Oh yeah, I have a blog...

I've been out of the habit of posting regularly. Life gets in the way of even our best intentions, it seems.

I'm still trying to pull together the kitchen space in the back. Right now, it's a matter of making the place warm. Whoever insulated the place must have used Q tips and toilet paper.

Bill spent the weekend crawling on all fours under the porch out there and into the space under the kitchen. He dragged in one of the bright work site lamps so he could see and, one by one, brought in long pieces of blue board insulation which he screwed in above his head, while lying on his back. He then used that funky foam insulation to seal around it's edges. It's not like radiant floor heating in there, but eventually, I'm sure it'll help.

Next on the project list comes the endeavor of building a new door into the kitchen. The one that is there now is probably about sixty years old and light comes in through the cracks between the wooden panels and around the door frame, along with twenty degree temperatures. The new door won't be as pretty and suited to the historic look of the house but it'll serve it's true purpose. Right now, we're almost drawing straws when it comes time to have go back there and pull pastries or grab foccacia bread. I can't imagine what it's been like back there in winters past, when it gets below zero. I think it used to be a mud room. I'm hoping and praying that with a new door, an operating stove and an insulated floor (and the help of an energy efficient space heater, I'm sure) that we can function back there without the aid of mittens and ear muffs.

I've picked out the colors for the coffee bar room and possibly for the room with the computers, as well. Tonight I may nail down the dates I plan on locking the doors and repainting the place. I think if I don't commit to the calendar soon, it will never happen.

It's officially stick season in the hills. Naked trees and brown earth. The long cornfields are freckled each morning with Canadian geese, crows and wild turkeys... each in their segregated little flocks, picking away at the mowed corn shafts for forgotten kernels.

The mums on the porch have died from too many hard frosts, my pumpkins were finally stolen and the front steps got egged on the night before Halloween. Summer is definitely over now.

Once we set the clocks back for daylight savings, I started closing up at 5pm instead of 6pm. It's still dark when I leave here for the night but it allows me some extra time at home and less time on my feet!

I still haven't gotten to the point where I'm wondering why the hell I decided to do this. So far, I still like being behind the counter and haven't had a nervous break down about getting taxes paid on time or about the constant grind. I've had near nervous break downs about plenty of other things but that's life....

Floor's mopped, drawer is counted, brewers are shut down and the pastries are wrapped. I've got a rooibus tea for the ride home. Cheers.

Costco Mentality

I took a trip to Montreal this weekend and revisited an Italian coffee bar that I discovered a few years ago. I remember it being the absolute best latte I'd ever had and wanted to go back to see what the trick was.... now that I'm in the realm of lattes myself.

I think now that I wanna hang with some Italian men for a while and learn the ropes.... maybe get the inside scoop on espresso machines and grinds and roasts. Being the consumer oriented Americans that we are (more, more, more), we serve a double shot latte in a 16oz cup. That's an awful lot of milk drowning out the coffee. The Italian shop in Montreal serves it in an 8oz cup. I came home and tried it here the next day.... my own beans, my own machine, my own 8oz cup.... it was better but it ain't that.

I think, though, that folks would riot if I tried serving them a $3.16 latte in an 8oz cup.
Maybe I should get some good looking Italian men in the shop to make it more convincing.

Duh

I named a recent post Dope Move #42.
I should go the extra mile today and name this one Queen Dipshit.

I drove off last night with my business checkbook on the roof of my car.

This is not the first time I've done this kind of thing. In the past, though, some honest citizen has called me or mailed me my wallet or organizer. This time however, my checkbook fell into the hands of some punk kids (I'm guessing) and they proceeded to tear my checks out of the book and distribute them in clumps up and down Main Street here in Johnson. The checks and their carbon copies. I found a page of them when I pulled up this morning at 7:30am. I found another page in the muddy curb water in front of the shop. I started looking around, walking around, and it was like a sick, twisted scavenger hunt....I found some around the corner by the bridge. I found more in the Grand Union parking lot. More in the dried up perennial beds of the health food store. Some more on the corner of Railroad Street. A few customers came in with stacks of them in their hands. Two local businesses called about some they'd found in their yards. Hannah, who opened the shop this morning, found a crumpled pile just inside the door.

