Has this ever happened to you? You go into a restaurant. It's not very crowded, in fact you're one of only a few tables in the place. "How nice," you think. But then you wait forever for your server, wait forever for your food and then the waitress is nowhere to be found when you want your check, or, she drops off your check and you wait fifteen minutes for her to run your credit card. "What's happening," you wonder, "They're not busy at all." Well, dear readers, I will enlighten you. The waitress, not being busy with any other tables, and not wanting to hover too near your table, frightening you, has probably found something else to occupy herself and every so often remembers, "Oh yeah, I have a table, don't I?" And the kitchen is probably trying to stave off boredom by telling incredibly dirty jokes in Spanish, and maybe doing some singing and dancing (our kitchen crew sings and dances). It's an odd fact of the restaurant business that it doesn't function very well below a certain threshold of business. If the waitress has several tables she's constantly out on the floor, keeping an eye on the tables and taking care of things. But if she's only got one table (you) then she only comes out when she thinks you might need something, which might or might not correspond to reality.

Such was the state of things yesterday. We did 14 people for lunch yesterday, so I spent most of my time looking through the dreaded Alaska guidebooks (I was much less grumpy by then), balancing my checkbook and making phone necessary calls. The first hour or so of dinner was pretty much the same so I spent the time writing, reading Kipling's Plain Tales From the Hills, which I'm liking very much, watching with amusement as the bartender struggled through Heidegger's Being and Time and talked about Being with said bartender. We did get busy later, but, just in case those first few tables were wondering where their waitress had gone, now they know.