Skip to main content

Open Letter to Jen Yates

By
Dear Jen,

I've been reading Cake Wrecks for over three years and EPBOT since you started it, checking my Google Reader feed every day in anticipation and even forcing my husband to look at your posts from time to time.  So I thought it was about time that I wrote you a thank-you note for all the humor and joy you've brought me.  I like to think that if I still lived in Florida, and was living in Orlando instead of Sarasota where I grew up, we could be friends; we have many shared interests (which explains my continued interest in your writing, and especially in EPBOT, which I prefer by far), we both enjoy cake and craft projects, and we both subject our husbands to undue amounts of stress (hi, Justin!).

What you do, however, that I only wish I could, is make it your mission to share your interests and sense of humor with the world in a way that's always affirming, supportive, and makes the rest of us readers feel like we're part of a network of awesome people - like we're not so alone.  You've introduced me to "Doctor Who" and "The Guild" and other shows/stories/music that have entertained me, and inspired me to share my own thoughts in this very blog.  I haven't bought either of your books (although I'm sure they're hilarious like everything you write), but I still feel welcome reading your posts every day.  I've cheered at your support of geek girls and the trials they face, worried about your family's health, and wished I had more room in my small NYC apartment so I could try my hand at your craft tutorials.  And I've wondered over and over again how you manage to produce really funny prose practically every day.

In short, you're such a celebrity in my life that I can refer to "Jen" and my husband knows I'm taking about you and not any of the other Jens I know (often I refer to you as "the Cake Wrecks lady" to avoid confusion, but usually "Jen" is sufficient).  So thank you for sharing your wit, grammar knowledge, and wisdom with the many, many readers who follow your blog.  We truly appreciate it.

Best wishes/May the Force be with you,
Caroline

http://www.cakewrecks.com/
http://www.epbot.com/


PS:  I hope this letter doesn't seem creepy, but based on the number of creepy things I've seen on Cake Wrecks, I suspect this has to rank very low on the creepiness scale.  Either that or Cake Wrecks has severely deformed my creepiness scale, in which case, I abjure responsibility!

PPS:  How nice are you to renovate your parents' entire house??  Of course this is only the latest example of how nice you are.  You rock.

PPPS:  Sorry this isn't in sonnet form.  Many things I may be, but a poet I am not.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age"

By
Reyner Banham 's Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) is an engaging overview of the important theoretical developments of the early 20th century leading up to the "International Style" of the 1930s-40s.  Banham does a fairly good job, in my opinion, of avoiding excessive editorializing, although he has a clear viewpoint on the Modern Movement and finishes with a strong conclusion.  In opposition to his teacher, Nikolaus Pevsner , whose own history of modernism came out in 1936, Banham dismantled the " form follows function " credo that became the stereotype of modernism, arguing instead that formalism (a preoccupation with style and aesthetics) was an important, if not overriding, concern of Modern architects.  Two sections of the book struck me in particular: his analysis of Le Corbusier's famous book Vers une architecture (Toward a [new] architecture) from 1923, and his Conclusion (chapter 22), where he breaks the link between functionali...
1 comment
Read more

Vertical Bike Rack

By
The work of our hands! A little backstory:  We bought two bikes as soon as we could after moving here, so we could both bike to work.  After a few uneventful months of chaining up our bikes next to our car in the carport of our apartment building, Justin's bike was stolen.  (Mine was mysteriously left behind, together with Justin's pannier, which the thieves helpfully folded up and placed on top of my bike.  My only guess is that the chain holding my bike was harder to cut than the chain on Justin's.)  Since then, we've kept our bikes inside, hauling them up and down two flights of stairs to our third-floor apartment every time we take them out, which is usually a few times a week.  Ugh.  Better than buying a new bike every few months, though. We needed a rack that would keep the bikes off the floor, off the walls, and in as small a footprint as possible, without requiring us to drill into or otherwise damage the walls (or floor or ceiling). ...
7 comments
Read more

Infrastructure and Urbanism in 1920s Sarasota, Florida

By
This post is based on research I did for "History of the American City" taught by Gwendolyn Wright this past fall. As an undergraduate in architectural history I was encouraged to think critically about my home town as part of an exercise in historical writing.  This past semester, for a course focused on the history of American cities, I decided to take this further and research the history of the city as a whole.  I was surprised to find that Sarasota, Florida , has a much richer architectural history than I had understood from living there as a teenager.  Settled as a frontier outpost in the 19th century, it grew thanks to tourism, the circus , and real estate speculation, resulting in an incredible expansion in the 1920s that died with the Great Depression.  The city grew again after WWII, and in the 1950s was home to the Sarasota School of Architecture , a nationally-renowned architectural style and movement (not a physical school) that produced early attempt...
1 comment
Read more