I was lucky the weather was weird yesterday afternoon; it meant my first day working at the restaurant was pretty quiet. I've been told that the place is packed on nice days and empty on not-so-nice ones, which was fortunate for me yesterday. It made for a pretty unstressful time. Not that there wasn't anything to do; I was kept plenty busy. But it meant that there was just enough slack for me to make a few mistakes and ask a few questions without consequences.

It was a pretty interesting time no matter what. The waitresses warned me that "the place has a lot of character" because "so many interesting people work there". I think they were trying to warn me. The woman who owns the place certainly seems like a battle axe. But, like I said last week when I took the job, it's nothing different than what I had to put up with back in Ann Arbor, so I feel like I'm going into it with my eyes pretty open.

The strangest thing about working there though, is that I have to keep track of my own hours. That's the one part I'm a little uncomfortable about. It means that I have to keep a diary of what hours I worked and on what days, then the owner signs the tally at the end of each shift. It's a weird system, and I don't see how it can really work. But when a place doesn't ask any questions about my status, for now there's nothing to do but keep my mouth shut as well.



All that to say that I had to get my hands on a datebook, and fast. Unlike the stationery stores in Rome, which were a treasure trove of awesome old-school supplies, the stores here totally suck. Everything is ugly and cheaply made and imported from China. It makes me want to cry sometimes.

But that's where my birthday present comes in. Back in October I bought myself (as an early birthday present) the most rediculously large, never used, customizable stamp. It has all 22 Hebrew characters, a full set of numbers and a few punctuation marks. It was so worth the $7 I paid for it. I've been waiting for just the right moment to use it, and finally it arrived.



This morning I bought a small blank book (I'm trying to get over the fact that it has a pink cover; it was the only one left), and I made myself a little datebook. I'm so excited about it. There were enough pages to cover 1.5 years; hopefully the book will hold together that long. All that's left to do now is to stamp in all the Israeli holidays and trick it out some more.