Coffee Shop Morals

So remember that time I said I didn't like coffee?  That I was a (constant) hot chocolate girl, and a (fickle) tea lover?  

Forget it.  I lied.

Pumpkin Spice Lattes are, quite possibly, the greatest thing I have ever tasted.  It's like drinking warm pumpkin pie.  And who wouldn't love that?
The girls at work talked me into trying one today (and let's just face it...that didn't take much convincing), and I'll never go back.  In fact, I'll likely go into withdrawal at the end of the season when they stop selling them.
I may have to convince them to sell me the recipe...

So what's the moral of the story, folks?  Run, fly, or teleport (don't even think about walking) to your nearest Starbucks, and buy the largest size they have (I think it's a Trente now?  Or something similar...) of a Pumpkin Spice Late!!!

<3 Kiersten 

Love of my Town

Reason #357 I love my town.

(full disclosure: I don't know if there are that many reasons.  I just liked the sound of 357.)

Today, my roommates and I ate lunch at a pizza place in town.  As I was waiting in line at the register to ask for a fork, the man in front of me was paying off his credit from last night.  Apparently the power went out all over town, and he had no cash on him.  So they took his name, and trusted him to pay today.

In most places, people stopped trusting each other that much years ago.  

I think that a lot of the reason for this trust is that a lot of the stores and restaurants in town are privately owned. I fully believe that had the power gone out at a Dominoes, nobody would ever have accepted "I'll pay you tomorrow", because corporate would likely have fired them.  

Which coincidentally is another reason I love this town:  I love privately owned places so much more than a large corporate place where nobody who works there has ever even met the actual owner.  

Tomorrow is the Restaurant Festival in town.  It's a yearly affair, and is a pretty big deal in my town.  I work in a restaurant and was advised by my manager to leave my dorm about fifteen minutes to a half hour sooner than I normally would because the side walks and streets will be absolutely jammed all day.  Yeah.  It's that big.

Last year I was at a friend's house for the weekend, and this will  be my first experience of the festival.  I almost wish I didn't have work so that I could go take pictures!

How about you guys?  What's something you love about your town?

<3 Kiersten

The Lessons You Learn

When you serve in a restaurant, tables start to take on faces instead of the numbers they're assigned.  After you've worked there for a while, you'll start to associate certain customers that ate there with that table, and whenever anybody else sits there, you compare them.  

At the first restaurant I worked in, a privately owned place in my home-town, 504 became a group of Saturday-night-friends.  They'd come in the first night that I was closing around midnight, and I stopped by their table a few times throughout the night to make sure they didn't need anything else.  The girl on the left was passed out in her boyfriend's lap.  The other two people at the table were in their own world, and didn't really respond whenever I stopped at the table.  The boyfriend was the only person ordering drinks, and he must have been the Designated Driver because all he ordered were waters, one right after the other until 2am when we closed.

305 became Ellen- an older woman who came in every morning at 11 or so for lunch.  Every day she'd tell us stories about her late husband Edward and the conversations she'd heard on the bus ride into town.  More recently, she's started telling us about her boyfriend, a man who she says is younger than her and who she promises that maybe one day, she'll introduce us all to.  


601 was a group of older couples, old family friends of one another out for dinner together.  The oldest man at the table choked on a piece of steak from his salad, and I remember having no idea what to do.  I just kept running back and forth between the server station and the table, grabbing piles of napkins and glasses of water for him.  Eventually he coughed it up, and his family had the salad wrapped.  

Given time, I feel like every table will have a face instead of a number.  That it will take time, but eventually, every table will be a reminder of a lesson that a customer taught you at one point or another, and even when you leave the restaurant you'll still carry the memory of that table with you.

___________________________________________

Or am I just getting too philosophical concerning my waitressing jobs?

<3 Kiersten