Trying out new recipes to impress the children with.
For example, my classic clam chowder, now even better that I've discovered a better bacon - costs more, get less, but what a difference it makes...the daughter will love this!!!!!
Only she isn't around this week. But I need to try out a few new recipes, and I've noticed the Shank Steak at Kootenay Co-op at reasonable (>$10) prices, and I set my heart on making an Oso Buco.
It works out, after a fashion, the sauce - beef stock, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, onion, garlic, basil, rosemary, thyme - is delicious. Five Star. I'm pleased. The steak, however, turns out a little tough and stringy, not the fall-off-of-the-bone-melt-in-your-mouth kinda steak that I hoped for. I need to figure this out so next week I'll try again.
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Other news, J***** - the other server, the only other server, is sick. She apparently hit a deer with her car and took the week off to recover. This would be a bad thing, only she does this every week. The week before she had a sad horse and couldn't come in to work. The week before that her dog got lost and then showed up a day later sick and she had to take off a day off. The week before that she had to take her mother to the hospital...
She schedules herself for 5 shifts and is lucky to work 3 and while I like her well enough, like working with her, it's starting to become like I'm liking an imaginary character in a book that doesn't exist, that I've never met, like loving Jesus for all the imagined benefits an imaginary saviour confers, or loving a Santa Clause that has never once brought you a single gift...
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At work, they're starting to get the hints. J***** doesn't want to work, certainly not as much as she's been working. I'm on her page, only I need a vehicle. And I'd go about it a bit differently. These last minute emergencies, as predictable as the sun rising, well, they're getting a little bit much.
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We tried out a new server, 2 shifts, lunches, never met her, she's already gone. Yesterday, my double, I trained two. Both younger, pleasant, not incompetent. I'm hopeful.
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Monday, 36 degrees. Too fucking hot. To do anything, and there's much to be done. Sit in the flat and melt into my chair. I've been feeding the crows, putting out peanuts where I smoke, the crows show up in my absence and recover them. There's one, that when he/she (??) spots me flies down and will hop up to recover, a little bolder than the rest.
Monday morning I'm greeted with the full mob, I've only brought 4 peanuts and there are 8 crows greeting me when I get up. I've officially been made provider...you can google 8 crows to get their AI nonsense on the topic. "Counting Crows" I don't recall got up to 8...
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Walking down to get some liquor because what else can you do in 36 degree heat, I've eaten, as much as I can, passing the antique shop where they've put my antique WWI gun sight in the window for a mere $200. I paid over $600 over 30 years ago in London. I should buy it... The law of greater fools, and I've spent my life proving it...
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And, yesterday, JR's Mother In Law shows up from Cranbrook, nice enough, but I'm no longer master of my own apartment, she's the guest and I'm officially on the living room floor yet again. Hopefully only for a couple of days, she's here to visit her mother, in the hospital, and I'm hoping this doesn't go on forever but god-damn today's a day off and I can't even hang about the flat, doesn't matter, I need to go and buy some more peanuts anyways...