Praying For Rain

"Sir Edmund Hilary and two experienced sherpas couldn't find this place with a GPS and a well-marked map."

-Craig
www.beerfooddude.livejournal.com

Hopefully this isn't too poorly writ, I'm trying to finish this quickly.

Here at the bar, to be refered to henceforth as The White Elephant Tavern, we do good things. The kitchen is amazing. Our Yelp and such reviews are consistenly positive. The bar end of things are good as well. There isn't one bartender here that doesn't know their shit or that's afraid to listen to yours over a beer and a shot. The problem is our location. To describe it as off-the-beaten-path is an understatement. Lifelong residents of our fair city have problems finding it. It's at a point where three large neighborhoods all convene, and the streets don't make any kind of sense... the ones you can still drive down without killing your car at least.

I've had several conversations with another employee about the labor of love this place has become. There's few enough employees here that you quickly begin to act as family, with all the up and downs and joys and pains of course. This bar has become the metaphorical "house we grew up in" and we love it in spite of itself. We want the bar and kitchen to succeed...not just because it's money in our pockets, but because it SHOULD succeed. You want your loved ones to do well, and it's painful to watch them, and a good thing, to fade or stagnate.

There's a hope, that good days are to come. The drought will end. The crops will grow and flourish, and we will reap the rewards of hard work, patience, and the ability to plant for another season. We try to put the thought out of our minds that maybe the good days won't come, that the seeds that have been sown will only amount to shriveled up weeds in the dust.

Truly, I'm just a bartender. I have no financial stake in this place other than the fact that it's where I show up 4 days a week, hoping to walk out with more money than I came here with. I can say fuck it and go find a job someplace else... but I don't want to. I want to be here, at this bar, with people who have quickly become a fantastic motley family. I want to make good drinks and serve good food, and I want everyone involved to go home tired but happy with money in their pockets.

I hope that's not too much to ask.

Work ALL the Jobs!

Working two jobs can suck. It's an inevitability that when working two jobs, you can't give 100 percent to both, and forget about your life. Fortunately for me, the bar is set pretty low. I sling pizza and serve beer and bbq. As long as I stay upright and don't forget to ring stuff up, I'm pretty much golden. I have no pets, my children are out of state, and my boyfriend is usually bogged down with his own activities. As long as I stay upright and don't forget where I live, I'm pretty much golden on that front.

The problems start to surface when you come face to face with the reality of balancing two workplaces: Neither job gives one shit about the other. You can be employee of the god damn year, the minute you utter one thought aloud about not being able to do whatever for one job because of another... FAIL. You could be trying to come in a little later because you're in the middle of curing fucking cancer, your other boss probably doesn't care. It's not his problem. He needs you at 5pm. You should know this going into the situation. However, that knowledge does not make you feel better when one job conflicts with another and you have to figure out WTF to do.

So this is the situation I find myself in.

After I left my job at The Death Star, I was forced to take a job at a pizza restaurant. Now, despite the fact that I have since been totally mislead by this place, it was there when I needed whatever little positive cash flow I could get. Little positive cash flow is exactly what I got, so I had to take a second job, thus, The Bar. I thought to myself "You can do this. No worries."

That's when I came face to face with another reality of working two jobs: Conflicts between jobs are going to happen. In my case, it's because one job nearly refuses to give me a set schedule (cause who wants to work the same exact shifts every week?! crazy lady!), and the other job decided they needed me for another shift. (You LIKE dead lunch shifts right?!) So now, I'm looking at 4 shifts at each place. 4+4=8 shifts a week. Seven days in a week. This means that at least one day a week, I get to work one place then go to the other. This should be easy, but starting at the bar and then leaving and going to the Pizza Jernt is not an option, because the latest shift at there starts at 6. The Bar shift ends at 6. Unless I figure out the secret to human teleportation through the fax machine, this is a conflict.

*side note: I'm pretty sure that beer truck almost drove through The Bar. this would have killed me and solved all of my problems. I figured beer will one day kill me, I just had never imagined it could be by a beer truck while I'm sitting on my ass drinking coffee*

So what does the Pizza Jernt do? Insist on scheduling me at 6 at least twice a month, if not just once a week. So my options are to be late, or to see if the bartender relieving me on Thursday (my manager) will come in early so I can get to the other place on time. FAIL.

During all of this though, I can't help but feel like I'd rather soak myself in gasoline and juggle lit cigarettes than deal with that tomorrow. (Adding to this nightmare is that whole broken car thing... so I have to cab it from one dead shift to the next. W.T.F.) I mean how hard is it to say, OK, she can work Sunday, Monday, Friday Morning, and Saturday. That gives you 7 possible shifts to choose from. AHHHHH.

Enough with my fruitless bitching!

On another note: things I have done today:

Made the Barenjager Box into a JackOLantern:



Tap O Lantern:

Yesterday I played with chalk!



If things go the same way tomorrow, everything in the bar will have a face.

I just gave the thermostat a face:

First Things are Usually First...

I'll spare you the whole "I've been wanting to start a blog again for awhile" crap, and I'll politely skip the events surrounding my life that may require some sort of outlet before I explode and leave someone covered in brain bits. That of course would insinuate I believe that my life was remotely interesting, dramatic, and worth writing about (THIS BITCH IS CA-RAY-ZEE!!!), because honestly, it probably isn't.

The best I can hope for is that someone will find the at-some-point-when-i-get-around-to-it printed editions of my blogs and use them to write a eulogy of some questionable sort. I'm sure no one will know anything about the crazy lady in the nursing home with no friends, no family, and singing "you are my sunshine" to a bottle of jameson that's long since been empty. The crazy lady, that even in her indistinct babbles, appears to be using run-on sentences.

Some things that should be said:

I bartend four days a week, and wait tables elsewhere another 3 or 4. These are called The Bar and Pizza Joint, respectively. If you figure you know where these places are, good for you. These jobs take up the majority of my time, but hey, things could be worse. I generally can drink on the job and work with people I love. I think it's a win. I live in an apartment I can't afford, with a car I can't really afford either. I drink Jameson and PBR but I'm not a hipster. I simply enjoy the subtle burn of irish whiskey and beer that many thought to be extinct. I forget to capitalize the word "i" unless the spellcheck does it for me, and I speak/type local slang like it's the Queen's English.

I think that's all the introduction I need. Cheers.