I needed this after a long day — I can’t stop laughing!

I should not have ventured out on Sunday. I should have called in sick, and stayed nice and warm in my cozy little apartment.

Of course, there’s really no slack at the Bookstore to cover for people who aren’t able to come in sick. I’m proud of the fact that in the near year I’ve worked there (I was hired in March of ’08 and started in April), I’ve only called out three times: twice, I was genuinely sick, once, I needed to stay very late at the Office to finish a priority project.

We were busy Sunday. I mean, we weren’t “technically” busy: the sales, I’m sure, don’t reflect that we were busy. But as corporate slashes available payroll to keep the company from floundering, staffing takes a major hit. We had no scheduled cashiers. We only had two booksellers, and a member of the inventory team to staff the register and the information desks. Our Loss Prevention guy, and our service managers, had scheduled shifts at the Info desks to provide slack. Our magazine guy came over to help ring when he had long lines.

Most of my post-lunch shift (which was a casualty of the cuts, I usually have lunch at one, I had to wait until two) was spent on the lower level, staffing the Music Information desk. I was rarely there. There was a big V-cart stacked with books, and I spent most of the evening running from Kids to Music, via Cooking or Romance, mass markets and quality paperbacks and hard covers tucked under one arm, directing customers to Self-Help (oh, the irony) or Popular Fiction or Poetry, while looking for books called down from Main Information for customers.

For a Sunday, our customer traffic was slow. Our sales were down. But we were busy hustling and running, and I’m glad I wore sneakers. While most of our Sunday regulars stayed home, the crazies did not. We’ve got a lot of crazies who come into the store: we have nicknames for most of them, although they’re not all particularly useful: –we have at least half a dozen customers we’ve given the moniker ‘manga man’ – one has a weird Sarlaac-monster-teeth-thing going on with his mouth, another I can’t tell his (her?) gender, a third we’re pretty sure has stolen half the section, and a fourth smells like rotten cabbage but returns the books to the section after he’s done reading them, so we like him (our noses don’t agree with our assessment).

They’re not all crazy: some are argumentative, some are detail oriented, some think we’re publishers, or a library, or Staples. There’s a guy who keeps ordering the same book on German Shepherds over and over again: it’s out of print, no one has it, but I guess he believes in persistence. Another writes up long legal briefs and distributes them to staff, along with little buttons that attempt to sum up each brief’s subject in a word or two.

I was yelled at Sunday, early on, when I was at Main Info. “Yelled” might be a strong word, too strong, in fact. A lady came over to me with a smile on her face, and asked politely for directions to The Mall. I think it’s safe to say, in the DC area, especially in the downtown DC area, that when someone inquires for directions to The Mall, they’re not looking for an enclosing shopping area: they’re looking for a long green rectangle with the US Capitol at one end and the Lincoln Memorial at the other. I was about a quarter of the way into telling her how to get there, when her face abruptly went from a smile to a frown, at which point she interrupted me and inquired whether or not I was giving her directions to The Mall, or to the fucking park? Because, godammit, she wasn’t interested in the godamn park with the godamn giant penis, she just needed a scarf, and shoes, and okay, maybe a food court. Properly chastened for my incredible stupidity, I pointed her in the direction of Friendship Heights (I think there’s a mall up there).

Another insisted that the water in the bathroom wasn’t running. Even after our LP guy went to check and confirmed that, indeed, the water appeared to be functioning normally. An elderly gentleman read our store’s write-up on the company’s locator website and thought we had famous political folks wandering throughout the store on a daily basis, and, dammit, where were they? He’d come a long way. I apologized: George Will had been in the previous Sunday, but the weekdays were really the best times to see them. Like we’re a zoo or somethin’. “Over here, on your left, is a Republican pundit … if you choose to approach him, do so at your own caution and remove any blue you might be wearing!”

Fortunately, our hustle paid off, and right at closing time, we’d totally have been ready to go … but to some people, “We’ll be closing in five minutes, please gather your personal belongings and begin to exit the store” is not an indicator that they should gather their personal belongings, use the bathroom, and then exit. Rather, she waited until our actual closing announcement to do that, meaning we had to wait around several minutes until she finally made her exit.

