She Dwells In Darkness. She Is... The Laminator

Yes, I am still alive, and with almost all my digits intact. Uhm... more on that in a bit. I am still on the godless graveyard shift, waking up at midnight to laminate, cut and shape danish dough through the wee hours of the morning. But the end is in sight...

(I don’t want to say "I can see the light at the end of the tunnel" because it makes me think of the line in Metallica’s "Four Leaf Clover": "and the soothing light you see at the end of the tunnel is just a freight train coming your way." Then again, that makes me think of Metallica, and James Hetfield when he was still dreamy, all surly and angry, before he went into therapy... but I digress.)

Yes, in three weeks and two days, I will be graduating...

Yikes! Mustn’t think about that now, precious, nooooo, focus on the near future, yesss...

Ok, in two days, I will be done with lamination. It’s not the worst thing in the world; in fact, since I spend half the time in a separate bakeshop, completely alone and without my yappy classmates, I much prefer it to some of the other stations. But I’m also responsible for picking up the food and sanitation orders (the former of which can be half a ton of food at times) and for taking out the trash, which can be exhausting.

Anyway, just to update my audience, such as y’all are, on developments over the last three weeks or so:

Wiley is OK. Some of you may know that just as I started cross-training for this class, waking up at midnight to laminate and then going to LeChef’s class the rest of the day, Wiley got very sick. The vet thinks it’s acute onset of Lyme disease. It was very scary for about a week (I thought I was going to have to put him down), but he’s on megadoses of antibiotics and has been doing much better. Yesterday he even wanted to play a little, which did my heart good to see.

Like Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner, only different. I was really sad to finish LeChef’s class. It was also his last time teaching for a while, since he’s taking time off to write a book. The last days of class, he took us out in the hall one by one to give us feedback. One of my classmates told me he told her "you’re going to be scooping cookie dough and peeling apples the rest of your life because that’s all your capable of." Ouch. But to me at least he said several really nice, sweet things. He told me where I could improve, too, but in a constructive way that made me want to say "You make me want to be a better baker... er, pastry chef... er, pastry chef aspirant... oh, a better whatever the hell I am."

Actually, what happened when he said those things was that I started crying. It was so embarrassing. But because of cross-training and Wiley being sick, I had been up for about 40 hours straight, all of it in motion, running around and stressing out about the career fair which was also happening that day. It was just a little too much to have someone I really respect sort of lay it all out about my strengths and weaknesses. Poor LeChef! He wasn’t expecting that reaction to his feedback. His eyes got really big and I thought he was going to cry. Der Erlkonig came walking down the hall, saw us and narrowed his eyes. Later he came up to me and said "Is he putting you down, young lady? You tell me, because I beat him up!"

I'm going to miss these guys.

Anyway... LeChef was very understanding about the no-sleep situation. He’s still on campus doing work, just not teaching, so every now and then he stops in to watch me laminate or ask how Wiley is. And every time I feel I might start singing the theme from "The Bodyguard," but so far I have nobly restrained myself.

Watching The Laminator is a popular chef pastime in general, by the way. Every morning, as the morning chefs roll in to get ready for their 0700 classes, they congregate outside the big window that looks into the bakeshop where I work. The sheeter I work on happens to be right in front of the window, so they stand there, sipping their coffee and chatting and idly watching me do things like break rolling pins (I snapped the handle off one on my first day. Good times.) and spill flour on the floor and all over myself.

Just what I need at 0-dark-thirty in the morning. An audience.

As for my actual product, I’ve surprised myself. The danish has been coming out almost always great, sometimes even "excellent" according to my current chef, for whom I have not yet devised a clever Nomme de Net. Yesterday they even took a photograph of the interior for posterity. I asked for a copy and if I get one, I’ll post it. I’m just pleased that I haven’t missed my tri-alarm clock wake-up time or gotten my jacket caught in the sheeter while my audience looked on.

Call me Frodo of the Nine Fingers. Or Auntie Maim. I knew, by the way, I was going to hurt myself during this block. Asking me to work graveyard shift is just an invitation to injury. I assumed that I’d twist my ankle or throw my back lugging that stupid food order up to the bakeshop every morning, but I was wrong. No, instead, on the first weekend after being on lamination, I decided to have a Dark and Stormy... Goslings Black Seal Rum and ginger beer. Delicious. Sitting at home, in my green flannel pajamas with monkeys on them, knowing I didn’t have to set my alarms for midnight, life was good.

At about 10 p.m., I decided to make marzipan. I eyeballed some almond flour and some sugar and added a dash of amaretto and mixed, using my hand mixer, aka stick mixer, aka burr mixer. It’s essentially a cuisinart on a stick. The almond flour got gunked up in the blade so, being the true pastry professional I pretend to be, I stopped the mixer to scoop out the flour with my finger.

You know where this is going...

Yes, so while my right index finger was degunking the Very Sharp Blade of the stick mixer, my left index finger, perhaps acting out some kind of subconscious revenge fantasy after having to live in a right-hand-dominated world for so many years... well, yeah.

I turned the mixer back on. With my finger still in it.

Now, you may be cringing and saying to yourself "what a stupid thing to do." Funny enough, that was exactly my reaction.

I didn’t cut my finger off, not quite, but as the nurse would later say, I "really did a number" on myself. Two minor lacerations framing an inch-long, nearly half-inch deep gash that made me look like I’d been mauled by a very small, very angry bear.

Here’s where the pirates separate themselves from, er, the thinking people. After expressing my indignation very colorfully, I sat down on the kitchen floor, resting my right hand on the countertop so it was elevated, applied pressure and finished my Dark and Stormy. I also ate some of my bloody marzipan (hey, it was my blood... besides, what part of pirate don’t you understand?).

What can I say, it was Saturday night, which meant I would have been sitting in the ER forever with my desperately sick dog home alone. Plus I was in my pjs, all cozy. Aside from the gaping wound in my finger, I was quite comfortable.

I got the bleeding to stop, wrapped it up and went to bed. I didn’t even bother to clean off the rather cool blood splatter from my kitchen wall until the next day. And the wound itself was in pretty good shape, until it came time to do the food order Monday morning... and I dropped a 40 pound box of apples on it.

It wouldn’t stop bleeding, so I went to the nurse who cleaned it up, steri-stripped it, chastised me for not getting stitches when it happened (she wasn’t buying the "too comfy to leave the house" argument) and demanded that I come back every day to get it cleaned, rewrapped and monitored.

Right now it’s looking good, as gaping wounds go, anyway. It’s not infected and I wear a double-layer XL glove over the padded full-finger bandage in the bakeshop to keep it clean (and to keep the danish from being, er, Pirate-flavored). I will probably never get feeling back in the tip of my finger, at least according to the nurse, but I am going to have an awesome scar.

Which is what really matters in the end, isn’t it?