Current location:	Home, sweet HOME!
Current mood:	exhausted

IU is Red Hot
When you work in Bloomington food service, or just any type of service in general, your work load is mainly determined by what the students are doing. Are they moving out? Are they moving in? Is it finals week? Do they love tuna salad?

This week, they are moving back to Bloomington, and they LOVE tuna salad. So do their parents!

The kitchen where I work is kind of a mess. It's a different kitchen every week! Things end up getting stored different places, in different kinds of containers. Sometimes things are prepped up, sometimes you have to do them on the fly. Sometimes you just have to make shit up! Never the same sandwich twice! Sometimes a sauce is green and creamy, sometimes it's chunky with green specks in it. Who knows? Who made it? Whoever had the time. Did they label it? Maybe!

Yesterday I made chicken salad, tuna salad, meat soup, vegetarian soup, countless condiments and sauces, grilled muchrooms galore, and today I did it all over again because we were out, and then I did it AGAIN because I do NOT want to do it tomorrow. Our customer load can seriously plow through five gallons each of tuna and chicken salad in a single day. Chicken salad involves slicing grapes in half by the hundreds, and the new tuna salad involves mincing bunches and bunches of tiny green leaves of all sorts-- cilantro, mint, and green onions. My hand has been split open in one place from all of the knife work, not that slipping on a wet floor and driving my hand between the grates in the kitchen shelving helped this. My hands feel a lot like a ballerina's feet often do.

I spent ten hours there yesterday and almost twelve today. I probably have a tan from standing in front of a sofa-sized griddle all day.

Sandwiches, sandwiches, sandwiches!

I kept myself going today by playing a fun game: How many pints of grape tomatoes can I eat one-by-one each time I go into the walk-in cooler??? The answer: Almost two! Each and every one was fucking delicious. A taut red skin to snap through and sweet seedy juice each time. Not a single one was bad. Thanks, Spencer Produce! Your tomatoes are real quality!

Breakfast wasn't very busy and we prepped like mad the whole time. My pancakes were light fluffy gorgeous, perfectly rounded, and grill-scab free. Each order of french toast smelled wonderful even to me. BEHOLD!

Just two days in this week and my entire mind is work-occupied. I'm drinking gin&tonic like it's Coke-a-Cola and listening to every song I've ever recorded to remind myself that I have done things in life besides fry eggs.

I produced a mountain of dishes. You have no idea. And everything in the pile had been washed once or twice by myself and used again immediately. The silent tow-headed teenaged night time dishwasher arrived as I was leaving and started right in without a single complaint, which was a relief.

Phew. STARVING.