Excessive

I don't even know where to start... the last couple days have been somewhat of a blur, it's difficult to keep track of any kind of timeline of events. I worked for fourteen hours on Monday, which lead into this weird migraine/drunk thing that made my sleep last night an agonizing experience.

The morning of work started pretty much as normal, I helped put away the order to speed up the process, and eventually began work on a continental breakfast for thirty that needed to be done, as Julie was busy with a breakfast buffet for 120 people or so, which is large, and requires constant work to keep up with. I got the breakfast ready fairly quickly, and eventually moved on to getting the grand hall lunch buffet for that same group of thirty ready, by bowling the salads, making a cheese tray, and all the normal things that are required for the event. I did manage to get most of it ready fairly quickly, at least as I remember it, and once I was finished, Julie was a bit behind as far as getting the hot food ready for this lunch buffet, mainly because she had been putting away the order and keeping up with the busy breakfast buffet, so I immediately started helping her out getting the food ready; Making chicken skewers, tossing corn on the cob, steaming asparagus... it was pretty hectic, and quite the run around, but after a bunch of hard work, it was 12:00pm, and we had got all the food out on time, and the food was well made, so all was well.

At this point I was informed that even though we had a huge event at night that had yet to be started (we're talking giant huge, 150 people, thousands of hor's, lots of work, and I was scheduled for 7am to 3pm)... I was informed that I had to go down to the CVG to make sandwiches for at least a half an hour, something which I thought was quite ridiculous, given the circumstances at least, I figured they could let it go for a day, Kat could suffer through one busy day in order to make getting the afternoon event ready something that could be realistically done, but no, Hannah insisted I went down, so I did. I arrived down there at around 12:15pm, and I was instructed to stay down there until 1pm, which is... you know... retarded. I had already missed the busy period for Kat, she had got through it okay, the wait times were a bit higher, but it's not like she died or something, and so while down there I made probably five sandwiches, at which point it was 12:45pm, and I just said... "hey if you feel comfortable on your own, I'm going to head back up" and she said sure, and I walked back up.

I got back up there around 1pm, and when I arrived back in the kitchen, it had been abandonded, with only the dishwasher there, doing the dishes from the lunch buffet (plates, etc), but there were all the equipment, pans, left over food, prep areas, ingredients, buckets, everything, everywhere, it was a disaster. I spent the first ten minutes or so cleaning up everything and putting away everything, and just getting the kitchen back to the way it should be. The only people at work at this point was Julie, who opened at 6am and myself, who came in at 7am, and Jon, who came in at 11am, to do lunch service in the Cafe, and Mike "word" aka Percy Krustofski, came in at 12pm, to work lunch and eventually dinner in the Cafe. Anyway, Jon and Mike were busy in the Cafe, as lunch service was fairly steady, and Julie was in the office putting in an order, so I was alone to clean up, get organized, and figure out where to start.

I wrote a list of everything that needed to be done, in three steps, as there were three distinct sections to the event, at 5pm there were the hor's, at 6:30pm there was a salad bar, and then finally at 7:30pm there was a dessert table, so breaking everything up into one of those columns let me prioritize things properly, and obviously it was getting the hor's done that took the top spot as far as what needed to be done went. I was a bit overwhelmed with the amount of work left to be done, essentially I was alone in the kitchen without literally thousands of things to do, and I only had two hours left to do it (hahahahaha). I went over to the Cafe and told Jon that it was too much for me to do on my own, and if Mike was okay on his own in the Cafe, he should come over and help as soon as possible, as we were going to need him if we were going to get this stuff done on time.

Julie was still MIA because Neil had requested a meeting with her... yes, a meeting during the afternoon of one of the largest events in recent months. I'm not sure how that seemed like a good idea, but to add to the insult, he asked her to go meet with him and then disappeared, so she had to spend time waiting, looking around and all that fun stuff, while Jon and I strugged to stay alive and work on all this crap. I already knew at this point, I wouldn't be going home at 3pm, on time, and I knew I would be staying late, which kinda helped me feel less upset. Together, Jon and I, and eventually Julie got most of the hor's done, but it was getting late... at this point, it was about 4:30pm, and while Jon was busy making garnishes and getting platters together to put out the food, and Julie was finishing up the last couple hor's, I had moved on to the salad prep, which was the second of three columns of lists of jobs.

