Pullin' a Late One

It's ten after twelve.

A.M.

And I really should go home...but I drank a double latte around 7pm and I know that if I lay myself down right now my head will go abuzz till at least 3am. I'm sparing myself the misfiring wires and tossing and turning. People have a hard time believing that I only drink coffee two or three times a week here. I think I need to be a bit more selective about when I choose to drink it, though.

We close at 6pm and I'm usually able to start breaking things down around 5pm so that, come six, all I have to do is clean the brewers, bleach the boards, sweep, mop and count the drawer. Tonight, though, Helen came in around 4:30 to show me how to get online and pay the monthly Meals and Rooms tax and also how to pay the payroll tax. It wasn't until 6:30 that we finished with that. I still had a customer in the living room taking an exam on-line for a class and I realized that I hadn't eaten anything all day.

I bought smoked salmon today on my Costco run so that I could offer it as a bagel sandwich and I went ahead this afternoon and erased a big portion of my chalk board so that I could re-write the sandwich into the menu.

Whaddya think ~ smoked salmon, cream cheese, red onion and organic greens on a toasted bagel? Kind of typical but a good stand by.

So I erased the board right before I got slammed with a thousand lunch orders, which led me right into my meeting with Helen, which led me right past closing and there it was... 11pm... and I'm covered in chalk and jacked on caffeine and standing on the counters trying to be just the tiniest bit artistic in my penmanship... hands kind of shaking. And can I just say how very much I hate the sound of chalk on a chalk board? About as much as the sound of styrofoam. About as much as the sound of a napkin being rubbed together. (About as much as the sound of a hand on the fabric of the ceiling of a car??) Isms.

But the board is written, the dishes are done, the sandwich was tested and approved and I'm about five minutes away from a serious caffeine crash. G'night.