Root Beer Floats

We finished our on-call assignment by showing up this morning at 6:45 a.m. as directed. On Fridays  the cook prepares the "Big Breakfast," so the morning kitchen people are asked to come in at 6:30 a.m. They had made the coffee and put out the tea and water and ice and juice, etc. The housekeeper had already folded and put away the kitchen laundry. The receptionist told us that it's her job to check people in and collect the money (everyone pays for the Big Breakfast). So our assignment came down to unlocking the building at 7:20 a.m. and turning off the porch lights. We could have slept another half hour! We told the coordinator we would come back after folks had left to wipe up the tables and chairs, but he said the staff would do that.

So we checked the driving schedule--no assignments. Our next assignment was to help in the kitchen for the evening meal. That means arriving at 4:00 p.m. on some days--but not this day. Ken decided to read over the volunteer manual, and suddenly he said, "We have to go over at 2:10 p.m. to help with root beer floats"--that's a Friday afternoon tradition here. Fortunately we had an hour before we had to show up.
We walked in through the multipurpose room, where a group was playing Bingo, and went to the kitchen. Joe had already started handing out floats to the early birds. We took over the job. I scooped the ice cream and Ken poured the root beer. We had regular and sugar free ice cream and regular and diet root beer, so one of the challenges was to keep straight which was which and who wanted what. When the Bingo game broke up, the crowd arrived, and we were busy for a while. When everyone had been served, we had our own floats--a perk of the job 8-)

The weekend and evening cook, Carl, has been on vacation, so the volunteers have been doing lots of cooking. Today he was back at work, for which we were grateful, since otherwise we'd have had to cook. He made grilled ham and cheese sandwiches. He certainly knows his way around a kitchen. We heard that he had cooked for years on offshore oil rigs.

Tonight I finally got around to checking my old computer for any files I might still need from it. Then I ran the recovery program, which wipes the computer clean and restores it to its original state, so now it's ready to put on Craigslist when we get back to Dallas.

We skipped the sandwiches for supper and came home. I fixed baked dijon salmon and rice with figs and broccoli. For the salad we had spinach, sliced onions, and mushrooms with a walm balsamic dressing. Everything was yummy. We went to bed early since we plan to set our alarm for 6:20 a.m., plus we are tired!