A Day in the Life

Today was one of those days when I feel like I didn’t do anything right. I got p.o.’d and threw some stuff around in the kitchen (I swore to myself thirty years ago that I would never do that.) I got irritated with my best little employee (and I hope she doesn’t just tell me to take the job and shove it.) I didn’t make any headway with my Valentine promotion plans, and time is ticking away quickly on that one.

Actually, I think today was just a continuation of yesterday. Which might have been an extension of the day before. In fact, I’m trying to think of just when my last good day was…

Let’s start with Saturday. First of all, it was a crappy anniversary of a crappy day. My dad passed away on February 2nd, 1999. So it’s always a kind of off sort of day for me.

And then, it took a notion to snow all day. Ugh! I looked outside at the snow and I thought, oh, THERE goes my week (sales-wise.) So of course I decided it wasn’t going to be busy. And then it was. Which was good. I guess. But annoying, when one has made up one’s mind that it is not going to be busy and has planned accordingly.

In addition, I’ve been fighting off a cold with mass quantities of zinc and Vitamin C; but so far, the cold is winning. You know how they say that if you take all this stuff, the cold is supposed to be less severe and of shorter duration? Well, that looks like it’s probably going to be true, but it only makes it marginally less annoying. I’m not sure it’s an advantage to be just sick enough to be really crabby, but not sick enough to crawl into bed and pull the covers up over your head. Let’s just say it’s not making me any friends this week…

I guess yesterday was the capper. Sunday…supposed to be our day off. The plan is for husband to sleep in and enjoy the game later on, and for me to go to the café and get some work done while husband is Superbowling. At a quarter to eight (am) the phone rings. It is the good and faithful "D" at the café. Mila the café cat has been attacked by three unleashed dogs. Saved by "D", who has been seriously punctured for her trouble. Can we rush to the café and whisk the cat to the vet?

So we jump out of bed, throw on some clothes, drive hell bent for leather to the restaurant. Poor café cat is holed up in the ladies’ room. Seriously sad kitty. Full of dog spit, probably in shock, and with one back leg sticking out at an odd angle. No holes or tears that I could see, but obviously not okay. But cat has a tag with an owner’s number on it. I make the executive decision to call the owner and let them foot the vet bill. Owner shows up, takes cat away in a laundry basket.

I slather peroxide all over "D’s" injured hand and try to help her wrap it up. Day off has just begun, and is looking pretty funky. Husband and I adjourn to a table and figure we might as well have the cooks make us some breakfast. Almost seems like things could slide back to normal. But the fun has just begun…
 
(I will finish this later. Gotta go to bed sometime…)

Hi Dad...

Hi Dad!

I got to thinking about you today. It is a day for thinking about you. February 2nd. I can’t forget.

It snowed today. All day long. Before I closed the bathroom door to take my shower this morning at 6:30, I squinted through the blinds to see what kind of day it was. Black rooftops…cold, but dry. Got out of the shower 20 minutes later and the rooftops were white.

Damn. But I slogged out to the truck, turned on the wipers, and mushed over to the restaurant. I learned to drive in this stuff. You see, Dad? You and your little nuggets of wisdom are never too far below the surface.

I was sure the snow would be the kiss of death for sales today. But we did okay. In fact, we had a good day. You’d hardly know it was snowing. The place was packed for breakfast.

I so wish you could see our place, Dad! I look out into the dining room sometimes, and I think about you. The way you and Mom would always come to wherever I worked. The pizza place, the Italian Restaurant, the bakery. The Scandinavian Festival. You always came. You were always part of my successes. I like to think it made you happy to see me do well, though you never really said so, in so many words.

You would be happy with the café, Dad. I think we’re really going to make it happen. Some day, we might actually make some money on it! I hate that you’ll never sit at one of our tables, never tuck a napkin into the front of your shirt and take a big bite out of one of our burgers.

Never see me trying to pass on to another generation some of what I learned from you. The things that are timeless and never go out of style. Honesty. Dependability. Patience (well, I do the best I can…!) Pride in a job well done.