The account has been closed, with allowances for the checks that haven't yet been cashed, and a new account has been opened and a new checkbook is on the way. Bill, being the eternal optimist, suggested that the wind may have ripped the pages out of the book ("it was pretty windy last night").... but I disagree. If I ever find the punks who opted to play scavenger hunt with my business checks, I think I'll opt to hang them by their toenails from the flagpole outside my bank. Fuckers.

Theory of Relativity

Mondays are slammed at the shop. Most of the other places in town are closed for lunch so everyone piles in to my place.

Today, after my morning help left, I was behind the counter taking it in waves.... except the coming up for breath between waves equated to tackling the sink of mounting dishes. During one rush, I looked over my shoulder to a woman that had been standing at the counter for a few minutes in a pretty blue scarf.

"I'll be with you in just a moment," I tell her, looking her in the eye to let her know I'm not ignoring her.

"Oh, that's okay. I'm fine," she answered, a big smile on her face. "I had malaria last week. I'm just fine now. I can wait."

Wow. How's that for a shift in perspective!?

Familiars

When I was a kid, I’d drive with my dad to the beer distributor to pick up the new half keg of “yellow beer” for the beer miester that lived in our dining room. I liked going because it was one of the few times that I’d get my dad to myself. Sometimes he’d turn up the stereo and blast opera for kicks, sometimes we’d talk.

I never liked the way the place smelled and it was always cold but I got a little Dum Dum lollipop every time so it really was a worthwhile journey. Pina Colada was always my favorite. That or Cream Soda.

Turns out, my friend Dana’s dad owned the place and there’s a pretty strong chance that, nine times out of ten, she was the one handing over the lollipop. We put it all together about eight years ago…one night after our girls fell asleep and we were drinking wine out on the porch. I think it was her first time in Vermont….our first time spending any real time together. She hadn’t spent much time out in the country yet and while we were sitting there on the porch, we heard a fox (or maybe a fisher cat) come and attack one of the chickens in my hen house. It dragged the thing, squawking and gurgling in the dark, around to the front yard and proceeded to knaw it in front of us. We could see nothing except for the predators glowing eyes in the dark and all we could hear was the crunching of bone and swallowing of chicken. We sat there holding hands in my funny little popazon chair, too freaked out to run for the indoors and too fascinated to try. It shocks me still that Dana now lives in the country herself. I was sure she’d be traumatized for life.

She came up on Monday with Amelia, her hilarious nine year old, and our buddy Kopicki to sit at the bar at the shop, drink tea and eat maple oatmeal scones. Like Ella, Amelia just got herself a pair of Heelies too… so she and Els spent the afternoon cruising Johnson’s sidewalks and eating way too much candy with the money they had stashed in their pockets. I’m sure Ella’s teachers would be very happy to know that that’s how she spent her day away from school. Very enriching. Very productive. But it beats the hell out of the all the Christopher Colombus bullshit she’d otherwise have been getting fed.

Having Dana and Kopicki sitting at my bar all day made for an incredible shift behind that counter. It was like a merging of worlds… the old and the new. Dana only offended about 25% of my customers with her crazy lack of filter between brain and mouth and Kopicki left with a fat stash of maple oatmeal scones for his friends in southern Vt.

It took about seventy three hours for the girls to come down from their sugar rush. This is not what I had in mind when I introduced a weekly allowance!

Foliage Season

The economy in Vermont is very much tourism based. Most towns and their small (and not so small businesses) make their bread and butter during peak tourism periods…. foliage being very much one of those periods. There’s usually one weekend, in particular, when the colors of the trees have peaked and the roads are saturated with out of state plates belonging to drivers who really shouldn’t be sightseeing and operating a vehicle at the same time. No one really complains since their wallets feed the economy. This weekend is one of those weekends.

