Fandom Island and Town

Lacey'd spent most of the fourth of July on the phone with the boys back in Dog River, which meant she'd gotten treated to an extensive (really, really extensive) and misinformed (grossly, grossly misinformed) diatribe from Hank on why exactly Americans set off fireworks on the Fourth. Hank's version, for the record, involved dud firecrackers from Canada Day that somehow ended up over the border, someone discovering them and attempting to light them, and this all logically (really!) leading to an explanation of why their fireworks celebrations were inferior.

At least, Lacey thought that was what he was leading up to before she'd hung up on him.

And maybe just for that, just to spite him, she'd do the diner up in a red, white, and blue theme today. So there.



. . . okay, she might have failed the theme there on that last special, but shh.

Luke's is open and, belatedly, a little bit holiday-themed? Maybe?

[OOC: OCD's going to the beach, because my brain is seriously on vacation today and this post took me three hours to write. I am not going to the beach, but I do have errands to run so SP is gonna be the thing.]

Lacey did not want to talk about Friday in any way, shape or form, so of course it was the first subject that came up when the busboy arrived, and Lacey, being a horrible liar, was unable to avoid it.

She also blustered so much that by the time the rest of the staff was on hand and the story had gotten around, it had been mangled enough that no one could decide if she'd been a stripper, a groupie, or if she'd gone and gotten a dozen piercings they couldn't see. This, luckily, meant that no one questioned the need to wash, dry, and put away the rest of the new set of dishes that'd been necessary to order after some random, bizarre Fandom incident left the diner with half its plates and mugs smashed by a sledgehammer on Saturday morning.

Whew.



Luke's is open, and not so -- ooh, new dishes.

[OOC: And also OCD-free today. Just for once. SO THERE.]

You know how sometimes the time goes by so fast that you don't realize a new month has snuck up on you? Lacey had fallen victim to a fit of that recently, having been caught up in a hectic whirlwind of contemplating paint chips and counter surfaces and other diner-specific interior decorating minutiae.

Which was why, when she walked in and spotted the calendar on the wall by the coffee machine, she stopped and blinked at it like she was trying to send the world's most rapid-fire, unintelligible Morse code message with her eyelids.

"Guys? When did it get to be June?"

At least she was used to the staff laughing at her.



Luke's is open, and a little disoriented. Belatedly.

The morning had started off innocuously enough, with Lacey doing her usual meticulous check of the diner to make sure everything was clean and up to her neurotically OCD standards. She hadn't even batted an eye when the cook decided he wanted to make pizza today.

She should have noticed the cook had a laptop on the counter with a browser open to Facebook.

". . . no, I'm sorry, it's a neat idea and all, but you cannot actually click to transmute the sauce, okay?"

She wasn't terribly persuasive, sad to say.



"Fine," Lacey told him, throwing her hands up and leaving him to his own devices. "I'll just let you have your delusions. Nobody ever said I wasn't nice. Right?"

Luke's is open, and . . . not actually all that much like Cafe World. Promise.

There was nothing new about Lacey being in early and polishing the sides of the coffee machine to an unnecessary level of shine. There was, for that matter, nothing new about the metal strips edging the counter getting the same treatment, or the doorknob, or even the service bell.

(This wasn't entirely because she liked things clean; the occasional flashes of reflected sunlight tended to catch the busboy in the eyes right at some inopportune moment when he was trying to pull a prank. Oh, yeah. She was clever like that. It was a shame she wasn't more consistent about it.)

Opening the cash register to count the till and witnessing a geyser of Raisinets as they sprang forth from the pennies, though -- that was new.

But yummy.



Luke's is open, and caught somewhere between the movie theater and Old Faithful, apparently.

When Lacey heard ominous rattling noises from the storage room as soon as she walked into the diner, she set her things down, grabbed a clean garbage bag for protection, and hurried toward the back fearing another flareup in the ongoing cream soda conflict.

But it wasn't the cream sodas -- stunningly docile today -- that were causing the problem; it seemed as if today, the problem was between a case of garbanzo beans and the shipment of wild rice that had come in over the weekend. That was unexpected, and certainly a new experience; for whatever it was worth, mediating beverage disputes was one thing, but sorting out problems in this section of the storage room seemed to go against the grain.



Luke's is open; it's safe if you don't try to get caught in the rice-and-chickpea crossfire.

There were certain advantages to living in a basement apartment: namely, not being able to see such things as giant GODZILLAs rising from the ocean to stomp the island, or giant squid that wished they could quit Fandom. No, aside from a few minutes of wondering why the room seemed to be shaking, she'd been hiding out from the fog since Tuesday and thoroughly absorbed in various projects involving things like sponge-painting her bathroom walls and re-grouting the tile and just maybe the tasteful application of metallic gold paint.

. . . also, lots of focused perusal of coffee-service equipment. No reason.

Well. There were certain advantages to this whole basement apartment thing when you were Lacey, anyway. The staff guys were a little disappointed that they had one less thing to use to poke at her neuroses, though.



Luke's is open, lizard-free, and open. And not neurotic.

. . . much.