I think it would be easier for me if they—my crew, "my girls" –could have known you. If only they could have met…the person I aspire to be. They might understand, then, why sometimes I’m so prickly. Because I’m frustrated. With myself. When I fall short of what I know I could be. What I should be. What you would have wanted me to be.

Nine years. I can scarcely believe it.

And now, Mom has gone, too. Is she with you? Are you together in some unearthly reality? And isJoyce there too?

I hope, wherever you are, it is…well, "beautiful" is such a lame human word, but it’s the best my lame human mind can come up with.

I hope, too, wherever you are…wherever you all are…you think about me from time to time. Because I think about you.

And I miss you.

Speed Post

I have a few minutes before I have to get ready to go to the café, and I haven’t posted for awhile. So I decided that I would just sit down and start typing, unedited, and write as much as I can about…whatever.

I lost an employee last week. This is the kid I have referred to as "the last piece of dead wood on the schedule." She was an eighteen-year-old with lots of issues, not the least of which was that her mother up and moved out of town without her scant months after she graduated from high school last June. She was pretty much given the choice to go with Mom and live somewhere she was not familiar with, with a man, by the way , whom she despised, or figure it out on her own. I’m mystified that a mother could just throw her kid to the wolves like that. Poor kid ended up shacking up with a boyfriend she had been seeing for only about a month. THAT relationship didn’t end well. And, since, she’s been casting about for SOMEWHERE to live, with SOMEONE, anyone…

Trouble is, she is just not mature enough to handle this whole mess. She can’t seem to buckle down and get the idea that she is going to have to work, full-time, and make money if she’s going to live on her own. She would complain that she couldn’t live on the number of hours I gave her, than totally flake out when I scheduled her for more than thirty hours in a week. She maxed out at about fifteen to twenty. Can’t really live on your own if you’re only bringing home about $200 a week.

I felt sorry for her, so I really tried to make it work. And she was one of those frustrating kids that could do the job when she wanted to, and unfortunately would do it once in a while, so the cat was out of the bag on that one. Nothing makes me crazier than someone who CAN do the job but, for whatever reason, WON'T. Anyway, her life "got unbearable," and she suddenly had to upsticks and move in with a relative, too far away to work HERE. 

Can’t say I’m sorry to see her go…but I did try to help her, and I always feel bad when I try to help someone and they aren’t helped. Which is how it works out 90% of the time, n’est ce pas?

east or Famine...

...is the name of the game at the Hot Flash Café. It’s just the nature of the place.

We’re either packed or empty. There doesn’t seem to be any in-between. If there’s such a thing as a nice, steady flow of customers, you wouldn’t know it by looking at our dining room at any given moment.

And when it comes to personnel, I’m either over-staffed or desperate for help. No happy medium on that score, either.

November and December were nice. From a staffing standpoint, anyway. Perhaps The Universe knew that I was going to need to attend to other matters. We were over-staffed; so there were plenty of people to tend the restaurant while we were away. And even afterward, throughout the holidays and a week or so beyond, we had more help than we really needed. Crew members were starting to complain that they weren’t getting enough hours, but they continued to call in sick and request days off with wild abandon. Yet, there was enough slack in the schedule to be able to accommodate all the germs, drama and personal indulgence. For about a month and a half. Yay.

Unfortunately, I’ve since had yet another employee bug out on me with no notice, and one more who informed me that she will only be able to work weekends from the end of January until the end of softball season. And a third employee, one of my most steadfast, had a house fire on Christmas Eve…and while neither she nor her husband were injured, and the house was not a total loss, it has thrown her completely for a loop. She has been a bundle of tears, pouts and general high-maintenance ever since. I love her and I wish I knew what to do for her…still, it’s one more headache that I really did not need.

So, though I feel like I’ve finally come out of the overwhelmed, chronically sleep-deprived fog through which I attempted to function for the first fifteen months after my entrepreneurial baptism, things have not yet found a completely solid footing. And when it comes to staffing, I’m afraid they never will. It looks like I’ll have to get as much done as I can while I’m employee rich, but accept that I will still have to don the apron and grind my nose into the stone when such is not the case. ::Groan! ::

But here’s the really good news. I don’t know if sales were more atrocious last year (winter of 2006/2007) than I realized, or if we really have turned a corner and are headed upward for good, sales-wise. After an almost flat October, we had sales increases of 27% for the month of November, and 24% for December. And, unless something really dire transpires in the next eight days, we’ll probably see at least a 20% increase for January. So maybe all the blood, sweat, tears, and years off the end of my life are actually getting us somewhere…

So Little Time...

