What a Week--When Is Vacation?

Wow, this week has been crazy. I've experienced a major psychological shift now that we're into the actual month that we will be opening in. For the amount of work we have left to do, I'd say we could comfortably open in about six weeks. But we're opening in three weeks. Hmmm. Luckily, one of the skills every professional student perfects is cramming. So we've kicked it into high gear. We're working practically every waking minute, and I had to subsist on leftover Halloween candy for several meals, although I did take some time off around 11 pm yesterday to make a nice dinner. Jill said I was crazy, which is indisputable, but I think it's a good sign that I'm still cooking for fun.

We're working so fast that the rest of the world is holding us back--this week the majority (of a large sample size) of the people we've had to meet or talk to have either been extremely late (like over an hour) or totally clueless about what they are supposed to be helping us with (lost our order, forgot to send the e-mail, added the numbers wrong, thought our business' name was General Savings), which is really painful because we can use every second. Nevertheless, we have barreled through an astounding array of activities in the past few days.

The week started with a Monday morning call from the contractors that three of the lights that we had rush-ordered last week didn't work, and we needed new lights right away to pass the above-ceiling electrical inspection scheduled for that afternoon. The guy at the lighting store managed to find some replacements, which was nice of him, although having three of thirty-one lights be defective leaves some doubt about their quality control procedures.

On Tuesday and Wednesday we went to a restaurant equipment auction. This was the fifth one we've attended, and all the auction guys know us (we stand out--there aren't many women at these things, and there definitely isn't another pair of sisters). We feel like pros now. At the first auction we went to, it took us a long time to even understand what the auctioneer was saying, and we were too nervous to bid. By now, we have a whole bidding strategy worked out. One thing that's fun about these auctions is that there is always some really strange equipment for sale. Here's Jill inspecting a large machine whose function was totally incomprehensible to us:


There's a mean lady at the auction house who makes sure that no one is stealing anything, and she came over and yelled at us while we were taking this picture (like maybe we were going to put this machine in our pocket and sneak out with it?), so we moved on to this really intense fry station:


Turns out we don't need one of those, and we also passed on the stuffed alligator (which a couple of people got into a bidding war over). We bought some good stuff, and today we had to rent a truck and pick it all up. Every time I rent from U-Haul, I wonder why anyone does (in this case, it was because there's a U-Haul location right next door to the auction house). The truck's brakes were somewhat questionable, but I did not have to use any runaway truck ramps. Here's me in my alternate career as a trucker:




Now we are placing orders for everything else we need so that we'll be stocked up for opening day. We also touched base with some of the semi-sketchy equipment resellers who hang out at these auctions, one of whom has our stove at his warehouse. We paid him a deposit back in August and told him we'd call him when we were ready to have it delivered, and since then we've been avoiding him because we didn't want to have to store it in my garage. But we promised him we would give him a batch of my new-favorite chocolate-chocolate chip-walnut cookies, which is worth way more than three months of free storage for the stove:



After eight hours at the auction, we came home and hammered out plans for where to get our furniture, what color we want our aprons to be, where the hood should hang over the stove, how to repair our gutters, how big to make the letters on our sign, who to call about composting our food scraps, and forty-three other things. Among the things we checked off the to-do list was deciding what color to paint the building. We picked this color:



If you don't like it, don't tell us. It took us forever to decide--we had a lot of people offering opinions, most of whom disagreed with each other, and this is the first one we can all live with. Besides, you're too late, the building is getting painted on Monday.

Inside the building, we now have walls, lights, and running water. Aaron finished pulling off the layers that covered one of our storefront windows (the middle window used to be covered up):



That went so well, we decided to break through another section of wall that was covering an unknown object, and this time we discovered a new door!


This building is totally bizarre. The door was covered up still with its "pull" sign still on it. But we're certainly happy to have all that glass along the street side of the building.

Yesterday we spent a fun afternoon at Coda Coffee, who is our coffee bean supplier. We hung out with the coffee guys and chatted about the true definition of a wet cappuccino, ergonomic espresso tamping techniques, and latte art. We experimented with making various drinks on their espresso machine, which helped keep us in practice while our own espresso machine lives in my spare bedroom. Soon our baby will have its place of honor on the cafe counter!