T-Day minus 3 and counting

Wow, it's been a while since I've had time to journal.

My mom is now home, and has been home for some time. When I called her two weekends ago she was all excited about her new, efficient furnace and about her next-door neighbor's new baby, which she is evidently an honorary grandma of. This brings me around to remembering one of my mother's most stellar virtues: Not once has she ever asked why I haven't gotten married and produced grandkids for her.

My pre-Thanksgiving week at work was a little stressful. Our main distributer has out-of-stocked us on mini-chocolate chips until the second week of December, my assitant manager called in sick one day, on another day one of my part-time people called into say they were out of town on vacation (an hour after their shift would have started), and one of my bread bakers told me he wants to drop some of his shifts because he's gotten a second job selling Tibetan singing bowls over the internet. This is not, however, the most stressful pre-Thanksgiving on record: that honor is a tie between the year I had two out of three bread bakers quit without notice and the year one of our two ovens went down without notice.

This year the bakery will be offering something a little different: bread sculpture! We always do whole wheat and challah rolls for Thanksgiving, and this year we are offering the rolls shaped into the form of a grape cluster with leaf and tendril. This is an idea we've been kicking around for about a year, ever since our outreach director commissioned us to do some "bread heads" for a presentation she was doing. We're starting out small and doing them by special order only--I'm not going to invest that kind of effort into something that won't sell!--and it will be interesting to see how many orders we've gotten. I'm looking forward to making them: bread is my favorite thing to make in the bakery, and shaping the dough is the best part of bread-baking.

So, this week will be busy. I and my loyal minions will be turning out large quantities of dinner rolls, pumpkin and maple walnut pies, and cranbery pumpkin crackquick bread, while attempting to keep up the usual supply of cake, cookies, granola bars, scones, etc. We won't be able to do it all, sadly, but the granola bars and scones are non-negotiable: we now have two coffee houses in town that carry our baked goods, and I Will Not Have Us Fail Them. It's gonna be a bear, but that's the way it is.

I'm just about at the end of my morning pot of tea, so it's time to figure out what I'm going to wear to work today. I worked on Saturday, and spent Sunday wrangling The Writing Assignment That Wouldn't Die, so ended up not doing laundry. I'm thinking I might have something suitable to wear for baking, but that is just speculation on my part.