I don't understand. All bread and cheese comes pre-sliced, and all butter is squeezable, right? Right?

I wish they'd taught cooking when I was in school, without pairing it with other useless tasks like sewing. I really could've used the help.

:p
It was a very useful subject. Unfortunately I scraped by on theoritical knowledge because I was taking Biology as a separate course and doing very well in it. I also bribed the girl who sat next to me with Skittles to let me copy her coursework (she never could understand why I got higher marks than her - it was because I tidied up the syntax and corrected the spelling mistakes). The practical part I coasted, and about the only thing I can make from those days is a killer chocolate mousse - and that's only because I discovered the best way to make it is add Cointreau.

Hey! I cook and sew. Useless? No, cheap.

Ah but did you learn it at school?

All I learned in Sewing (compulsory for both sexes for the first year) was how to make a stuffed toy dog. And in all honesty I smuggled it home, unpicked it and got my Dad to redo it - the sewing machine turned into a synthetic-fur-eating monster when I got anywhere near it. He on the other hand made our school uniforms for 8 years.

Ahh, you've got me there. Not in school. At home. Some while a child living with my parents, but much much more as an adult living on my own, then even more as a husband and father. I wouldn't do my kid's sewing homework, though. I'd walk them through it, for sure. But if I did it for them, even as a demonstration, I would undo *my* work, and hand it over to them.

They hate that.

You're right actually - I'd have learned more if Dad had taught me.

He was the only one I learned my times tables for, working through weeks of tears and "I can't" (problems with maths, not refusal to learn) and the only one I took medicine for - somehow my natural inclination to retch was suppressed when my Dad told me how brave he knew I was going to be.

But sometimes, just sometimes, Daddies are there to save you :)

Junior High: Home Economics. Ugh. Got a D when we had to sew (first D ever.) Cooking was OK.

Back then it was all the new thing to have guys and gals trade and we got to take shop for a 9 week term. I got an A+. I made a trivet that Ethan Allen himself would have envied. ;) Always been mechanically inclined.

I still like to cook. Sewing? Nah. I lose a button, the shirt is a loss.

Cool!

We have a table in our house that I made in the 9th grade. I won a county wide Industrial Arts award that year for my work in woodshop.