Wedding and Back Again

The wedding was incredible. It took place on a beautiful, four-masted ship called the Moshulu. I threatened for months to come dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow and I was surprised that none of my brother's friends didn't actually do so. The bridesmaid dress was pretty but dancing to the electric slide (which I didn't actually do but my mother, however, stole the show) would have been much more entertaining had I been sporting black, beaded dreads and a dagger. Next time....

We stayed at the Hyatt on Saturday and Sunday night, which you could almost spit on from the ship, and other than the half dozen wedding parties staying at the Hyatt, the hotel was hosting American Idol auditions that weekend. There were a few Paula Abdul sightings and that Simon guy was floating around as well. Beautiful, robust Philadelphia women could be found along the waterside, just outside the hotel, belting beautiful blues, looking nervous and waiting their turn. Occasionally one could be seen running down the roped off escalator, a pink piece of paper waving in their hand, screaming that they were "goin' to Hollywood!" I've never actually seen American Idol so it was all kind of lost on me.... the one channel we get up here in the hills, via the bent clothes hanger that serves as a rabbit ears antennae, must not get the station that broadcasts the show.

Poor Bill spent the next day, his 35th birthday, taking turns driving and napping on our eight hour drive back from Phillie to Vermont. I'm sure he was dreaming the entire time of the waves he might have caught somewhere else.... anywhere else. Tomorrow I'm going to drop into his work site across the street with a birthday cake and a case of Heiferweizen for he and his boys. If they're lucky, maybe I'll follow carpenter suit and tell them all the dirty jokes Dana shared with me tonight on the phone.

And back to the coffee shop.....

It's almost been a month in business and so far I haven't gone bankrupt. The numbers are higher than breaking even, which is a good sign, and the nightly cash-outs are higher than they were before I took the place over.... which means that more business is, indeed, coming through the door and into the register.

I haven't had the time to start turning the kitchen space into a kitchen space and I'm starting to realize that it'll probably require more of those 6pm to 2am chai latte work sessions to actually make it happen. But as it stands right now, I'm paying a baker an awful lot of money and spending way too much time at home making the par-baked croissants and brewing chai tea. Once that space is finished all that stuff can be done here, while I'm working, and life will become exponentially less tiresome.

Bill has taken over the bookkeeping for now... till I get my head wrapped around everything behind the counter. He's been creating systems for filing and getting an understanding of how things should be put into and organized in Quickbooks so that, when I'm ready, he can convey it all to me and pass the baton. I come home at night, sometimes not until 8 or 9pm, after a 14 hour day, and he's sitting on the couch with my laptop and nightly cash out sheets. And he's doing this after spending an hour or two organizing his own business... when I know he'd much rather be spacing out on the arrival of his new Netflix surf video. I get flooded with gratitude when I see him sitting there because even though it's already been a fourteen hour day, I still have to pull baked goods to proof and brew chai and read to and hang out with Ella before bedtime and then go over that day's invoices and receipts before my own bedtime. Thanks Billy boy. I promise we'll celebrate your birthday better than we did on Monday. If anyone out there wants to send him a plane ticket to Costa Rica, I'm sure he'd appreciate it very much.

The Deathly Hollows

I took the day off from the coffee shop yesterday to celebrate Ella's tenth birthday. I couldn't believe how unbelievably sentimental I felt all day, remembering exactly where I was a decade ago. Laboring through the night with the full moon, calling the midwife at dawn, lying under that gorgeous cherry tree, the unexpected ride in the ambulance past the coffee shop where all my knotty headed, patchworked friends were sitting drinking iced coffee and wondering when the hell we were gonna call them with the big news. Holding that incredible small bundle in the nook of my arm as that same moon came in from the window, lighting her up as it still does these years later.

As it turned out, when 8:58pm rolled around last night, ten years following the birth of that little girl, I found myself in a big room with big noise pumping from about a thousand different video games. For years Els has wanted us to take her to a place called Pizza Putt for her birthday.... an indoor mini golf course, enormous indoor jungle gym, batting cages, driving range, laser tag and really bad food. It's kind of like an amped up Chucky Cheese. I've never been able to rationalize taking her there for her birthday, in the middle of July, when the sun is shining and the days are long and the river is the perfect temperature. But yesterday's big plan included hanging out on Church Street in Burlington in anticipation of the new Harry Potter book being released... so Ella, to her great joy, was able to take two of her girlfriends to get rowdy, rifle through tokens, score tickets and trade them in for lots of cheap, plastic shit from China.

We bagged doing the release party on Church Street and opted to keep our business local but we kept our Pizza Putt commitment. Afterward, we drove home from Burlington, quick milked a cow while the girls changed into a strange concoction of fairy renaissance wizard garb, and loaded up the Suburu to drive into Johnson.

Tom was in the front seat with me, taking charge of the new Ipod to keep me from swerving all over the road and poor Bill was crammed in the backseat with the girls. I say "poor Bill" only because I had just spent the last hour serving my time in that backseat on the way home from Burlington. I was still feeling a little naseaus.

I got pulled over about two hundred yards from Main Street in Johnson. I was driving ten miles over the speed limit, which just got dropped from 35mph to 25mph so he let me go with a warning. I think he pulled me over because he saw all those heads in the backseat and was maybe hoping to nab some partying college kids coming from Johnson's one and only bar. I cannot even begin to explain the look on this young cop's face when he glanced into the backseat to find those three fairies in their velvet head wraps, sparkling wings, glittery faces and flowing dresses. And Bill.

And now we have the new book but I can pretty much figure on getting to it sometime in November... when my life frees up. Maybe.

Happy Birthday, Bean. Ten years riding this Earth around the sun.......making your mama proud.