sickly

ugh. i have a little cold. it's nothing serious, just enough to be annoying. a hacking cough, medium snot production, sleepy head. i took a nap this afternoon instead of a bike ride, and tonight i'm going to take some nyquil so i can sleep through the coughing. that's the most irritating part of this; it's a dry and hurty cough, an insistent tickle that won't quit.

i have my cheese training graduation this week, which means four whole days out of the store. i have a dinner one night, a long day of final tests and a curd stretching class (we're making mozzarella!), and the cherry part is i get to spend the night in a hotel. spending four days out of the store, even though two of them are work-related, and like an awesome little vacation. getting ready to be gone that long is a task, but worth it. do you know how much cheese i have to order? a lot. at any given point in time, i carry $20,000 dollars worth of cheese on a table six feet long by three feet wide and three feet tall. i go through about $3 to $4 thousand of that stock weekly and have to keep my holes filled. there are over 200 varieties, all of which i've tasted and can tell you at least something about. truth be told, i'm fairly nerdy about it and can tell you more than a little, although i am the first admit i don't know it all. i like being the ruler of my cheese island, now if only i can get that raise! they are saying after the graduation and i'm certified* they'll talk with me seriously. cross your fingers.

*there is no real cheese training school; to be a cheese maker you have to make cheese, and everything else is sort of nebulous and vague. we aren't like sommeliers or butchers or bakers, we don't have schools we can go, and we have no fancy name. a professional who works in cheese can be trained by a company like i was, but aside from putting in time and learning as much as you can on your own it's not like i'll be able to go to any grocery store and get a job like this. this way of working with cheese in standard grocery stores is a really new concept and only three or four other chains in america have a program like this. it's part of the reason they're getting me for such a low, low price. i imagine at some point in the not-too-distant future getting a job like this will be a lot more complicated, and there won't be a lot of on the job training. our wine specialist doesn't have to go through all this because they're expected to have either spent time in culinary school, in restaurants, or in distribution or production. what i'm doing now is either going to pay off big time, and allow me to run my own little section of this store or some other store, or the cheese trend as we know it won't last. i think there's longevity here, after all, the american artisan cheese movement started in the 70's and is still growing. in the pacific northwest alone, oregon and washington, there are dozens of small creameries and dairies producing cheeses. cheese itself has been around for thousands of years! it's not like i'm hitching my wagon to low-rider jeans or investments in atari.

i think the nyquil kicked in and that's why i got all rambly. the point is, i know that this job choice seems weird and counter-productive, and that it makes my mother crazy. she's always saying, "you went to college! now you sell cheese." in a way i think this might be the perfect job for me, though. i loved teaching, i love cheese, i love food and cooking and as much as it pains me to say it, i like having customers, and this lets me do all of the above. the schedule is flexible, and while i'm still in my dues-paying mode and not making scratch, if i do stick with this the payoffs will be good. i have medical and dental insurance, access to chicken wings that have gone past the two-hour mark, and a slew of ridiculous characters to watch and interact with. things could be worse. my job, like all jobs, has its shit moments, but it still makes me smile to tell some onethat yes, all i do is work with cheese all day. plus, getting to say, "i can't help you, i have to cut the cheese" never fails to crack me up.