I started by making a giant bin of greek salad, one of the salads we needed to put out and feed 150 people with, which didn't take that long, considering it's just cutting tomatoes and cucumbers. At this point it was after 5pm, and Jon had started sending out the food with the servers, even though they started late because of the number of people, it wasn't on us, so everything was fine. I started making a potato salad... a very large amount, and after I had finished that, it was 6:15pm, and I had been there for 11.25 hours, so Julie told me I could stop, I could leave, but I told her I wanted to make some dinner because I was very hungry, I was literally shaking, my hands couldn't be still, and that's not cool when you are using a knife really, so yeah, she told me that she'd probably only be an hour or so, if I wanted a ride, so I went to the Cafe and deep fried some chicken fingers and fries, took them back over with a bowl and grabbed a Coke and set up the step ladder at the end of my prep table and sat down, very tired, slightly out of it to be honest, and started to eat. At this point of the night I had a bit of a headache, that was getting worse with each minute, and I was spacing out all the time, couldn't keep my eyes focused and yeah, was just generally a big ball of shit.

After eating one or two chicken fingers, I could tell the Jon and Julie (who started an hour earlier than me) were behind, and they were doing work that I knew I was good at, so I couldn't just sit there and watch them fall behind. The salad bar was being sent out, but Julie was a couple salads behind, due to whatever, and so I got back up and stretched out a pasta salad, made salad dressings, and from there just continued working as if I was still on. I think the energy from the bit I ate helped because I kind of got a second wind, although I was still kind of out of it. When I was cutting the potatoes for the potato salad, I had stabbed right into my pink finger, which didn't even hurt, and it looked like a paper cut, but I think it went in a bit because it poured out blood like a mother fucker, so I had to wear a bandaid and a glove for the rest of the time. After the salads were out, Jon got called to the Cafe, becuase Percy needed some help, as it turned into a bit of a busy night in the cafe, and so Jon had to go, and if I hadn't started helping again, it would've just been Julie. So this event that we were doing was way more intense than we had thought it was going to be. We were under the impression that as long as the hor's were done and the salads were bowled up and ready to go out, we could just leave and all would be well, but these people ate non-stop and just devoured everything, Julie and I worked non-stop, running around like crazy people. Julie continued to replenish salads, as I moved on to getting some of the dessert stuff ready... which was mainly cutting and plating fruit.

The desserts started going out, and the salads kept being replenished, so I continued to work on desserts, traying up cakes, but eventually Jon came back over, and I used that time to make more pasta salad, which takes awhile because I had to cut all the veg again, and then add it all in, season and what have you. At this point, things were winding down a bit... it was 8:00pm, and Jon had started working on the breakfast cart, and Spencer had told us to just stop sending out food. We cleaned up a bit, I sat down, Jon did a bit more work, and we were changed, done and out of there at around 9:00pm. Even though I had originally wrote down 6:15pm as my sign out time, since I worked so hard afterward for free, Julie changed my out time to 8:15pm, which was nice, because I was going to have just worked for free to help out, but now at least I got paid for it. On paper, I worked 13 hours, but was there for 14, and Julie had worked 15 hours, so all in all, I think we were both almost dead, and we both knew the answer... alchohol.

Julie and I got in her car, turned on some music and drove to the Metro near Adelaide and Oxford, where we hit up the beer store, picked up about six tallboys, two for us to share, two for me and two for Julie, and then stopped by the wine store, and Julie bought a bottle. From there, Julie ran in Metro to pick up bacon for work because we were out, and she also grabbed me gifts, a bag of the intense dill pickle Doritoes that I had yet to try, as well as a pack of gummy bears and a pack of fuzzy peaches. She drove me home, and we just sat in the car in the drive way and each had a tallboy Alexander Keiths and talked for a bit. I think this was kind of stupid of me, because at this point of the night my headache was pretty intense, and I was pretty out of it, and add on to that the fact that I hadn't really eaten anything all day, and I was exausted, the beer got me kinda drunk, which was unexpected, as it usually takes at least two tall boys to make me feel all fuzzy. I don't know why I thought this was a good idea, but after about twenty minutes, I said goodbye and went inside. At this point I felt a little drunk, and so sore and my head hurt so bad, like sooooo bad, and I felt sick to my stomach.

I came inside and ripped most of my clothes off and I don't mean that in a sexy way, which I'm sure you are most likely picturing in your head right now. I was really out of it to be honest, and I don't really remember much. I know that I was really, really uncomfortable due to the amount of pain I was in, but I didn't know if I should go to sleep yet, since it was around 10:30pm and it seemed earlier to me for some reason. I did decide to take a sleeping pill, and I even tried to eat a snack, chips and a coke, but immediately realized that I wasn't going to be able to eat it due to how sick I felt, so I just wrapped them and put them away almost right away. I also tried to relax and chat but I couldn't do it, I couldn't even wait long enough to feel effects of the sleeping pill, I knew I had to go to sleep, so I changed into my pijamas very quickly, and just went to sleep.

