Why America needs to change over to the Metric System

Before I get into the meat of this blog entry, I'd like to point out that we all did fabulously well on our Storia del Costume final today. I got a 30/30 and was as a result, very pleased to close those books for good. No more conversations on fashion terms; that subject's all over! I will miss little Isabella Bigazzi, though. She was such an adorable professor. Today she and I, aside from completing the oral exam, talked about how much I supposedly "loved fabrics" and appreciated their wealth and value. Grace reported that during her exam, the two of them talked about Grace's awesome jewelry, a topic brought up completely by our professor.

Anyway, after the exam, we all felt great and spent the whole day getting last minute souvenirs for people. Andrea and I returned home around 6:00 and started cooking the reason why America needs to change over to the Metric System. A few weeks ago, we had told Maria Pia that we wanted to make her an American BBQ, and we chose this evening to see it through.

Our menu consisted of cheeseburgers, corn on the cob, dilled potato salad, pasta salad, and chocolate chip cookies. The hardest ingredients to find were brown sugar and dill, but with a little searching in the American stores, we ended up with everything we needed. All to be cooked went fairly well, considering the fact that we had a lot of trouble properly converting and then cutting each recipe in half to be served to only 3 people. The problems escalated with the chocolate chip cookies, since baking is supposed to be a fairly exact science. We did our best to convert from cups to grams and to properly divide the recipe, but we ended up with more of a cookie cake than individual cookies. When we watched the cookies melting together in the oven before our eyes, we determined that perhaps we had needed more flour. They ended up tasting more or less the same, but just looked like squares instead of circles!

Maria Pia loved it all, especially the potato salad and cookies. She had 6 cookies! This was the one day that she chose to break the diet she's been working very hard on and I'm really glad that she felt that our dinner merited it. She's always making us these fabulous Italian meals, so she certainly deserved to try an American tradition.

However, all this ladies and gentlemen, is why America needs to chill out and convert to the Metric System. We're the last ones in the world on the senseless system and we really need to get with the program!

Tomorrow, we are meeting our Italian Professor from Holy Cross (Professor Amatangelo) for lunch. She is visiting with her family from the States. I can't wait!

Ciao!