A good Mother’s Day

Jeff & I were awake at O-dark-thirty Sunday morning from anticipation & excitement. . .cause the café opened for it’s first meal of the season — free pancakes for moms. We’d spent an intense week of getting ready for the season, and had been working a lot & closely with the relief cook couple — Jeff & Marietta. So. . .we now have Jeff-1 and Jeff-2, or Jeff² when talking about them together. I’m still amazed at how excited these two guys are about playing with the big-boy toys in the kitchen. And Marietta (pronounced Ma-RE-ta) & I get along perfectly. She’s great at doing the things I’m not so good with like decorating & cleaning. I’ve updated our menu, made a cost analysis spreadsheet to track how much of what sells, & programmed the cash register with menu item names & prices. We’re set to go (I think)!

However. . .as much as I love & understand (for the most part) computers, me & cash registers still have a rocky relationship. I needed to tweak a few things just before we opened but customers stared coming in before I got finished. In fact, I continued to get interrupted by customers, Jeff, the boss, & a few other things, so it took forever to get the changes made. By then I was getting totally flustered, & over all felt very bad about how I was handling the order/pay process. Thankfully Marietta was there also to assist the customers in the dining area while I hammered away at the cash register. Jeff & I still have to get our order ticket shorthand figured out. I learned actual shorthand decades ago, but that won’t work & I don’t know the abbreviations to use on an order ticket yet.

We treated 11 moms to free pancakes & had 14 couples/families come for breakfast. That’s about 4 times better than last year’s event! As disappointing as my experience was, I had to remember the fiasco of our first day of Christmas tree sales. I never DID figure out the registry tape for that day even after I learned how to read it well. BUT. . .never let it be said that I don’t learn from my mistakes (geez, who’d be dense enough to want to repeat them?), so this can only get easier.

Marietta & I even brainstormed later that day to develop better procedures & simplify our cash registry entries. I’m looking forward to seeing how much our changes will help. Although we don’t open the café for breakfast until Thursday, Jeff & I are both going to hang out at the café with Jeff & Marietta for Tuesday’s official opening. We have a group of fiddlers arriving Wednesday so we’ll be having special meals for them until Sunday.

We had a pot-luck Saturday night for all the workkampers to kick off the season. We won’t be able to all meet off work together again for the next several very busy months though. We were glad to meet several couples who have worked for Robert (the owner & boss) for 6 (maybe even 8) years & even followed him from his previous Colorado Springs campground to this Branson campground. He sure enjoyed frying up some okra picked from his own garden last summer (another guy playing around in the kitchen).

I nearly passed out from laughing though as Robert mentioned walking past a large cat that barked at him yesterday, and how happy he was to see an actual dog crawl out from under the trailer then! OMG, he was talking about our Boots & Kira. Sure wish I could’ve seen the expression (confusion) on Robert’s face.

Since the café opened on Mother’s Day, all I could do was call my mom. We’ll go visit them Wednesday & continue helping move their things to their new little apartment. I feel that my parents are slowly adjusting to my brother’s sudden death & are ready for another chapter in their long lives together. They are having a sale (an auction) next weekend so they’ve got to get what they want out of the house by then. I know my dad is going to enjoy not having any stairs at their new place & hope my mom quickly learns how to get to the only bathroom in the place. They’ve upgraded to a new flat-screen TV for the living room, got a new sleeper sofa, & switched from Dish to DirecTV — otherwise, they’ve moved their familiar things with them.

The weather has been great lately & our workkamping circle of campsites is just about full. Funny how we didn’t like seeing or hearing our neighbors when we lived in our country house, but it’s somehow comforting to have our fellow workers living so close to us now.

It’s sure gona be an interesting summer!