Lacey had made a point of coming in on Saturday night and personally making sure all the clocks in the diner were adjusted properly and set forward an hour and everything.

Lacey . . . had forgotten to do the same for her watch and the clocks in her apartment. So that lady sitting at the counter with her head in her hands, looking disheveled because she was in a hurry to get here? Yeah.



Luke's is open. If a little confused.

Somewhere over the course of last Monday, the dishwasher had decided that Lacey'd been trying to put a curse on him in some kind of weird Canadian voodoo, because there clearly had been no better explanation for the way she'd give him some baleful look and then mutter "Brodeur" in that tone of voice.

The supreme, smug, smirky smile Lacey gave him when he came in to work this morning?

Did nothing to change that idea.

Lacey was fine with letting that be.



Luke's is open . . . and still celebrating. Yup.

The collective sigh of relief from the staff today when Lacey didn't greet them in the aggressively perky tone of I-have-an-idea was so potent, that rustling noise could actually have been napkins fluttering in the resultant breeze. They weren't so relieved a few minutes later, when she set them to completely draining and cleaning out the deep fryer. In her (and the fryer's) defense, it needed it.

Lacey, meanwhile, would be soliciting Farmville neighbors to send her bricks and nails, and hoping the boys back in Dog River never got the idea to send those to her as actual gifts someday.



Luke's is open, and thematic -- even if Lacey did it entirely by accident.

There was to be no pie in the diner today. Lacey was going to ban pie for . . . for . . .

Oh, for about a week. Who was she kidding? Her convictions about pie's rightful and basically hallowed place on a diner's menu were going to win out in the end despite her current trauma.

Thankfully the only gremlin she'd had to deal with over the weekend had fled head over heels when she'd tried to offer it advice on how to get along better with other gremlins (what? It had been perfectly good advice, Lacey felt) and she'd stayed barricaded in her apartment the rest of the time.

Now, if only she could figure out why there was bubble wrap around the cash register today . . .



Luke's is open. Hey, can you break a $20?

. . . oh, very funny.

Lacey should never be allowed to browse other restaurant's menus; it made her neurotic. Okay, she was always at least slightly neurotic on the best of days, but when she'd spent her entire Sunday staring at her computer screen and occasionally letting out a slightly whimpery "Oh" once the latest PDF finally loaded it made her jumpy.

Like paranoidly looking over her shoulder when someone scraped a spatula over the grill jumpy. Not because it was a metal-on-metal ick-ick-unpleasant-sensation-down-spine sound, but oh gosh did someone burn something that needs to be scraped off now?

Which was why the writing on the specials board was somewhat squigglier than usual:



Luke's is -- what was that what was that did anyone hear that? Oh. Open.

The Yule Log channel wasn't showing any more. Ordinarily Lacey would be sad about that, but Not This Year. Oh, no. This year, she'd gone back to Dog River for Christmas -- actually intending to go to Dog River, rather than ending up back in Dog River after a disastrous attempt to fly to Toronto that somehow took her from Saskatchewan to Nova Scotia to British Columbia and back by way of Every. Single. Province. Ever -- and gotten an iPod Touch from Brent and Hank as a Christmas gift.

And they'd preloaded it with the Yule Log app.

So here she was back in Fandom, and it was like having Christmas in her pocket year round, as long as she remembered to keep the battery charged.

It also meant the kitchen staff had a much easier time of it getting away with antics in the kitchen . . . which would explain the miniature marshmallow mountain range taking shape if you peered through the service window. Lacey didn't notice.



Luke's is open, and that Yule Log is virtually crackling away. Yes, still. It'll be virtually warm to go with that marshmallow ski resort back there.

It was a cupcake-baking sort of morning. Mostly because Lacey had found out that tomorrow was National Cupcake Day, and she wanted in on that.

. . . it was also an 'oh, God, Farmville, stop freezing' kind of day, and in combination this meant a lot of Lacey running frantically back and forth between the kitchen and her computer and occasionally babbling things about what would happen if she could really make cupcakes with green milk from her dairy full of alien cows.



Luke's is open, and lo, was there much amusement from the staff. When they weren't dodging out of Lacey's way.

Lacey was fated, so it seemed, to spend most of the morning at work with the phone glued to her ear -- not literally (not this time -- that had been glued to the TV, thank you, and it hadn't been her fault the cable had gotten knocked loose when she happened to be in the middle of a papier-mache crafting activity) but it felt like it might as well be.

Sure, she kept trying to hang up, but Hank kept calling back, all too intent on talking her ear off with his histrionic, half-coherent at best rants about the end of last night's Grey Cup game between the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Montreal Alouettes. Lacey wished she could actually sympathize more, but she'd had to watch it on a streaming internet feed, and then her internet connection had cut out with ten seconds to play, the Riders up 27-25, and Montreal in possession at 3rd and 6 with 10 seconds left on the clock. By the time she'd gotten her connection back the game was over and she'd found herself looking at Als players dogpiling each other in celebration on the field.

Besides, it was Lacey. All she'd taken away from the game was that it was very exciting, the end had been disappointing, and ouch, didn't all that tackling hurt?

