Early springtime.

Starting late February in the town that I now live in, I started seeing daffodils and crocuses coming up, and then a few buds on trees.

I wonder if it's a different climate zone, or climate change.

It's probably both.

Wage/rent proprotions.

That one super busy weekend night was pretty amazing, tips-wise.

Like, between the tips and the base wage, I was making almost $24 an hour for 5 hours straight, at a place that's like a 6-minute walk from my house and where I get a free dinner afterwards.

Since my basic rent and utilities is like $600 a month, I basically nominally earned a fifth of that monthly cost in just over one half day's work!  Yeah, there's taxes, but that's still a shit-ton of money.

My life is so much easier here financial-wise than the city that I used to live in...  There I had it pretty good like that when I first moved there, but it never really regained balance after the 2009 economic crisis, though a lot of people were hoping it would. There, it was like every time that wages went up or something happened to make your life easier, some other expense would go up and you'd be back to square one and the shitty middling endless grind that reigned since 2009.

Return of the intense undergrad.

A few weeks ago at the (Thai) restaurant where I now work at, I was working an unusual weekend night shift and it was like the second busiest shift I've ever worked -- we were slammed -- and suddenly there in the door walk this (apple-shaped) (frizzy-haired) (white) (vaguely countercultural girl), a (young) (short) (white) (sexually ambiguous) (flannel-wearing) person who may have been either (male) or (female) or (trans) or (both), and that one (cleancut) (seemingly biracial Indian - white) guy with a surprisingly deep voice.

And, as I was like "Table for three?" and grabbed the menus and dashed them over to one of the few remaining empty tables, I stopped just beyond it and turned towards them and gestured to the table like I always do with customers, and as the intense undergrad went to sit down and passed by me, he turned towards me just a bit and winked at me a few times with his right eye, but awkwardly, like he's taking one of those classes on in-person flirting that I hear they offer sometimes at college campuses nowadays, to teach the overwhelmed children how they can act in-person in that part of their lives if they should so choose to do so, at some point.

And, it was so busy and it threw me off so much, I had no idea how even to respond, and I simply ran around the restaurant doing other stuff.

I guess to him I'm the hot daddy waiter who gives him little kicks now and then, when he comes in and I'm there?

It's like I'm a small prairie town attraction, for the hormone-addled youth.

Later I noticed that his (trans-seeming) dining companion was drinking a lot of water, and for fun I thought the next time that I went up to fill it up I'd make a comment about how "someone at this table is thirsty," but then they never drank anymore water, so I never had the chance to say it.

I'll have to keep that line in my back pocket, so that the next time he comes in and I go to take drink orders, I can ask everyone at the table like I usually do "if they want anything else to drink besides water," and then I can turn my eyes to his and hold them a little bit too long and and be like, "...in case you're thirsty," and maybe wink after I say that.

More blogpost notes that no longer have any meaning:

- gift certificate + return

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- s[o?]da appeared at w[k?]r, gl[as?]s to[o?] h[ea?]vy

- vs incept [?] b[a?]d tot [?]

. . .

- laugh b/c mult ppl 

"depends"

- lost fr sp [?], ret pm

. . .

- flo[o?]d tks 0 add up

Odd (Thai) restaurant customers.

The other afternoon at the (Thai) restaurant, it was like twenty minutes till we closed the kitchen, and this (very young college-age) (Chinese from China) couple came in, the girl goofy and beautiful, and the guy thin and nasty-looking and a bit cross-eyed.

And, they didn't speak the language much.

And, I told them that the kitchen was closing in twenty minutes, and after they ordered and I asked and they said I should bring out extra plates since they were sharing the one entree, the guy asked if he could keep a menu, and I was like, "Please order everything now, if you want dessert, so we can make it before the kitchen closes."

And, he said he'd let us know right by the time the restaurant closed, and I insisted he order right away in five minutes, and then I went to do something, and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was helping the girl who was very insistent about a phone charger for some reason, and then it's like ten or twelve minutes later and she's putting in a different order, and she says the girl ordered a meal and then she paid with her phone before it died, and meanwhile when I'm delivering things to the table, the cross-eyed nasty-looking guy has a vaping cigarette out on the table, and out of the corner of my eye I see him vaping inside the restaurant and trying to hide it.

So, I go in back to the back office and ask the owner what we should do, and I tell him they're the only table there, and he asks if they've paid, and when I said that they had, he said to tell them nicely that they can vape outside, so I did that.

And then, like five or eight minutes later, I see more vaping clouds again in the sun that's pouring through the front window -- they were sitting way up at the front -- so I tell my (chubby) (Thai) coworker, and a few minutes later she comes up to me and is like, "The girl is also smoking, I just saw it!"

Anyways, they were taking an incredibly long time to eat even though they knew we were closing, and we had to close out the register, so I asked my coworker to go ask them to sign the credit card receipt, so we could bring it up front and close the bill out and start doing all the end-of-shift report stuff that we need to do at the end of every shift.

"They don't like me," I was like, "So, you go."

