Ye Gods.

I have never worked this much in my life.
Total of ten hours today, double shift with two hours off in the middle. My third double in four days. Yesterday was nice and calm but tonight was freshly shat from the devil's arsehole. Evil customers with their mega-large group bookings and rambunctious children. Spaghetti from one end of the verandah to the other.
I swear, next time the CMS descend on Roxanne on Glebe Point Road with our finely tuned carousing habits, large collection of BYO wines, extra people without warning, and the "kids table" who lurk around drinking for hours, I am leaving them as large a tip as I can afford, and an apology. Large group bookings suck.

On the other hand, all the other customers who had the misfortune to be around tonight were lovely and patient with our understaffed insanity; tables 36 and 37 were so sweet and highlarious, respectively, that I wanted to tip them. The guy on 37 was Norwegian, on a last night out with his Australian girlfriend before leaving the country. They got completely overlooked for nearly half an hour due to the chaos surrounding the group bookings, but nevertheless when I went out to offer them dessert and be all charming, they pulled out all stops to entertain me, insulting each other and clowing around and generally making the night worthwhile. Then, while their dessert was coming, he got up and wandered over to 36 and charmed the wits out of the middle aged ladies there. When I came back outside he was kissing one of them up the neck from shoulder to chin (apparently because she had expensive perfume on, or so his girlfriend would have me believe). 36 said they had a wonderful night- the food was delicious and the entertainment spectacular. When asked if they meant 37, or either of the two Evil Family Tables Of Doom, they assured us that all were equally entertaining and you couldn't get amusement like that if you paid for it. Once 36 were gone we turned up the music and started on the mammoth cleanup job, while 37 danced- first romantically, then some kind of frenetic disco-dancing, across our verandah. The guy cleared up their table for us- turned up in the bar where I was polishing glasses with his arms full of plates and glasses, and wouldn't hand them over to me, carried them right out the back and stacked them all neatly for the chefs. Customers like that deserve prizes. We gave them cookies, because that was what we had.

Speaking of which, Manic!Manager, a co-worker and I did the Nutbush across the verandah on New Years Eve. Would have to be one of the best NYEs I've ever spent, actually, which just goes to show you that my social life is non-existent.

Spent my break today- what little was left after i rang the Goblin, and before I had dinner- in the public library, finally starting my Anglo-Saxon translations for the summer. Remembered that I actually adore this stuff, and I felt somewhat more like myself again, after a month or so as hospitality-zombie. Then I got slammed in the face with tonight's shift. You win some, you lose some, I guess.

Driving home is tougher some nights than others. New Year's Day, when I finished at 10pm, was for some reason much, much harder than tonight, even though I finished at twenty past midnight. Either way, thank the good lord for museli bars and the Coyote Ugly soundtrack.

My Brain, it is weird

So, exhaustion is supposed to result in sweet dreamless sleep. I could be so lucky. Instead, I seem to have been channelling ursulav, except without all the sex. And no birds, either, unless you count dragons.

Had an extremely complex dream last night, one of those ones where two separate narratives crash into each other with bizarre results.

To start with, I was pregnant. The baby was due on my birthday (which, weirdly, in this dream was Nov. 7, not 6), but Dad was sure it would be two weeks premi. That meant that I was due in week twelve of semester, and would conflict with the presentation-and-paper I was planning to give for Devious' class that week. goblinpaladin was also in said class, but could not or would not swap presentation weeks with me. I'm not sure if he had anything to do with the baby at all, he was certainly quite peripheral to the whole thing.

At this point, the plot collided with a very cool, very vibrantly coloured fantasy world, in which I decided to summon a dragon oracle from an outback dunny, to find out when my baby would be born. The dragon oracle had a BABY DRAGON ORACLE, which was ADOWABLE and had blue eye-shadow. I don't think I found out when I'd be giving birth, but the dragon oracle did give me useful advice on parenting in general and managing parenthood and study in particular.¹ Meanwhile, there was a very complicated plot going on in this fantasy land, which I can't remember particularly well anymore. There were two cousins in love, an evil lord of some sort, and a king or possibly duke who was with me also consulting the dragon oracle. He needed to know when my baby would be born (it was important to the fantasy plot somehow, but also I think he was in Devious' class with me), and then we conducted a second summoning of the dragon oracle in order to find out if she could convince the queen to resume conjugal relations with the king. Except that the queen didn't BELIEVE in dragons, so when we dragged her down to the outback dunny, all she could see was an outback dunny, and that doesn't put anyone in a conjugal mood.

There were sieges, escapes and pursuits, a couple of villages got razed, and I had 15000 words of essays to write.

******

1. Current theory is that the "babies" in fact represent theses, and the Dragon Oracle represents Awesome. What the cousins in love and the non-conjugal royalty had to do with it, I'm unsure.