Feeling Lucky

Our event went well. The weather was perfect. Considering the non-summer we’ve had this year, the gods could have inflicted any number of meteorological disasters upon us. We’ve hardly gone a week without rain (which is unusual in summer here…usually by mid-September we are begging for it); so we could very well have had to battle that. It did cloud up Sunday afternoon, but the wet stuff politely stalled about a hundred miles north. Worse, it could have decided to finally break out into actual summer, complete with unrelenting sun, no breeze and temperatures in the triple digits. Picture an 8 x 20 ft. trailer packed with four or five adult bodies, two large refrigeration units, a convection oven running 95% of the time, and the western sun beating on the back of the building for six hours a day. We’ve "Scandi-ed" through those conditions in the past. There are more pleasant activities…like having a root canal or walking over burning coals in bare feet.

Anyway, we couldn’t have had better weather if they had taken our order for it. So the faithful citizens of the central Willamette Valley showed up in force. And they were hungry. So we fed them. To the tune of over $22,000.00 in sales in four days.

I personally had to drag my butt away from the last hour of the festival, de-Scandi myself and make the two-hour drive home Sunday night, so that I could be ready to open the restaurant on Monday morning. It didn’t seem difficult when I made the schedule. And, truthfully, I wasn’t as wasted as I once might have been. As I was dressing Saturday morning, one of my sisters walked in the room and said, "You look like I feel!" And my reply was, "I look like this every morning. I’m no more tired today than I am any other day since we bought the restaurant."

On the drive home, I’d tuned in to a country station.  I heard some guy waxing rhapsodic about how lucky he was in his everyday, normal, boring-ass life. But the lyrics got to me, and I had to nod my head in agreement. How lucky I am to have the life I have! Sunday night, I walked in my front door, laden with my Scandinavian paraphernalia to be lovingly set away for another year. I wasn’t exhausted. I was kind of stoked, actually. We’d had a great event. Daily reports from the restaurant indicated business had turned around over the weekend and pulled a bad week out of the crapper. The housepainters had come while I was away, so I was anticipating some major new curb appeal for the humble abode (which unfortunately I was going to have to wait until morning to enjoy.) Lucky. Yeah…I felt lucky. For the first time in a really long time.

And then I went to work on Monday morning. And within two hours, I wasn’t feeling too lucky anymore.

I’ve got to go get ready for work now, so I’ll have to finish this later…