So if she ended up knocking a bunch of Beaver Buzz into the ground beef again, well . . . it was all Hank's fault. Hank and her flakey internet connection's.



Luke's -- "Uh huh, Hank." Is -- "I know, Hank, it's awful." Open -- "I'm very, very sorry."

It was a perfectly ordinary morning to start with: open up, make sure the diner was clean and ready to go, maintain the safe minimum distance between the cream sodas, set up her laptop in a mostly-hidden spot behind the counter, check her crops.

It looked like today would continue in that vein -- until Lacey discovered someone had tipped her cows.

And now the poor Farmville programmers were going to get ranted at on the forums, because really, if people were bored enough to go around tipping cows, obviously this four-day crop business was GETTING OUT OF HAND.



Luke's is op -- HOW COULD YOU DO THAT TO POOR PIXELATED COWS?!?

Everybody was a little confused this morning at the diner, or at the very least full of questions, just before opening, it seemed.

From the busboy: "How did it get to be November already?!?"

From the cook: "Is anyone else still thrown off by the time change?"

From the delivery guy: "Wait, there was a time change this weekend?"

Meanwhile, from Lacey: "Why won't Farmville let me expand my farm again already? These are not acceptable living conditions for my animals!"

The staff could already tell it was going to be another one of those days.



Luke's is open -- watch out for the question marks. You might snag your sleeve or something.

Lacey, whenever she wasn't serving customers or wheedling the staff into doing something, was behind the counter staring contemplatively at a square-ruled notepad, tapping a pencil against her lips and squinting.

And, sometimes, writing something down after much deliberation. The staff thought she was reworking the cafe's budget, or menu, or their job duties, and were nervous and speculative all day.



What Lacey was actually doing was planning out which Farmville crops she needed mastery on, and in which order.

. . . oh, and designing a new floorplan for her CafeTown restaurant, because owning one diner and running another in real life wasn't enough, apparently.

Luke's is open -- stupid evil insidious Facebook.

Lacey had long since given up on the idea that any of her kitchen guys were a hundred percent sane, but still, she didn't expect to have the busboy fling himself at her in tears as soon as he walked through the door this morning.

Upon asking if he'd had some kind of traumatic experience with weekend visitors (not that Lacey was wibbly at all because nobody had come to visit her, she was perfectly fine, thank you) she discovered that this was not, in fact the case. He was all manner of flaily because he hadn't been able to get the MyZoo app on Facebook to work in days, and was Concerned about his breeding pandas.

The sad part was, Lacey completely understood.



Luke's is open, and yes, there's still Beaver Buzz left over. Be afraid.

There were things Lacey could have lived without, really, like discovering the existence of fanfiction.net. (Yes, it'd taken her this long. Shut up.) She could have turned back while it was still safe, but no, she'd had to keep poking through out of curiosity, and then it turned into a fascinating horror, and then trainwreck syndrome kicked in.

The sound of that woman in the kitchen cooking up a storm? That might be the sound of a woman mourning the flaming ruins of her childhood.



Luke's is open, and Lacey can't unsee it. SHE CAN'T UNSEE IT OH GOD.

[OOC: . . . I have no idea.]

Lacey was still considering Kyle's suggestion of renaming the diner. To this end, there was a sign on the counter, next to the cash register, placed prominently behind two large trays full of tiny pies.



There was a flaw in this voting system. Quite possibly everyone but Lacey could see it.

. . . and maybe the dishwasher and busboy, who were engaged in a heated debate over whether a time canoe would be cooler than a time machine. Lacey wasn't going to ask. She was just going to make sure that one booth was cleaned and all ready for the expected weekly arrival of the Weetiny Boys' Club.



Luke's is open, and in some extremely vague way, Lacey can't help but feel that things are very historical. Just don't ask her why, or how. She doesn't know.

The laptop was back out today, and Lacey had finally been able to get the pandas in MyZoo. Lacey had also spent most of the previous day watching a marathon of Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel, which meant that there was a lot of cooing over the Breeding screen.

Because those virtual Facebook animals had really wanted to have facts about their own feeding habits and proximity to extinction related to them by a well-meaning but ditzy coffeeslinger. Really.



Luke's is open, and in no danger of not passing a health department hygiene check (hopefully), since all the animals are virtual. Right.

It was Monday morning, the diner was sparkling clean and set up with fresh flowers in the vases on the tables and countertops, all was right with the world . . .

And then a bird had the audacity to try and hop toward the front door in search of the crumbs that Lacey had just swept out into the street.

"Excuse you, no!" Lacey shrieked exclaimed, brandishing her broom to chase it away. "You are not allowed in here, you are not allowed to eat the crumbs, I won't be responsible for you getting too domesticated to live in the wild! Do you know what kind of sanitation problems you would cause if I let you in here? Don't take it personally or anything, but it's a . . . thing. A control thing. It's not your fault you can't control it, but --"

She paused and set down the broom, shaking her head. "I'm talking to the bird. I've been here too long." To the gawking, smirking kitchen guys, she added, "Just pretend you never saw that, okay?"



Luke's is open. And YOU NEVER SAW THAT.