Here we are, already more than a week into the new year. I SO have not been feeling like writing. I get an idea or two in my head, I turn on the computer, and I just sit and play solitaire. It seems like way too much trouble to think hard enough to write any kind of an engaging essay. Life is not too bad right now, either. I think I just have the mother of all cases of the winter blahs.

The weather has been absolutely miserable. When it’s not dark and rainy, it’s dark and icy. Either way, it’s dark. I know the days are supposed to be getting longer. It’s hard to tell if the sun is showing up earlier or sticking around later when the clouds are so heavy you have perpetual twilight. Ugh! I REALLY need a sunny day right now!

I have a stack of things a mile high (as usual) to accomplish at the café. We just got the last Christmas tree taken down this evening, took the wreaths off the doors and peeled off the rest of the decorations. All that’s left are the poinsettias I bought from one of the local school fundraisers. They’re still alive, still beautiful, in fact. I can’t throw them away, and I know if I bring them home they will become garbage almost immediately. And there is the added concern that we don’t want the cats eating them. Not good for them at all. And I clean up enough barf around the house…I don’t need poinsettia puke added to the mix.

At least de-Christmasing has been accomplished. The million and ten other things I need to do are still weighing heavy. I have to re-do the menu. I did a rudimentary cost analysis last week and found that the price WE pay for provisions has increased over thirteen percent since last January. So if I don’t raise my menu prices, we’ll be going to the poorhouse fast. 

And I just hate to raise the prices. People are very price-conscious out here in the sticks. I’ll have them bitching and moaning for months; saying things like, "How come your prices are so high? This isn’t Portland, you know." No, it’s not Portland. But my damn food comes from Portland, and they don’t charge me any less just because I do business in the boonies. If anything, I pay more. Why don’t people get that? Duh!!!

AND I have to plan our Valentine’s special, create the menu, design the ad, figure out the decorations, try and guess how much of what to order, etc. etc. ad infinitum. This one has me kind of intimidated. Last Valentine’s Day, we didn’t do anything special, and we still had a pretty good turn out (overflow from the local restaurants that DID do something special, I imagine…) This year, I want to try to actually make the most of the day (it’s supposed to be one of the top two or three days of the year for dining out…that would make it an opportunity I can not afford to pass up!) So I’m feeling some pressure, here…shaking in my boots and cultivating my ulcer.

There are times when I’m concerned that I take this all too seriously. And times when I worry that I don’t take it seriously enough. Either way, I worry. And I hate worrying. It takes all the fun out of it…

Old Life, New Life, and Benazir Bhutto

This morning, my clock radio woke me with the unhappy news of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. I’m not well-informed about the politics of our "ally" Pakistan. I know I don’t trust Pervez Musharraf any further than I could throw a tank. I know I feel a little soiled, a little jaded, every time I hear Dubya go on about what a great partner Musharraf is in our "War on Terrah." It doesn’t seem to matter that Musharraf’s government presents only the flimsiest pretense of democracy, and only when it doesn’t inconvenience Musharraf.

Benazir Bhutto, as the leader of Musharraf’s chief opposition, was many things. She was loved and revered, discredited and exiled, and tainted by corruption. Who can say, entangled as she was in the political strife inherent to Pakistan, what Bhutto really was. I can only believe that to have become Prime Minister of an Islamic nation—even an unsuccessful and ultimately deposed Prime Minister—she must have been a remarkable woman. I admired her. And I feared for her life when she decided to end her exile and return to Pakistan. May she rest in the peace she was fated never to know in this life.

I considered posting a quick tribute to Bhutto this morning, since I thought I didn’t have to work until 11 am. My life being what it is, however, half my crew crapped out on me today, so I had to give up any nobler aspirations and run to the café.