Now you'd think that this is where it would get better, but in fact this is where it got much, much worse. I don't really know how to describe it, but I was tossing and turning all night. My body was in agony, and my head pounded, blinding pain all the time, turning around, trying to responsition, couldn't breath out of my nose, couldn't lay on my back or it hurt my head, couldn't lay on my stomach or I felt too weird. It was just a terrible, terrible night, and I was really quite out of it.

I woke up around 9:30am, still feeling pretty groggy and uncomfortable, but I somehow knew I wasn't going to fall back asleep, so I got up, kind of took a second to wake up a little, and decided that a large breakfast might be what I need to snap out of this crappy feeling that was following me around. Considering I didn't really eat anything the day before, I figured it was a good step to take towards feeling better. I was out of toast, sadly, and this actually almost made me not make a breakfast, but I figured I could get by without toast if I made a good enough breakfast. I made a red pepper, red onion, mushroom and mozzarella omelette, with deep friend potato pancakes, bacon and a coffee. It was a good breakfast, and that, with a breeze coming in while I sat at the computer, helped me feel a lot better.

I did kind of still feel weird emotionally... I kind of felt numb, a result of the drinking most likely. I knew that I needed some structure to my day, as I usually do, and I had some things in mind already, so I took the time to make a to do list for the day, just to help me along, and perhaps stay sane through the day. I did all the dishes, and cleaned the litter, naturally, but also vacuumed all the carpet in the house, took out the garbage, and swept the floors. After the majority of the work was done, I rode the bike to the grocery store and picked up a few things that I needed, things like bread, apple sauce, dish clothes... a pretty light load really, but things that I needed none the less.

Once home, I did two loads of laundry while floating around the house, not really doing anything specific, kind of feeling bored and antsy. I played one map of La Pucelle, played a level of Trine, and played a tiny bit of Limbo, but not really sticking with any one game for any significant amount of time. Eventually I had wasted enough time that it was getting closer to dinner time, and the laundry was in the dryer, so I could really just sit down and not think about anything. I put on spaghetti for dinner, and watched the second part to the four lights episode of Star Trek: TNG, which is sooooo good. I really love that episode so much! After dinner, I made a coffee and ate a mars bar, and quickly decided that I needed some programming job to occupy my mind, as I felt I was going pretty crazy and had nothing to do that amused me. I didn't know what I wanted to work on really, I had no solid ideas, but I went over to the computer and loaded the site to see if I would be inspired by something, just have an idea fly into my head that I could act on.

I had started a graph class a few weeks back using an open source php graphing class as a parent, but had given up on it when I was strugging for practical uses for it, but i decided that I would continue working on it tonight, by finishing up the class, so that I could easily create graphs based on a set of data returned by a SQL statement. Oh, I suppose I should mention that during the course of the day, I listened to almost every Tragically Hip album... some strange desire to for some reason, as it's a band I never listen to, but for some reason, today... I really enjoyed it. Anyway, I was listening to more of the Hip while programming, and chatting with Ally about her recently aquired new job, and it turned out to be a pretty relaxing time. I finished the graphs, and the system that generates them, so I can add new ones as I think of them, and soon you will find them integrating with the site, but not quite yet. I'm mainly using them to view trends in my writing, like how much I write, and if it's gotten more and more, or less and less. I just find it really interesting to view data and stats on my own writing. When I was finished with the programming, I noticed that there was garbage at the curbs, so I forced myself to go out and bring the garbage and recycling to the curb, in the dark, and for some reason I really didn't want to, but I did.. haha.

Afterward, I decided to run a bath, and shave, as it had been awhile and I was starting to look retarded, so I had my bath, and shaved, while I had Jimmy Fallon (rerun) playing in the background. I didn't stay in for long, as I seem to have A.D.D. whenever I get in a bath lately. I don't just lay there and enjoy it anymore, I just get in and get out pretty quickly, it's kinda messed up. I set up the laptop in the living room in order to write and watch TV at the same time ( and chat with people), and so far I've watched that episode of Jimmy, two episodes of the Daily Show and an episode of the Colbert Report. Oh yeah, and before I had my bath, I watched tonights episode of Star Trek: TNG while I folded all the laundry, which I hate doing, but Star Trek made it better, for sure. So as of right now I've been writing for like two hours straight, and I'm really freakin' tired.

Tomorrow I've got another day off, and the house is pretty much clean, so I just plan on cleaning the bathroom stuff, and then playing games the rest of the day. Hopefully that works out for me... maybe I'll have another nice breakfast. At any rate, I'm off to bed now, because I can barely keep my eyes open, and I'm not sure where all this writing is coming from, because my brain isn't really working that well right now either!

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