Melanie’s Comments (group member since Sep 01, 2014)

Melanie’s comments from the Nothing But Reading Challenges group.

Chris wrote: "So I've been doing a lot of reading (I've finished eight books so far, and more than half-done with four others), but my laptop charger broke & it's making it difficult for me to input information ..."

If it's easier, you can add the information in this thread and I can move it to the spreadsheet.

Question because this is a bit of an odd one and I don't know which way it would go.

I am reading A Little Country Christmas and at the start of each chapter in one of the stories, there is a recipe for a dish the main character is making for a holiday dinner they're hosting. Can I use the ingredients from these recipes as part of the scavenger hunt?

I'm in again. I really need to buckle down this month and make a dent in my backlog.

Start of month:
Books on shelf: 50
Feedback Ratio: 84%

Books (ordered by pub date):






Added:


Finished:


Claiming the Rancher's Heir | My Review
In Bed with the Earl | My Review
When You Wish Upon a Rogue | My Review
Don't Look for Me | My Review
A Little Country Christmas | My Review
The Virgin and the Rogue | My Review
Looking for a Cowboy | My Review

End of Month:
Books on shelf: 49
Feedback Ratio: 85%

Annalisa wrote: "I tried to remove the sort so I could see our completed books and it told me it was locked. I was curious since I’m think of reading some longer books but what is to make our 90 book mark this roun..."

Sorry about that, I'll work on fixing it tomorrow. We have finished 21 books so far (3 of those I'll be allocating to meals tomorrow).

Ok meals are done for all books finished so far. Don't worry if you don't see the books on the tab for the round anymore, I have filtered out the used books (if you want to see them, the filter is on the book # column by fill color). I also filtered out the completed meals from the meals tab. I'm waiting to move things over to the official sheet though until some meals before the completed ones are done so I can move things over in order by meal number.

Moderators of NBRC wrote: "Melanie wrote: "Two questions, I don't think I saw these mentioned anywhere and wanted to check if it was allowed or not.

Can you use the generic food category name as an ingredient in a meal? i.e..."

Thank you, I thought that's how it would work but wanted to double check.

Two questions, I don't think I saw these mentioned anywhere and wanted to check if it was allowed or not.

Can you use the generic food category name as an ingredient in a meal? i.e. Can the word sandwich be used in a sandwich? Or salad in a salad?

Can something like wine be used from a book less than 500 pages as an ingredient in pasta since wine is used in a lot of pasta recipes?

I started some meals with the couple of books that have been finished so far. I will try to fill out meals every couple of days this time around to make things easier.

Saar The Book owl wrote: "On the sheet I see books for round 2 that are already with items. Are these books started after the start of round 2 or before, because:

Only books read during the specified round can be used (“r..."

Read date on GR is date finished. We can use any books started after the challenge began and what round they're finished in determines what round they can be used in.

Annalisa wrote: "I think when we signed up as a group we were under the 80 books they suggested.

Right now I can read about 8 books a month, often as many as 12 but things are a bit chaotic for me."

I think you're right, we were under the 80.

I normally hit 12 per month but can usually do more. However work has been busier than expected, so I'm only hitting my normal number.

Ok, I did the customers tonight as it didn't take long. I tried to feed kids and teenagers first as that seemed the right thing to do but there were a couple we had no meals for. Then I split the remaining meals evenly between adults and pensioners.

If anyone wants to change how I assigned anything, feel free to do so. Because we don't have enough meals for all of our customers, there didn't seem to be any good way to decide how to split stuff.

Ok, so we got our customers and have 2 days to assign meals to the customers (10/19 9pm UTC). I have no plans tomorrow, so can spend all day assigning the meals to customers. This part seems like the simplest part of the process, so I should have no problem getting it done.

One thing to note, we're going to have at least 55 customers who won't get a meal as we got 160 customer but only have 105 meals. The large gap is likely due to the fact we read 54 out of the 80 max books. I don't know what this means in terms of points as it's not really spelled out in the rules that I can see.

Next round we'll have to see if we can up the number of books we read as there will likely be more customers in round 2 due to the upped max of 90 books.

Lau Maia wrote: "Melanie, it is too much work to add a column to check if it's a comic or children book?"

Sorry about that, I have added one now. Hopefully that will keep me from missing that in the next round.

Just a few things for going forward that will hopefully help make tracking easier for everyone and make creating the meals faster.

Do not track food items that cannot be used in the meals the book qualifies for (mostly saw this with drinks and desserts in books too short to use them as books must be 500+ pages to use those).

Also do not track items that cannot be used in the types of meals in this challenge (I saw a lot of pizza, soups, and stuff like that, none of which can be used in this challenge).

Here is a link to a tab in our spreadsheet that shows all the meal options and example ingredients as well as the minimum page count for that meal type. So if the food doesn't fit one of those meal types, it can't be used so skip it when tracking.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...

Here is a new link for the tracking sheet that will open directly onto the round 2 tab so you won't need to keep switching if you're opening from the old link.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...

Ok I got us to 105 meals and got everything added to the sheet just in time. Six books did not make it into the meals either because they were spell it out only and I didn't have time to come up with a word or because they didn't have page/chapters/something as justification for the words that I could understand enough to use.

Jade, one of your books (The Blind Date Diaries) didn't get used as it didn't have a read date, so I assumed it wasn't complete and had originally moved it to round 2.

Chris, for your book "An Embarrassment of Riches". Are those chapter names or something next to the ingredients? There aren't page numbers or anything listed, so that's all I can think of that they may be? Nevermind as the deadline passed.

I will be done my errands a bit earlier than I thought. So I'll be able to give everything a second look in about 2 hours to see if we missed anything.

Ok now that it is after 3am my time, I have to call it. I can't add anymore and I likely won't be available tomorrow to add any others.

I added 85 completed meals. I have moved over the books involved with the meals and the meals themselves to the official sheet. The meals still need descriptions on the shop front tab, but I don't have time to add those.

I had to rework some of the meals that were already on the sheet as they didn't follow the formatting of the main sheet. Please see the newly created tab labeled "Completed Meals Round 1" for how columns G, H, & I should be formatted for any more meals created.

Tab "In Progress Meals Round 1" has one meal I didn't completely fill, so that ones open to be finished.

There is an error in the meals tabs for type of meal that can be used because I renamed tabs, but I'm too tired to fix that now. So for now, just copy over the meal types that can be used when moving books into meals.

I also moved all of the books that were completely used to the tab "Round 1 Books Added to Official". So those are not available for any more meals.

The first tab in the sheet "Round 1 Books Remaining" has the books left from this round that are still available to make meals out of. There is one book highlighted in yellow (Breathless) that I used 3 out of the 5 available words to make meals. I have crossed out the 3 words I used from the available words.

Also, just an FYI that if you go into the sheet now stuff will have weird colors and random filtering. This is because I'm making the meals and it's how I'm keeping track.