So, she did, and then she brought it back and was like, "Look at this," and she pointed to the bill, and she said the girl just signed it without leaving a tip, on more than fifty dollars worth of food.

And, we were closing and they were the only table, and they were looking at their phones and eating decently slowly, even after we flipped the sign to "CLOSED" and took in the sandwich board from the outside on the sidewalk, something that they couldn't have helped but notice since they were sitting so close to the door.

And, as the kitchen guys came out into the restaurant to have their late lunch before the restaurant opened back up again when the evening shift started, I was like, "I'm going to talk to them," I told my coworker. "And," I was like, "I'm going to mention that vaping, because that's nonsense, they did that even after we asked them to stop, they know what they're doing."

So, I went up to the front of the restaurant and told them that the restaurant was closing, and then I chose my words very carefully to use very simple and understandable words and was like, "The owner is in the back now, do you want to speak to the owner about the smoking policy?"

And, the cross-eyed guy was like, "We are leaving now."

And, I was like, "I am not speaking about the restaurant closing, I am speaking about the smoking policy. Do you want to speak to the owner about the smoking policy?"

And, the cross-eyed guy was like, "We are leaving now."

And, I repeated myself and was like again, "I am not speaking about the restaurant closing, I am speaking about the smoking policy. Do you want to speak to the owner about the smoking policy?"

And, I added, "I am confused. We told you that vaping is not permitted inside, but you continued to vape inside. It seems that you disagree with the restaurant's smoking policy. Do you want to speak to the owner about the smoking policy?"

And, the cross-eyed guy was like, "We are leaving now."

And, I was like, "Okay."

And, they left and stood outside the door, but the guy had forgotten his coat, so I ran outside to tell him, and he came back in and got it, but then they stood inside the door texting, like they had all the time in the world.

"Maybe they were on drugs," my mom was like, when I was telling her this story later, over the phone.

I also told my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker at one point that they were probably going to leave a nasty review online, and though it's a stereotype about (Chinese) students that they're entitled, we get a lot in the restaurant, and this is only the first time that I've felt that that stereotype was true.

"Yes," she was like, "They are like that," and then she told me about a temple in the north of Thailand "with very beautiful restrooms," and the (Chinese) tourists just destroy it and don't listen to anyone and go and pee everywhere.

Idea for a ploy.

Like over a month ago at the (Thai) restaurant where I now work, I was working an evening shift, and this (highly energetic) (young-looking) (former athlete-looking) (muscly with a little fat on top) (blonde) woman and this (non-descript) (white) guy were in for dinner, and when I went to ask them if they wanted anything to drink besides water, she was like, "How long do we have the babysitter for?", and when he told her, she ordered a beer and was like, "Bring it on!".

And, when I brought out the beer, I was like, "You know, it would be funny if you were actually both college students, and you talked about a babysitter to make it look you were older and get beer."

And, she smiled a big smile and was like, "That would be funny."

And, I was like, "You know, if that was the case, I'd just give it to you anyways, I mean, like, props to a good ploy, that's super creative."

And, she kept smiling her big smile and was like, "That would be a good ploy."

Only, I really do think they were parents in their late 20s or early 30s, they just looked good for their age.

Two sets of customers from one day at the (Thai) restaurant (1 of 2): Earlier customers:

Early on that day before the massive rush, it was just two tables who came in early, including this table of three (white) (older) gentleman the one of whom would shuffle around and speak with tics and seemed somewhat overly literal and autistic, and this other table of this (early 40s) (aging) (white) hipster couple, the guy fatting and balding with tattoos up his one arm, and the woman trim and with a smart pixie cut, and their (vaguely hispanic) (curly brown-haired) small child, who has scrunched-up eyes and who's unresponsive to normal human interaction and who's in this bulky mechanized wheelchair that sticks out into the aisle over by the tables that are out of the way and where we usually never seat anyone, and who every once in a while gives out soft moans that you can hear throughout the entire restaurant.

And, when right before the couple leaves and I bring boxes to the table, the woman is adjusting some feeding tube for her son that's bigger in diameter than my thumb, that's wrapping around the armrest of the young child's wheelchair.

Anyhow, when we're winding down the shift and I'm entering in credit card receipts to adjust the tips, I get to this one, and it's like $6.66, and the amount makes like no sense at all since it's a pretty good tip but it doesn't make the bill add up to anything round -- sometimes people do that, to make a bill come out to fifty dollar exactly or whatever -- and besides that, it's from that part of the restaurant where we usually never seat anyone.

"Look at this," I was like to my one (tall) (skinny) (white) soundguy coworker.

"Someone must have really wanted to put down that number," he was like. "I wonder if it was that table of guys."

"No," I was like, and I pointed to the name on the receipt, "It's a woman! It must have been from that couple with the kid in the wheelchair."

And then, I was like, "How weird."

And then, I was like, "You know, there's more that goes on in [our reportedly boring part of the country] than people think."

"I'll say," he was like, and then he started telling me about some girl he grew up with who would always say she was a witch but really wasn't.