A couple very rare things happened this week:

1. I remembered Mother’s Day occurs every year.
2. I remembered Mother’s Day before Mother’s Day–rather than the morning of–which allowed me to figure out what day it was on.
3. Figuring out what day it was on allowed me to make some plans.

Granted, the plans weren’t that complicated. I bought wine on Saturday and made breakfast today (Omelet with spinach, cheese and ham; side of bacon; rye toast) and had our youngest do dishes after.

I was then able to cocoon with a bunch of small projects that got pushed aside by other things whilst She Who Must Be Obeyed attended a PTA meeting, because Mother’s Day is totally when you schedule meetings (something like that).

During the meeting I also took our youngest to the store to buy chocolate and decorations. (Note: She decorated the chocolate bar with a ribbon and other decorations.)

Then, in the afternoon, She Who Must Be Obeyed, completely misunderstanding the purpose of Mother’s Day (sit, do nothing, enjoy being pampered) made chocolate chip cookies. Granted, if you’re going to do something when you could be doing nothing, making chocolate chip cookies is an awesome thing to do.)

In the evening I cooked steaks for all of us–three medium rare and one well done for our youngest because she’s a communist. Something like that. She Who Must Be Obeyed bought the salad and I pan fried the steaks. (Note: we are not allowed to use any kind of open flame grill in our apartment because our landlord and neighbors are also communists. More on that in a future post.)

The steaks turned out reasonably well (for cheap steaks) and we all managed to eat too much. She Who Must Be Obeyed and I couldn’t choose between wine and beer so we ended up drinking both.

Later, after some “severe promises” were made, our oldest washed the supper dishes.

Now, all I have to do is remember all this again next year. I could set a reminder on my phone, but I’m sure I’ll forget to do that.

I should have gone out to eat, but it’s not much fun by yourself. It also didn’t take that long to do.

Today was inventory day at my odd little ink reselling business. I have a bunch of product to move and I needed to list the inventory so that I could offer it to people with the ultimate goals being 1) making a little money and 2) getting it all off my floor.

All this reminded me of inventory day at Taco Tico. (Note: I am not responsible for their bankruptcy/failure to pay taxes although my management skills, quite frankly, did not help the situation.)

One of my jobs as shift manager was to control the outflow of napkins (servilletes to those in Europe) and paper products. The main rule, if I remember correctly, was that, although Taco Tico had a more “family” style, with food served on regular plates rather than in cartons, napkins were only available on request. This is because when we handed them one or two napkins, customers would accept that. When facing a napkin dispenser or a stack of napkins, however, customers would take half the available supply.

This seems like a minor thing, however, once a month the store manager and the area manager would take over the restaurant after closing and count everything in it The napkin rules came about after they decide that napkins were disappearing too quickly. They then presented a complicated mathematical formula that was supposed to prove this but I just said “Sure, yeah, control napkins. I get it”).

After the inventory, which took a few hours, they always went to a truck stop for a middle of the night breakfast. At one point the area manager implied that I would one day be involved in the counting. I assured him, in so many words, that wasn’t my style.

Instead I ended up counting ink bottles and trying to figure out how to get them off my floor. And there was no breakfast after.