Month: April 2013

sundry and various part the 95th

I am now communicating with a Swedish man regarding the subtitle file for Real Humans.  We are going to collaborate via the internet, yeah.

Spoke to pOp.  What an entirely loathsome experience he had in hospital.  I need to get him a black turtleneck and get GOS in big white letters on it.

My stress level is rapidly rising as opening day approaches.  However, the last piece of cooking equipment is on board and working so that is good news.

The potholes in the back parking lot are so big I’m posting pics of them on facebook.

Katie is working her ass off.  We are going in for five am this morning, heavy heavy sigh, but such will be our lot for the next little while.

 

at the shop

listening to Gotye’s Your Heart’s a Mess, having delivered biscotti to the gents at Gord-Ron.  I was condoled with at having to clean up the sex trade worker mess left on our doorstep / bleaugh.

 

Peggy’s mum has passed away.  She’s the eldest, so now she gets to sit with the full glare of her own mortality.  I had been saving a very beautiful but somehow sad card… autumn leaves silvered with frost.  Somehow apropos.

Something horrible regarding my church work has been righteously ducked, and I am so relieved I am practically weeping with relief.  I feel really stupid though.  None of us are walking alone even if we think we are.

Back to the shop

I am heading back to the cafe with Katie this morning.

Real Humans, the SVT show from 2012, is the best sf show I’ve seen since BSG came out.  It is filled with beautiful and nuanced performances, amazing photography, whip smart writing EVEN IN TRANSLATION, deft and surprising plotting, great background music, hat tips to all our favourite science fiction movies, a portrayal of family life which through its economy and plotting is realistic and emotionally sound – without making the father look like a moron or a wimp or a drunk or an emotionally abusive jackass or the mother like superwoman or hysterical, or the kids like little cookie cutters, brilliant set pieces which totally rock the ensemble acting, and it asks, all the time and at many levels – what does it mean to be human?  Where do we get our ‘programming’ from?  Is the most important thing about us that we can be kind?

Oh, and naked girl robots, but you knew that without asking.  It is filled with little Swedish touches regarding being open minded about sexuality which play out in a variety of interesting and sometimes cringe inducing and sometimes laugh out loud hilarious ways.

It’s a very UNITARIAN show, in terms of its concerns and writing.  Very, very satisfying.

Katie and I had the same dream

ROFL.

It was opening day.  The layout and the location of the restaurant was completely different; we had kids running around, a lot of extra space, and we had no cash register.  It was a complete zoo.  Katie and I were laughing our asses off as we traded notes.  No, it wasn’t an identical dream, but close enough.

Just over a week now.  I’m hip deep in church stuff and going straight back to it once I hit send.

Churchy stuff

Can’t do anything re the shop today or tomorrow. I have shitpiles of unavoidable work re the AGM.

 

There’s a biscotti batch in the cooler at the shop, and I brought home the lentil soup.  Jeff is tearing a hole through the split pea with ham soup; it really is awfully good.

We found really cheap split green peas at the warehouse place on Kingsway but strangely a 20 kilo bag of lentils is the same cost as what we pay at Galloway’s, so that was weird to find out.  We also found lots of consumables for cheap, including coffee cups, glassine bags, etc.  Snow Cap trading has everything we need in terms of baking supplies in bulk, and then some, and we found a place for plastic containers for muffins for people who want to buy a half dozen at a time.

The website is pretty much done, we’ll be adding menu items slowly and carefully.  We still haven’t settled on a bread supplier but Costco will do for the time being.  I roasted up another hunk of beef.

Katie got up at 4:30 to go pick up Jessica from her midnight shift at SaveOn and they are going to hang out today.  That is true friendship. Spoke briefly to Keith yesterday and told him he must come over and watch Real Humans, the phenomenal Swedish sci fi show.  Cannot recommend it highly enough.

Three days go by like nothin’

Yesterday we were at the shop all day and baked in the pizza ovens.  They make really good muffins and that’s good because we can fill an oven with morning muffins and it will reduce prep and cook time immensely.  Then if there’s going to be a biscotti bake we just leave em on.  Katie’s got other stuff to do and I am at the shop again, REVELLING, REVELLING I tell you, in the abundance of hot water.  Sanitizing powers ON.

Katie and I ripped through all of the crap we will never use in the storage loft and an amazing amount of junk went to Value Village.  That also made it easier for the tradespeople to do their thing (it took a day and a half longer to get the job done, but all I do is phone him and ask him for a revised estimate of his arrival, and he never, ever ducks my calls, so I am very sparse in my “Where the hell you at man” calls.)

The wee man arrived with the new hot water heater and a rather ascetic helper and he took the old one, whose continued functioning was a rather amazing thing on the basis of the pitting and rust and the mess the fittings were in, away (part of me is thinking that the wee man saying NO NO NO lose this one and get a bigger one, you’re not saving money and you’re making trouble – was good damned advice).  They had to use axle grease and shoe horns to get the sumbitch in, but it’s in and making lovely hot water, oo, yes indeed.  Soon he will come back and fix the rest of the walk in cooler compressor (it works but needs cleaning and sound isolation) and then once we have the special order light fittings for the lights, that’s it, we have no more problems to fix for the health inspector and we’re just waiting on fire and building.

Paul and Katie got up on the roof and there’s no obvious leaking but Katie says the tar is too soft.

I took pictures of the potholes to send the landlord.  Wish I had a buck for every time I’ve turned my ankle back there in the ‘parking lot’ which is actually more like a ‘hole farm’.

I have put the previously existing comfy chairs out front, free to a good home, and Katie washed and I put the covers back on our new used chairs,  They are Ikea second hands from a restaurant supply place that we heard about at church on Sunday, if you can credit it, and they turn out to be super nice and having the solution to a major throughput problem we were having.  But soon we will be able to run 350 pieces of toast an hour through a toaster.  With the Bunnomatic being able to make five carafes of coffee in just over half an hour I don’t think we’ll have a problem keeping up with plain coffee, and we have the espresso machine for the fancy schmancy stuff.

 

Lentil soup is on.  I got banking and church stuff to do today, which I am NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO, but haven’t I complained enough already?  Everything is coming together nicely for a 15 APRIL  start.

Iain M. Banks is reported to be dying of gall bladder cancer.  Fuck cancer.  He’s one of the best writers in any genre and he had another twenty years of awesome Culture novels in him and now he’ll be lucky to finish his most recent effort.

pOp has had a rough couple of weeks compressed into one brief hospital stay.  He’s back home, and none of the rest of it is anybody’s business.