Saturday, October 09, 2004

Ministry of Bread Part II: It's Carbin' Time

Our downtown festival event went very well today. My diet, not so good. But what are ya gonna do when you're selling nothing but loaves of raw empty carbs?

I bought several loaves of bread, including one of Mrs. C's pecan pie bread loaves and a lemon ginger bread Mrs. A baked that the wife had requested. Still, I didn't eat any of it. Not right away, at least. I remained admirably faithful to the philosophy of low-carb dieting, until about 1p, when I told Mrs. A I was going into the depths of the festival in search of food. I was trying to be good in my search too, but I accidentally walked by a fried apple pie booth and the sugary little dough pockets of piping hot apples in syrup cried out to be devoured. I burned the hell out of the roof of my mouth as penance for eating it. It was great.

After that, I figured what the hell, I may as well eat what I want. I finally settled on the German-themed booth, where the sign declared that I could get bratwurst on a hoagie roll, sauerkraut and German potato salad for $5. Sign me up! Only after the man in the line handed me my plate with the bratwurst and bun and a second man slapped some sauerkraut next to it did I learn THERE WAS NO GERMAN POTATO SALAD TO BE HAD AFTER ALL!!!!

"Um, where's the potato salad?" I asked the man.

"There is none. So we dropped the price by a dollar."

Well poop on me! That was why I went in there in the first place. After all, if I'm gonna stuff carbs in my gob, they should at least be in tasty potato form. It had all been a clever ruse! Bastards! (I will say, the brat and sauerkraut was very good--and I don't even like sauerkraut.)

While I was in the downtown area, I did get a chance to check out the location of Garin the Comic Shop Guy's new shop. He's been in business for just about one year as a kiosk shop in the local "mall" but even from the first day I walked in there I thought it had potential. (Heck, just check my commentary on it from back then.) He did some great things with the kiosk shop and really showed how much could be done with one, but I figured that he would trade up to better digs before long. He definitely has. This shop is downtown central in a prime shopping location and next door to my favorite coffee house no less. He's also sharing floor space with the local paintball/ski/scuba guy, in a store that has plenty of room for both. And the Billy-Mayes-Screaming-Oxy-Powered Added Bonus to this is that the shop is located a mere two minute walk from the "liberry" itself. This means I get to cruise on down during my break without having to fight traffic to race across town to the "mall." I could even go in and hang out before heading on in to work.

At the moment, only a portion of his inventory was on display, the decorations weren't complete and the store won't open full time until the first of next month, but damn it's nice to have a full fledged comic shop to walk into.

I spent the rest of my time there working the festival booth, hockin' bread to the masses. The masses were hungry, too. Much bread was sold.

Around 2p, I began trying to find ways to speed the eventual teardown of the booth cause I wanted to hit the road ASAP. The wife is doing an Emergency Room rotation in Princeton, WV and I had a bit of a drive to get there. She's living in student housing there, since her 12 hour shifts are so close together that she has no practical amount of time to come home.  If we're to see one another at all this month I need to drive to her, and I wanted to get over there to spend as much time with her as possible before her 7:30 p shift began. So I started consolidating the remaining bread onto as few tables as possible just to speed things along. I must have also looked pitiful, rushing to cart boxes and chairs and tables back up the hill, because Mrs. A let me go at 2:30.

The wife is doing pretty good in Princeton. I think we miss each other even more now that she's a little closer to home than Clarksburg.  She's at least sharing the student house with one of our friends from school, so she's not as lonely as she was last time she did rotations in Princeton.

We put away quite a few more carbs of brown food down at Ryan's. (For the record, the Princeton Ryan's is the best Ryan's we've ever been to. The service is great, the place is consistently cleaner than most others of its kind, the food is excellent and there's lots of it.) She told me about some of the cool things that have happened to her in the ER.

It was sad, though. We had very little time to spend with each other--even less than we thought, it turns out. She thought she was supposed to go in at 7:30p, but as we looked at her schedule to plan our next rendezvous she noticed she was supposed to be there at 7, a mere 10 minutes away. It was awful to have that half hour snatched away from us like that. So I walked her over to the hospital and said goodbye. Then I drove all the way back home again, with my Patton Oswalt CD for company.

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An employee of a small town "liberry" chronicles his quest to remain sane while dealing with patrons who could star in a short-lived David Lynch television series.