Hej så Länge (Bye for Now...)

My next thirty hours will be spent preparing to step out of my new life and back into my old one. I wonder what it will be like…sliding—already chronically toasted—headlong into the most thoroughly exhausting four days of the summer:  the Scandinavian Festival in Junction City. The objective being to rack up something approaching the proceeds of an entire month at the café…in four days.

The upside? Five days of no fourteen-hour shifts toiling away in my impossibly small restaurant kitchen. No…I will trade that for fourteen-hour shifts in front of an oven in an eight-by-twenty-foot trailer jammed stem to stern with hustling, costumed, mostly fifty-something (the lone exception being my fifteen-year-old niece) bodies.

I know there are several good reasons why we do this each year. Just now, I’m having a teensy bit of trouble visualizing even one…