Don’t ask me why the town of Johnson scheduled a planned power outage for today, Saturday, between the hours of crack-of-dawn and noon-time. My absolute bread and butter block of time…it being a coffee shop and all and people, for the most part, really liking their coffee in the morning. When I called the guy in the municipal office to bitch, the poor guy sounded exhausted from dealing with every other business owner in town who had also taken their turn calling him to bitch. I also wanted to find out if they had some kind of stash of funds to compensate business owners for situations like this…. situations when the town makes a dumb ass move and decides to put people out of business during absolute peak business periods. I figured the chances are slim but maybe it’d at least drive the point home. And no, they have no such stash.

I did get to sleep in a few extra hours… which was nice. I got to do some extra prep in the morning and decorate the front of the shop with my new mums and pumpkins and corn stalks.

I was sitting outside, eating a melon and hanging with the boys who do web design upstairs when the digital clock down the street started blinking again. We rushed in, brewed up the coffee and filled the register with the till just in time to get slammed with more cyclists coming through town.

I don’t know what it is about these people. I don’t know if they go to some kind of seminar before heading out onto the Vermont country roads or what, but they seem to have mastered the art of rude. Every week we get a delivery of a great Burlington paper called SevenDays and they get stacked right inside the door - free for the taking. It was pouring down rain by the time those bikers came flooding in, so they decided to take every single newspaper on the rack and use them to sit on. I guess they didn't want to get my chairs wet? They left them there, soaking on the seats, when they left....little blocks of typewritten words having imprinted into the wood from the wet paper. They also draped their filthy, muddy clothes all over my furniture to dry and proceeded to wring out their soaking wet socks and biking gloves right onto my nice wooden floors. Assholes.

What did I say about not complaining because their wallets feed the economy. Sssshhhhhh…….

I x’d out the drawer after they all left and the good news is that their arrival provided me with what I would have otherwise made that morning if we hadn’t had a planned power outage. That’s good. Any way to take their business without their company? Maybe exile them out onto the porch the next time they come? I can lay down some blankets on the lawn out back………… Give them each an umbrella?

Cracked Fingers and Taking Stock

It blows my mind how many people, women especially, get that far off look in their eye when they talk to me about what it must be like to own a coffee shop.... and i know that they're picturing some idyllic, quaint experience that involves the smell of baked goods and brewing tea and music playing on the stereo.

And it is all that.

But I can tell that no one really takes into consideration the sliced fingers from sharp knives and how much they burn when you bleach the cutting boards at the end of the night and how all the little creases in your hands turn black from grinding coffee beans and you look kinda like you've been out in your perennial beds planting crocuses for hours....with dirt all caked on your hands that won't wash out. Or maybe they're not thinking about how you're dreams at night turn from sweet symbolic metaphors of life into repeats of nightly cash out sheets or sudden onslaughts of panic about whether or not you ordered enough of that Sumatran French roast that people just freak out about.

Two nights ago, around 10:30pm, I was talking to a friend on the phone while I was making soup for the shop. She was surprised that I had worked all day and was still putting in time for the shop that late at night and asked if it was like that every day. When I told her that yeah, it kinda is, she was surprised that I wasn't complaining and miserable about how much all of this was consuming me. I don't know if it's that I'm not really seeing the forest through the trees or if it just feels good to be putting myself into something but it made me realize that I don't feel compelled at all, really, to complain about it. I guess that's a pretty good thing.

But still, customers (and people I don't even know) ask me how it's going and if I think it's successful so far and while those are such incredibly vague questions and there's no possible way I can give them the full score of an answer during the time it might take me to draw an espresso shot and steam their milk, I find that (even deep down) I like what I'm doing. Whether or not it's successful, I have no freaking clue. It's still too early in the game to know.

I spent sooo much time looking over the Profit and Loss statements of the previous owner while I was building the business plan I couldn't put to use and just a few days ago I took a look at my very own first P&L for my first full month. Talk about driving it home. It was a little like looking at your newborn and thinking 'did i really make happen?'.