Mother’s Day Thoughts

[Still recovering from all the work so this post was written a day ago at a few different intervals so if it doesn't make much sense... deal with it. ;) This is part one, explaining my day. Part two, the actual thoughts I spoke of will come in a little bit.]

Ah, Mother’s Day. What a strange time for me, well, strange and not so strange- I supposed it’s only something that I’ve just noticed but I’ll get to that in my own time.

Work was interesting. Sort of. Every year we hold a Mother’s Day banquet and to be quite frank- they’re hell. It’s almost always the worst holiday up at the mountain and without fail something always go wrong. In fact I don’t think I’ve worked a Mom’s Day where the machine didn’t bust and we even had a new one this time- hardly a few months old. The heat coil busted, something about a hole in it and gurgling up water all over the place. I didn’t get to see that because it happens in another part of the building but the end result was first my machine wouldn’t fill up with water and then when it did it was ice cold.

Peachy.

The one thing I like about these horrible situations is that the cooks and head chef trust me to take over the situation. They ask me what’s going on, I tell them and what alternatives I’ve tried to fix the situation and what I plan on doing then. My fellow dishwashers listen to me, make suggestions if they have any, and even if everything is falling into chaos we still manage to keep it as a sort of well organized chaos.

I may never be rewarded for the times I take charge, no one says anything and I’m seldom thanked, but I like when everything works out. I like seeing the guests happy and the chef unfrazzled because someone else is capable of handling the situation. Even if no one says anything it just makes me feel good to know I’m doing something and actually being helpful.

Kei, E, and I (we’re all dishers) took about eight carts of dishes over to one of the other kitchens and we left E to wash them on his own. He was handling the big stuff and whatever they (the cooks) would need right away, I had Kei start in on chemically sanitizing the other half of the dishes while I ran back and forth between the two kitchens running dishes for the both of them and snagging things for the cooks.

I was also dive bombed by a crow or some sort of huge blackbird oddly enough as I continued to take carts to and fro between the kitchens. It was after some left over prime rib, lol. All in all it was a pretty rough day, a huge thing of silverware ended up on the floor, things broke, I cursed and cried at one point and then hugged a total stranger- after smashing my hand between two racked my wedding ring had fallen off. Said stranger found it about eight minutes later. Thank gods.

We were only scheduled till six but washing dishes in cold water takes forever so we didn’t get out of there until around eleven- I’m used to getting out way later but Kei and I had been there since the morning shift so it was pretty rough. When we got home the both of us passed out. I’m still worn out as hell, lol.

Idle Thought

Crap, I’m tired. *yawns* I kept waking up last night and thinking that I was talking to someone but then I’d wake up a little more and realize I was the only one semi-conscious in the house and that I was talking to myself. So, I’d go back to sleep and then do the whole thing all over again in an hour or so. Lol, in fact it happened so many times that when my Hubby woke me up this morning I had to just sit there and stare at him for a long time before I figured out I was actually awake.

Nap time for me. When I wake up I want to go over some of my coding knowledge. I’m trying to teach myself how to write basic windows applications. Why? Well, because I can and because to me it’s about as fun as playing a favorite game is to other people that and I want to see if I can write out the code for a basic word processor. Not because I don’t have one, I’m the master of finding free software and I have all the writing tools I need on my laptop but I’d really like to see what I could make myself. Just because.

Anyways, night night for an hour.

Little Bird Black

About two weeks or so ago our roof was chosen by a family of beautiful Redwing Blackbirds as a nesting place. There are two more pairs of these magnificent creatures starting homes down further in our yard but we don’t see nor hear them quite as much as this pair who’ve been driving our poor cats nutty.

A few days ago I was lucky enough to have a bit of a close encounter with them. It was so nice out I decided to take a blanket, my writing stuff, and two of our kitties out for a little nature centered writing session.

Our two youngest kitties are leash/harness trained so they don’t cause too much of a fuss but they were so happy when they got to sit less than three feet away from these huge birds, well, not huge like the hawks that can take off with the cats- hence the leashes, but bigger than the Finches and Chickadees who usually frequent our feeders. I was amazed when they continued to fly to and from their nest while we were out there, even coming down ‘nearly’ within Gabe’s reach and acting like he wasn’t there at all. Lol, my cats are so mad that I wouldn’t give them the line they needed to get closer (I only do that if they’re hunting spiders).

Anyway, while my cat children enjoyed a little game of yank-leash-fall-over-drool-and-repeat I came up with a little ditty in my head that later turned into this. One of the lines irks me terribly but it’s stuck in my head and doesn’t want to be changed so I’m going to leave it as it is. As for the image, it’s something I drew (pen) awhile back. It’s actually a Chickadee but I decided to color it like a Redwinged Blackbird just for the hell of it. It might be a little fuzzy because I took a photo of the original in my art book instead of just scanning the thing- it’s so much quicker, lol.

Ode to Little Bird Black

Little Bird Black with red on your back,
Eating your seed and sneering at cats.

Feather by feather and abreast to abreast,
Hiding in my rooftop and building your nest.

From beak to foot and wing to tail,
Nevermore fall where men have failed.

Sing to the sun and tell us your story,
Of forests green and winds so stormy.

Fly high, fly free,
And to your own skys be true.

[Edit: Video and photos of my new avian friends coming soon!]