We've Been Discovered!

In the past week, an interesting phenomenon has occurred: Generous Servings has been discovered by miscellaneous salespeople who want to offer us coffee, cups, food, Yellow Pages ads, phone service, memberships in associations we've never heard of, and more. In fact, we're being stalked. Every time we stand outside the building, someone who just happened to be in the neighborhood pulls up and jumps out to meet us. It's kind of weird. But I remember that when I was in cooking school, I asked one of the chefs how to find food distributors, and he said, "Don't worry, they find you." I didn't believe him, and I've been proactive and made my own contacts, but now I can see that if I'd waited a few more weeks, I could have saved myself some phone calls.

Our construction has progressed more this week. Rick managed to get the 1000-pound steel beam into the building by himself on Sunday afternoon. Here's Chris looking at it, thinking, "How the heck is Rick going to get this thing up to the ceiling?"



Somehow Rick did it, and now our ceiling is held up by wood and steel, so the center wall can come out. Here's the view from the door (apparently there is a large number of loose bricks in the parapet, which Chris and Aaron are going to do something about--I don't think there's a clear plan yet--so the area is fenced off to keep Jill and me out of it):


The steel beam is the thing running right over the ladder. The guys will now start to remove all the shoring, and by next week they'll be pouring the new concrete floor, and the place will finally start to look like it's part of the developed world again.

Also, in an ironic twist, my frustrating trip to the Denver Water Board of Commissioners has returned dividends: about $27,000, in fact. It's a long story, but as a result of talking with one of the guys at that meeting, I found out that we don't need as big a water tap as we thought, which saves us $18,000 in fees, and then a different guy at Denver Water referred me to a plumbing subcontractor who can do the work to replace the tap (hire flagmen to reroute traffic, dig down to the water main in the middle of the street, replace the pipes, fill in the concrete and asphalt, etc.) for about $9000 less than the company we were going to use for the job. It's taken several weeks to figure this out, and we had to call a lot of inspectors to make sure we wouldn't get in trouble farther down the line, but now we've gotten the necessary approvals. It's unbelievable that a few phone calls can make a $27,000 difference. I am totally in favor of rewarding persistence (it is one of my strongest qualities, much to the chagrin of people whose evil tactics involve wearing you down), but this is bordering on being completely arbitrary.

Yesterday afternoon and this morning have been spent fighting with the bank to get them to release funds from our SBA loan. I know we should be endlessly grateful to them for entrusting us with so much money, but their oversight is so heavy-handed as to be insulting. In fact, although they've promised to entrust us with the money, every time we want some of it, we have to prove to about fifteen people that we need it for a REALLY good reason. This is a slow way to get anything done, and a waste of my mental energy, which you would think the bank would want me to put towards finding ways to make sure they get paid every month.