Even with her, we still made good time, and by 7:10, we were all beginning to assemble at the front for bag-checks and good-byes. As we were pushing out, customers were trying to push in, even refusing to listen to our pleas of, “We’re closed! We’re closed!” Right up until one of our managers, a big gentle giant who with a scowl and set of his shoulders turns into an intimidating motherfucker with a growl and a low rumble satisfied all our would-be shoppers, “Closed!”

All but one: a fellow who just had to buy a CD, he needed it , desperately. He was refused, and his protests that our website showed a later closing time gently rebutted, referred to a different store. By this point, I was rapidly proceeding towards the bus stand: no mood to wait for the delays on the Red Line, or to walk. By the time I got home, well over an hour later, having stopped at Giant for lunch meat and bread, I had barely the energy to throw my food into the refrigerator before collapsing onto my futon and kicking off my shoes and crawling under the covers.

8:45pm, my alarm clock said. Late enough.

Here’s the article.

Here’s what came to my mind:

I bet they slept together afterwords. Possibly beforewords, too. Anyway, now the whole seemingly incestuous nature of their relationship is freakin’ me out, man!

I’m not that brilliant in the kitchen. Okay, I make a mean pot of Kraft Mac & Cheese. And my experiments with Apple Betty and lasagna have turned out quite excellently. On the other hand, I fucked up spaghetti when I put waaaay too much beef in the meatsauce. So, really, the lesson here is never to put anything past me when it comes to fraking up simple recipes.

I e-mailed my Mom this past week for her recipe for broccoli quiche. Now there’s something I never thought I would actually find myself purchasing in a grocery store: broccoli. And yet, Friday after work, that’s what I was bagging up: broccoli, feta cheese, cottage cheese. I also picked up some beef, taco mix, and shells, and made tacos for dinner. Sadly, most of the shells were broken, so it was sort of a taco salad without the, uh, salad.

Back to the quiche, here’s what I needed:

Pie crust, broccoli, eggs, 8-oz feta cheese, 10oz cottage cheese, parmesan cheese, 6 teaspoon milk, nutmeg, salt, pepper. I had most of that available already, but I picked up a package of pie crusts: I had one in my fridge, but I bought that to make a pumpkin pie back in October. Indeed, it was well past the expiration date.

Saturday around 6pm, I fired up the oven and consulted my Mom’s recipe. It seemed pretty simple enough: mix up four eggs, spices, and cheeses in a bowl. Chop up some broccoli, mix it all into an unbaked pie shell.

My first hurdle was how to steam broccoli. Google is the idiot-cooker’s friend, and I put a cup and a half of water into a pot, and when it was boiling, added both bunches (the recipe calls for two medium-sized bunches). I set my microwave’s timer for five minutes, and at the appointed time, pulled the pot off the burner and pulled the broccoli out of the pot (there was a considerable amount of “ow! ow! ow!” at this point).

Meanwhile, the cottage cheese, the parm, the feta, the eggs, all went into a bowl. I sprinkled in some nutmeg, pepper, and salt, and a few teaspoons of milk. I mixed it quite thoroughly, then moved back to the broccoli. I chopped off the stalks, then cut up the big-leafy parts quite tiny. Although Mom’s recipe called for a pre-baked pie crust, I think that was a typo, and substituted a non-baked crust. Once the crust was in the pie-baking-dish-thing, I spread the broccoli over the bottom of the crust, then poured the cheese mix over that. I sprinkled some parm cheese and nutmeg on top, slipped the whole thing into the oven, and baked for 35 minutes at 375 degrees.

And this is where I ran into problems: when I pulled the quiche out, and stuck a knife into it, it didn’t seem to have, er, come together. So I baked it for a total of ten more minutes, and at that point, I was pretty sure I’d ruined it. It looked puffy and runny. Bummed — because I’d spent however much bucks on the food. I watched TV for a bit, then went back to the kitchen to clean up and throw away le quiche.

And what to my surprise should await me! A beautiful looking quiche. So I cut out a slice, and ate it (peaches on the side, duh), and it was fantastic. I guess it just needed some time to settle. In fact, it was soooo good …

Yeah, well. I didn’t want to lose weight this week anyway.