Reading

Don't let my frequent frantic puttering around fool you: I am a lazybones at heart. Laggard. Bum. Sure, yesterday morning I did drain the fish pond and shop vac scum off the bottom in preparation for, maybe, some actual fish. Then as I chopped some green beans for a salad, the knife jumped out of my hands. I jumped back fast, but not quite fast enough. My knee took a cut that's not quite bad enough for a stitch, but is good and ow-y and bending my knee makes that worse. I prescribed lots of lallygagging, and even put off calling Dad until it was late enough for him to have left the house.

Instead of reading Silence of the Songbirds (I really shouldn't use the over-ride code to renew it again...) or even HP like all the other kids, I plowed through Dishwasher: On Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States. Probably, I wouldn't like Dishwasher Pete. He's a slacker and a job-quitter, yet I still wanted to find out what gig he'd land next, what crazy predicament he'd get into. He makes it through an entire summer at a resident camp, which did win points with me, but then promises to help with clean up and ditches the director after all. He is, though, a slacker with some standards: some infestations and heaps of rotting food are even more than any kitchen should tolerate and he makes stabs at improving the scene.

He includes brief essays on restaurant labor history and notes famous folks who had dish washing gigs. My few rounds with commercial dishwashers don't allow me that claim, I suppose: a few rounds in the dishroom in college (MacGregor, I'm thinking; or maybe 1837?) and turns at the helm of the one at CK.

I also read about one of our patrons, here. Generally not a chatty fellow, recently he had shown me a picture or two from his "cross-country trip using bio-fuel." That'll teach me to be skeptical of claims patrons make!