Week 1, A Review in Achievements. in Life

Well we survived! Week one is now complete and despite the move itself being stressful in the sense of a climax of events and the ever looming idea in the back of my head that “I don’t deserve this” and “The Universe is going to make sure something bad happens at the last minute” We survived.

Not only survived but flourished a bit. I’m starting to think all that dust floating around the last place might not have been great for us. The past couple of months it was hard to go a week without one of us being incredibly sick. Like, laid up in bed sick. After the first week here and all the stresses that come with, only Ellie has caught a bit of a cold (no fever!) and I’ve got a sore throat. Pretty good given the odds.

We’re almost entirely unpacked except for books because we’re not sure where the bookshelf is going to go, hopefully planning on taking care of that today and we’ve got a pile of boxes to go to Pam’s Sister who uses them for her recycling bin.

This is all so mundane as far as information dumps go but there are dark clouds that shadow this awesomeness.

Pam’s Mom has something of a diagnoses for her sudden personality change. It turns out that a while back she had an Asthma attack and ignored it to finish baking a pie. During that time her brain was getting a reduced flow of oxygen resulting in Severe Retrograde Amnesia so she now believes she’s 20, and doesn’t remember Pam at all. Leaving her esentially an orphan by her two surviving parents. Which… REALLY pisses me off, it’s just such a fucking shit deal because Pam is so wonderful, and loving, and caring and her parents are just… fuck-wads.

I understand that it’s not within her mother’s control (to a degree…) but it’s just gotta be so shitty to see both your parents not want you around. It really puts my parental situation in perspective and also really makes you think twice about “When something goes wrong, deal with it” If she had just not been so stubbron she’d be at least better off than she is now (Pam’s Mom) But because of that moment, those few moments where she was like “Piss off I’m fine” she’s lost 30 years of memories. Fuck.

Beyond that, Pam’s job is going well, she’s very happy there and walking about 10km (6.2 miles) a day to and from work, which is both impressive and daunting given that we just got 25cm (10’‘)-Forecasted of snow on the Friday that just passed. But she seems to be dealing with that side of things well. I think it’s good bit of alone time for her to proccess everything that’s going on and in time she’s going to start losing that weight that she’s been waffling on wanting to lose since Ellie came along.

disclaimer Make no mistake, I don’t think Pam needs to lose weight but she has this tendancy to talk about wanting to lose weight and then biting my head off when I suggest things that can help her lose weight, in turn making me look like I’m shaming her size when I think she’s beautiful but I, at the same time, want her to achieve her own goals so she goes from “I’m beautiful and I don’t need to lose my baby weight no matter what people say” to “I need to lose weight so I can keep up with Ellie and be a healthy example to her” and the second I push the latter, it makes me look like a bit of a prick. /Disclaimer

I also have a new job. On the Monday I went out for an interview at a kitchen, the chef couldn’t make it in due to an emergency and I had to get her #2, who was doing her first interview. I have some first impressions of this kitchen and the people in it but I’m holding my toung until I get more comfortable there and establish my position as someone who isn’t always saying “What’s next” I think they don’t quite know what to do with my skill set, and I’m cautious about being egotistical but I’ve worked in much stricter kitchens than this with much larger workloads. The cool thing is that they don’t have a dishwasher for 4 days of the week. On Friday-Sunday they bring in a “Kitchen Helper” and they work dish. The rest of the week, everyone pitches in as they have a minute or two. Which is REALLY weird to me. I like to stockpile dishes and drop a bucket when I need to in an effort to save time, so I’m dropping a day’s worth of dishes on some poor server and she’s like “Oh I got that, we all help each other out here” and I’m just… So confused on how to deal with that. It’s one of the smaller kitchens I’ve worked in (They boasted during the interview that it’s a bigger than average kitchen) and at most they have 3 people on line at a time and I’m used to running a line with 7 people. It’s really… A change. There’s not a lot… organization. Or rather there’s a lot of room for improvement on the topic of organization. The good part is that everything is clean(ish) and they take good care to avoid cross contamination. But you can tell that they haven’t really done a good hard deep clean. I’m used to places where when you’re done with your section you grab a scrubbie and go from top to bottom, wall to bottom shelf. And that’s just not something they do here. It’s not dirty in the sense that you’d find rodents or anything like that, just a lot of the counters have a haze of only being sani wiped rather than elbow greased to a shine. Not bad, just a lower standard than I’m used to, purely superficial.

Right now I’m in full observer mode and just seeing how things are done and learning to adjust to people’s personalities. Everyone there is super chill (So far) and there’s a lot of returners to the industry so it’s nice that everyone kinda understands things like the early leg pains and trying to get your callouses back and all that fun stuff that comes from being out of the industry for so long.

Regardless I got my coats and pants on order so we’re off to the races!

-D