Gnu

It's a new moon.  Happy new moon everyone!

As for my state of mind at the moment, I'm all over the place.

Opened the pub yesterday...... closed the pub yesterday...... worked a shift at the pub yesterday...... couldn't sleep.....  Dawn started snoring..... the rain started pouring........ my back started hurting.......  restless night to the power of ten.

Today I have to open the pub..... close the pub, and make sure the new real ales are all tapped and ready to go for the weekend.... I think I'll tap the Martson's Pedigree tonight to put on the bar tomorrow and tap the Kelham Island on Friday night so it's ready to replace something at the weekend.  The new Copper Dragon will arrive Friday and that'll just follow itself on the bar when it runs off and the Leeds Pale, well, unless I get some stillage space, it'll have to wait.  I need a Bateman's XB drinker to walk through the door!

It's enough to keep me awake at night!

I eventually got round to making a lovely salad yesterday to take to the pub for my tea.....  I julienned carrots, diced peppers, boiled eggs, tore lettuce, chopped spring onions, sliced radishes, deseeded cucumber, and generally mixed it all together........ then promptly dropped it all on the kitchen floor!

If Jesus wept, he couldn't hold a candle to what I did!!

As we all know, the 8 second rule doth verily apply, and I scooped it up quickly, leaving the last few dog hair coated pieces for the sweeping brush.

Once I'd tipped some bacon bits (vegetarian ones of course) and Italian dressing over the top, you'd never know of the salad's close encounter of the linoleum kind!

And Lord, the salad was good!

Right.... time to get ready and get down the boozer for some opening up type antics..... a barsteward's work is never done!

(just got time to pay tribute to Brian at Tannu Tuva for reminding me how good Squeeze are - in homage, I've changed my music - go on have a go on the music player over there on the right hand side)

Confused

Confused from Huddersfield!

I am working some crazy stints at the pub this week..... I mean crazy!

Some days I'm opening up the pub, other days I'm closing up the pub..... and all the twiddly little bits that go inbetween.

A good number of years ago, I worked as a Mainframe Operator - the computer was so old and grey that it filled a whole, enormous, air-conditioned room.

The disk drives (whose capacity was tiny) needed two people to lift them, and the tape drives were like those that you might see in a mad scientist's laboratory in an episode of Thunderbirds.

I say "a good number of years ago" but it might surprise that this was still in operation around the time of the millennium switch-over, by which I mean the twentieth to twenty first centuries!

Well, that job was a split-shift pattern, and one week I would be working 6:30am to 2pm (including Saturday morning) while the following week I'd be working 2pm to 9pm (or until you'd achieved the workstream - sometimes early hours, others you might get a half hour earlier) and that week there'd be no weekend working.

I shared the shifts with a clever young chap called Sean and we did ok..... we actually ran things quite well.

The ONLY problem I had with those split shifts was that you sometimes get disoriented.......

It's wasn't uncommon for me to wake up at silly o' clock in a cold sweat thinking I'd forgotten to go to work, or that I'd missed a shift, or that I didn't know which way was up and what day of the year it was.

It's the only time in my life that I've had irregular working patterns and hours..... and it did strange things to me.

Well.....

I'm sure the more astute readers have already guessed where this is heading.....

Day one of my hectic schedule and I'm already waking up in that familiar cold sweat!

Right now I'm typing so fast so that I can get this down..... get to the pub to open up..... go to the supermarket to get some food...... cook myself some food and head back to the pub for the evening shift (I need to make myself some decent food because once I'm in the pub tonight I will be there until closing time).

Roll out the barrel on next week!