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There’s nothing worse than a blog that just mysteriously stops being updated, and this blog has been in danger of turning into one of those, so I owe you all an explanation. Things have been really tough at Dirt Candy recently, so tough that I’m starting to think I’ve become the victim of some kind of gypsy curse. I keep thinking back on my life and trying to figure out where I went wrong. Did I turn my back on a wizard’s child who was being eaten by bats? Did I break up with a powerful warlock in college? Was I visited by evil fairies as a Canadian baby?

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“Hello, I am here for the baby naming.”

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There are three parts to this story, and today is the shortest and the least most awful. Tomorrow is the next most awful. And Friday is the worst most awful – actually it’s probably almost the worst thing that I’ve ever been through in my life. But all three awful strands have been weaving in and out of each other over the past four weeks, to form a giant tapestry of suck. But this post is about the little stuff that has been taking a toll. I figure the little stuff is the universe’s way of chipping away at my psychic immune system, its way of getting me worn down so that the big stuff hurts more.

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Over the past four weeks, I’ve been training a new waiter. After Kristen moved on I hired a waiter who was very, very nice but had a hard time managing the dining room. When I brought it up with her she told me she had experienced an accident that affected her short term memory. I really appreciated her honesty, but we both agreed that it was unlikely she’d ever feel fully in control of the dining room because of, you know, brain damage. Then came a waiter who was…well, the less said about her the better. I should have known she was trouble when I saw that she had several different last names, but she interviewed well and was so great during her training period that I was willing to ignore my gut. But the second the training was over she turned out to be nothing more than a scam artist who wound up leaving after trying to shake me down for money for hours she never worked. The new waiter, Anna, is great and so far she shows no signs of short term memory loss nor of criminal activities, but she’s a new waiter and this is a tough dining room and so training her takes a lot of time and energy. Also: give it time. She’s probably an arms dealer who’s using the basement to store plastic explosives, or running a human trafficking ring out of the bathroom.

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“I am your new waiter. Can you show
me where your basement is, and how to
deactivate your alarm system.
No, I am totally not evil.”

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Then, this past Monday, I had agreed to cater a charity dinner for Women’s Campaign Forum that I hadn’t been able to do last year. No one thought to tell me that unlike last year when the dinner was for 12, this year it was for 60. Truly, I have rarely had my butt kicked as hard as it was by doing this dinner. It went well, but it was like feeding my soul through a paper shredder. Then I managed to drop and break my cell phone (my phone still worked but it left shards of glass in my ear every time I answered it) and my dishwasher (the machine, not the person) broke a few hours before service last week (cost to repair: $800).

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Then, my dishwasher (the person, not the machine), William washed the mat I stand on behind my station and put it outside to dry. Five minutes later: stolen. Who wants to steal a disgusting floor mat from a kitchen? What’s the street value of that? I don’t even understand. Next, I bought an enormous roll of masking tape (we use it to label quart and pint containers) that turned out to not have any sticking power whatsoever which resulted in a fridge full of blank containers with their labels scattered all over the floor. Figuring out what was what made for hours of fun for the entire staff! Add to that an exciting issue with Verizon in which they managed to accidentally turn off my internet service for an entire night which meant that I couldn’t run any credit cards or take any Open Table reservations for about 24 hours, and the fact that a mighty rain storm wiped out my poorly-built outdoor electricity system leaving me without a menu stand or a front light, and it feels like I’ve put my face in the punching machine for the past three weeks.

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Tomorrow: fun with the Health Department!

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