Large coffee, black with 5 sugars

Millhouse’s job is at night.  He usually starts work anything from 11pm to 1am and he comes home anywhere from 4am to late the next afternoon.  It all depends on his schedule and how many restaurants he has to service.*

His new job has resulted in some very obvious changes.

1. He’s got a different sleeping / waking pattern than we have.  When the boys and I are awake and at daycare and work, he’s asleep.  When we’re asleep, he’s at work.
2. We don’t see him as much.  Because of his schedule there are days when we only see him for a short period of time or some days we don’t see him at all.  So far this week, I haven’t really seen him and because of that I still haven’t told him about a certain someone asking a certain question that they knew the answer to already.
3. We have a second income in the house.  Booyah!  More money is always a good thing because the damn mortgage refuses to pay itself.

But there are some things that we didn’t expect:

a)      Millhouse has lost weight.  A good bit of weight, actually.  He has lost about 35lbs since he started doing this job.  The job itself is extremely physical and because of this he has gotten leaner.

b)      Millhouse doesn’t want to eat out anymore.  Millhouse sees the conditions in which the restaurants operate.  And even though all the places that he goes in to service are board approved, they are not Millhouse approved.  He has seen food left overnight on counters with the intention of being served the next day, he has seen not Millhouse approved storage methods and he has seen the ingredients that actually go into the things he used to love to eat.  Seeing all these things has made him not want to eat out anymore.

c)       Millhouse is on the verge of becoming a vegetarian.  Working in the restaurant industry means that Millhouse sees all the things that we don’t see and one of the things that bothers him the most the grease that is left over after meat has been cooked.  Grease is a big part of Millhouse’s job.  In a lot of places the grease is so thick that he has to use a paint scrapper to scrap it off the equipment (and that is within months of the equipment being cleaned).  And the grease still smells like food when he scraps it off, only a stale, more greasy version of the actual food.  Rotted food smelling grease is not appetizing.  That acrid smell of burnt flesh has become embedded into his nose now and the thought of eating most types of meat disgusts him.  I give him another month before he completely gives up on eating meat.

But he also comes home with some crazy stories.

There was the time that the drunk guy called into the pizza place that he was working at and his helper answered the phone thinking it was some sort of an emergency.  Turns out the guy just wanted to order a pizza.

But my most favourite stories are the stories about the haunted places that Millhouse goes to.

There was this one time when Millhouse went to a restaurant in a 200 year old house.  When he got there no one told him it was haunted.  He just knew that it “felt” weird there.  For most of the night he felt as if someone was standing behind him watching him work but whenever he would turn around, there would be no one there.

He didn’t mention this to his helper, and it wasn’t until they were leaving that the helper mentioned how he felt like he was being watched all night and his helper told him what had happened to him.

His  helper was walking out to the van to pack things away and he heard Millhouse walking down the hall in flip flops behind him and he asked Millhouse to grab a roll of plastic for him so he could load up the truck.  The thing is, when they are on the job, Millhouse doesn’t where flip flops.  He wears steel toe boots.  In fact, his helper has never seen Millhouse ever wear flip flops on the job.  Whoever was walking behind him wasn’t Millhouse.

And they were the only two people there.

His helper threw everything into the van and jumped in.

It wasn’t until they left that they found out that it was haunted.

They are never going back there again.

*He services restaurant kitchen equipment.  So he can only do that at night when the restaurants are closed and there is no cooking going on.