Dear Feastlings,
I say this walking the line between genuine belief and supercilious judgement of those who genuinely believe: Worm Moon, you’ve got nothing on Mercury in retrograde. There’s nothing that’ll make you believe that the planets have it in for you like working in the restaurant and hospitality biz. Last week, as Mercury and the moon trined and squared Jupiter and Saturn and what-have-you, I’d already mentioned the tragic outages of our lighting and our most recent refrigerator purchase. For the most part, I’m not inclined to give much credence to the cosmic square dance and how it might affect each of us on a personal level, but 44 years of foodservice makes for about 545 full moons by my calculation, and I’ll be dipped if those 545 days weren’t rougher than the other sixteen thousand and change.
Yesterday and today were meant to be the days that things were resolved. The electrician, who showed up last week to install the transformer I ordered, installed it without noticing that I, no electrician by any means, had ordered a 227-volt transformer rather than the 120-volt transformer we needed, and so, while we’re not benighted like we were last week, the dim bulbs on the east side of the dining room mock me each night as a metaphor for my own dim-bulbed mistake. The refrigerator that’s already had the compressor changed out now requires a new coil, and while I’m thrilled it’s still under warranty, it’ll take a few days to get here, and another few before the tech can come out and spend four or five straight hours in our refrigerator’s loving embrace. With any luck at all, in a week, both will be working again, but that’s only if all goes ideally. In the meantime, I’ve looked it up and Mercury’s perceived path won’t be changing until the 20th, so I’m not inclined toward optimism.
In the meantime, we’ve got a wine dinner tomorrow, which was full, then not, and now has four seats remaining if you’d care to taste some exceptional Pinot Noirs and some equally exceptional Chardonnay and sparkling Pinot Blanc.
That’s assuming the blunder of the duck legs that came in today instead of the duck breasts we’d ordered is resolved first thing in the morning. I’ll reserve judgement until then.
We also have a wine tasting on the 14th, at the usual 2:00 pm time, if you want fewer bells and whistles and you want to meet Devin, who’ll be joining us for the first time to shoot the breeze about how wines are influenced by the ocean and its creatures.
This will all take place within Mercury’s backward dance, as will the abundance of brisket we’re corning for St. Patrick’s Day. And by the end of next week, we may have survived it all, lights on, refrigerator running, bellies full of food and drink, and no one to blame but the stars. Last time I went on about this, a regular guest sent me this Shakespearean snippet, and I feel like I should carry it around in my pocket like Abe Lincoln evidently carried Poe’s “The Raven” in his, at least according to a recent crossword puzzle:
sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make
guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if
we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion;
knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance;
drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine
thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay
his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father
compounded with my mother under the Dragon’s Tail, and my
nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and
lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am, had the
maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.”
If nothing else, I think I’ll take to exclaiming “Fut!” every now and again. But I’ll probably keep blaming my woes on the planets and stars as well. See you when Mercury goes direct.
Yours,
Doug