hosting and get the site online before the day was over. But Rusty, the rector of the seminary, was busy most of the day and couldn’t come until late in the afternoon.

On the lighter side, Louise took a photo of Yoli and I with her digital camera, so enjoy!

Anyway, we did get the web hosting purchased, but the site is not online yet. I hope to have it on the web by this afternoon. It’s not complete — we still need information for two pages. But about 90% of it is finished, and I’m happy about that.

Yoli and I also printed out some of our fianceé visa application forms to bring back to the U.S. Originally I sent for the forms by postal mail, and they arrived a few weeks later in a nice package. But the problem is that they were stained last week when some of my shampoo leaked out of the bottle and through my shaving kit bag.

So I was pleased to learn that the INS makes the forms available as PDFs to download and print out from your computer. Not only that, but the PDF files themselves are truly forms. You can open them in Acrobat Reader and type values into the form fields. When you print them out, and they look very professional.

But we discovered a problem when we were working on them — most of the fields aren’t nearly long enough, so you can’t type much into them.

The Josh solution was to place the PDFs as graphics into an Adobe InDesign document and then put a layer of type over them. That way I could control the font kerning and font width and make more fit into the blanks than the PDF would allow.

The past few days we’ve been eating a lot of a rice dessert Yoli made over the weekend. It’s very tasty, there’s just a LOT of it. Why, you ask? Well, Yoli was using a recipe that called for 1 cup of rice to 9 cups of milk (or something like that), and that seemed to be the wrong proportion to her, so she doubled the rice. You can probably imagine what happened — we didn’t have a pot big enough to hold all the milk and rice, and by the time it was done cooking, we had way more than originally intended. Enough for 20 people, according to the recipe (and a little math).

Let’s just say that we’ve had a lot of milk and rice to eat in recent days. Milk and rice for breakfast…. Rice and milk for dessert with lunch….

But Yoli has done a wonderful job of cooking — even those times when it became an adventure — and I don’t think she’s yet made anything that I haven’t liked.