Pancake Day

For starters, this post is about a week late considering Pancake Day was a week ago, but better late than never! 

Anyways, I first found out about Pancake Day when I was hanging up my giant Wilkinson’s free calendar on my bare bulletin board that needed some stuff on it (my bulletin board is much more cheery since Christmas when I hung up all my cards!).  I noticed that there was a Pancake Day and I’m pretty sure that my first thought was, “Oh how cute, a day celebrating that glorious breakfast food!”.  I thought it might be something like “Talk like a pirate day” or “Pi day” (which is March 14th if you were wondering).   Then come to find out-it’s actually something that people celebrate.  Which is awesome.

In the US (specifically New Orleans) the day before Lent is called Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday.  The premise is to get rid of all the things from which you will fast during Lent.  The more official name is Shrove Tuesday, but here they call it Pancake Day, although the pancakes here are quite a bit thinner and not as fluffy as the way Dad makes them.  Still very tasty, though, and I know this because I was fed so many pancakes on Sunday and Monday of last week in advance celebration of the day.  I had never really had savory pancakes, but I did enjoy them.

The funniest part is that after being fed pancakes on Sunday and Monday, I was walking home from class on Tuesday (the actual Pancake Day), thinking about what I want for dinner, and all I wanted was pancakes!  So I looked up a recipe and tried my hand at making them myself.  They didn’t turn out too bad:

Two ham and cheese and one with chocolate chips.  The middle one got a tad burnt, but overall, I’m pretty proud!

 

I can’t escape

As an Indiana resident for most of my life, I have spent my years in the happy bliss of not having to bother with Daylight Savings Time; however, my state saw fit to join with the rest of the continental United States (except Arizona, from what I hear) and in April 2006, I had to ‘Spring Forward!’ for the first time.  Now I’m not going to complain, and I’m sure that there are advantages and disadvantages to DST, but every time I have to switch my clocks, I have a mini panic attack the next day because I don’t know which clocks are correct, which are wrong, if I moved the time the correct direction, etc.  Usually it ends with me typing into Google, “What time is it in Indiana?”  and that puts me at ease. 

My point in all this is that before I came to Lancaster I’ve only switched my clock five times, and Saturday before I went to bed, I switched it the sixth time.  I still had a panic attack Sunday morning, and I still Googled “What time is it in Lancaster UK?”, so I don’t think I’m close to getting used to this.  An interesting note, though:  I was told by a friend, and I confirmed it on Wikipedia, that DST is an English invention.  Who knew!  Also, if you are remotely interested in the tumultuous history of time zones and DST in Indiana, Wikipedia has an extensive article on that as well.