I get to work, and thoughts of Mrs. Bhutto are still swimming around in my head. I say to my counter girl, "So they killed Benazir Bhutto…!" And she says, "Who?" I say, "Benazir Bhutto." Totally blank face. "Do you know who Benazir Bhutto is?" "Uh, noooo…"

Okay. Counter girl is only nineteen. But she is also in her second year of college. What made me think a college student must have somehow heard of Benazir Bhutto?

Toward the end of this exchange with clueless college student counter girl, my cook walks through the door. Cook is in her late thirties, never struck me as being particularly well-educated…but I also know she is a total internet junkie. "P, do you know who Benazir Bhutto is?" "Who?" No surprise there, really. Apparently, cook zaps right past the news blurbs on her home page…

Over the past year and a half, I’ve had such a hard time letting go of my "old life" and embracing my new life as a (completely lost-in-the-weeds) entrepreneur. And I’ve been trying to figure out what my problem is. Though I’m inching closer to the total immersion I think I need in order to be successful, I really feel like I’ve been dragged to that place kicking and screaming. After today, I have a little better idea of why that is.

I work in the freaking Twilight Zone. I’m surrounded by people who have absolutely no idea what is going on in the world beyond the ends of their own noses. For someone who has spent much of the last four years nurturing and immersed in her personal political identity, this is a particularly bitter pill to swallow. I feel like I’m finding a life, but losing myself. And I’m not entirely sure that’s a trade I’m willing to make.

Christmas 2007

Around Thanksgiving (was that only last month?) I predicted a hard holiday for my family, and wished for Spring. It did indeed come to pass, that sad and difficult season. Thanksgiving was a non-starter…we were even then in that watching and waiting pattern that establishes itself as a loved one dwindles. Mom passed away on December 3. Her memorial service, and our ability not to tear each other to shreds in the preparation of it, was the single shining moment for the Baldwin family this season. We sent Mom to her rest with love and dignity.

We didn’t feel like celebrating the holidays, but we thought that not celebrating would be too sad and empty. After the funeral, and the unhappy task of cleaning out Mom’s apartment, sifting through her prodigious angel collection and her sixty years’ accumulation of costume jewelry brought us the comfort of fond memories. Each of us chose one or two pieces to hold and remember. By mid-December, that business was mostly concluded, and we tried to scrape together some kind of family holiday. But we just…ran out of gas. Yesterday saw some of the sniping and the anger and the tears that we had worked so hard to avoid.

In the end, maybe it would have been better to just…give Christmas a pass this year. It was so hard not to compare last night’s somber little celebration to "The Good Years" and find it pitiably wanting. No one was really in the mood to count our blessings and put a good face on it. Mostly there was a lot of food that nobody needed, and a few presents that nobody really wanted. Christmas 2007 is just about over now, and nobody in our family is going to miss it, I think.

Hard to believe that the bright spot of my life the last few weeks has been…the café. That thing which has been more inclined to kick my butt than feed my ego for the past nineteen months…

This may be the worst Christmas since the Grinch licked his evil lips over Whoville, but Old Town Café is chugging along at a record pace. Not world record, of course, but record in relation to our own history. The first week of December, while I was in Eugene tending to my sad family business, my crew piloted the good ship OTC to its highest December sales week in its three-year history. And we’ve repeated that performance in each of the last two weeks. As of today, we’re showing a 1% increase in sales over last year’s total December sales, and we still have six sales days remaining. And I haven’t laid out one dime in advertising money all month. I’m having a hard time believing we’re the same restaurant we were one year ago.

Oh, do I remember the goings on of a year ago, though I’d rather forget. 2006—the year of the chronically sick, reliably unreliable and/or disappearing employees, and sales so bad it didn’t really matter whether I had employees or not. The year of no mercy, which threatened to chew me up, spit me out, and grind me into the pavement. The year where the best I could say of it, as it dwindled into its final hours on New Years Eve, was that I had survived. (And yet, I felt giddily victorious to be able to say that much…)

Last year, my family was my life preserver, the thing that kept my head above the waters of my foundering business ship. This year, my business is the thing that my hands are grasping as the waves of grief and loss toss me about. I suppose I should be grateful—and I am—that there is always something to keep me afloat. But I’m still hoping that next year will be a little less tempest-tossed.