The laundry basket

My New Job. I get up at six in the morning and leave for work an hour later. I bake things like scones and eclairs and muffins. I make big dinners for twenty. Today I made a chicken and vegetable pie from scratch. Everything from scratch. I even cut up whole chickens into bits for it. I also make traditional English desserts like treacle tart and bread and butter pudding. I finish work at about two or two-thirty. I like getting home early. It means I can watch my favorite Australian soap opera at six. And there's about four hours of daylight left this time of year. I have a lot of say into what I cook at work which is great. And I love cooking from scratch! The manager came in and asked if I'd ever made a chicken pie before. Well I hadn't, but I'd researched it the night before and learned all about it and it today was a success. My old job involved a lot of microwaving frozen premade stuff. I did cook things like steaks and burgers and eggs, obviously, but I didn't get to cook anything from scratch.

However, working at a rest home is kind of sobering. One of the residents died this morning and made me reflect on my own mortality. I would find it hard to be a carer. My gramma is a carer and I guess she must have dealt with death in her job, but it seems so tough. I think my gramma has it easier though, because she doesn't work for an institution, but rather privately in her clients' homes. So she isn't faced with an overwhelming sense of the inevitable, I would think. There are about twenty residents where I work and all of them are close to death. They may live another year or five years even but they may die in a week. I hadn't even met the man who died, but I was kind of sad about it.