What is in a name?

There is something about me that just screams "My name starts with the letter A". And invariably if someone forgets my name they come up with one of two other names.

Last night during the cake class the instructor repeatedly called me Amber. There was a large name tag on the front of my table that clearly stated "Amanda" but apparently that tag was not believable. I didn't correct her since it was the last class and I will likely never see her again.

In college I attended some campus activity that involved an icebreaker where you had to remember names. I received an enthusiastic Allison! So that turned into a running joke.

And in general if people are trying to guess/remember my name I get Amber or Allison. Really? No Jennifer, the most popular name during my birth year? I don't look like a Heidi, one of the most popular German names?

Although I do have to admit it's creepy when people guess Amanda on the first try.

Speaking of my cake class, the last one was yesterday. The instructor was 40 minutes late, so I didn't get to finish in class and managed to get it done this morning just in time for it to be cut and shipped off with Chris.
In case you can't tell, those are roses on top, not a cabbage patch, and leaves around the bottom. And it took some time for me to find the right angle to photograph the cake, because the top layer had begun to slide.

Oh, and here's a shocker. Apparently our house came with the most advanced dishwasher available on the market. I discovered this today when trying to clean all of the cake decorating supplies. I know you are shocked that we haven't used the machine in the two months we've lived here, but we tend to do them by hand. In fact there has been a standing agreement in our marriage that I do laundry and Chris does dishes. However, as CFO I am trying to take more responsibility in the dish washing arena.

So today I start to organize the massive pile of icing covered paraphernalia in the dishwasher. First I have to pull out a bunch of accessories such as baskets and clip-on thingies. Then some of the racks didn't line up and I realize that they can fold down and up. Then there is some sort of handle on each side of the top rack, still haven't figured those out. And there is a swivel bar that pins glasses in so they don't rattle, at least I'm assuming that is what it is for. I haven't even fully investigated all of the buttons on the outside. There are no knobs. Of course it really didn't help that after all of that I discovered we don't have dishwasher detergent.

Yeah, dishwashers have come a long way since I was a kid. We had four different ones at our house, one of them named Amanda.