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.

Bloodbath Update

After twenty four hours of bleeding through the bandage on my finger, I called my doctor, who informed me that one could indeed bleed to death out of their finger. It seemed a pretty pathetic way to die, so I took myself to the emergency room, feeling very juvenile..... and since there was really no clump of skin remaining to stitch together, they put on this funny gauze that created a new, rather fake, layer of skin. The way they wrapped my finger made it look like the thing had been severed to near death and I made a ton of money in pity tips. I may resort to similar techniques in the future when times get tight.

Dope Move #42

When painting a set of stairs
and you make yourself a cup of strong tea to keep you going...
and you're painting those stairs from the top to the bottom....
be sure to rest the mug of tea
on the
bottom
of the stairs,
not the top.

Bloodbath~ Take II

• I went to visit my friend Amy yesterday at her cafe in Stowe. She was in the kitchen with all her staff.... picking chicken off the bone for her chicken curry salad, mixing up the dough for scones, and mixing up some kind of dressing in the processor. All at the same time. She showed me her hand at one point. Her one finger looked old and arthritic.... all swollen and black and blue at the knuckle. She broke it the day before. I can't remember how.

• Jared, a regular here at the shop.... like, seven hours a day kind of regular.....the one whose heart may someday explode from the amount of chai he drinks........his finger is all busted up from jamming it between two heavy logs while taking down a big old cedar tree for his landlord.
  

• Old Bob, another regular at the shop....like, three times a day kind of regular.... the one who drinks the half coffee/half hot water and eats prison toast each morning.... he came in this afternoon and showed me his left hand. His thirteen year old grandson, playing around, poked the end of a broom handle at him and when Old Bob grabbed hold of the broom handle his grandson gave it a tug. Turned out the end of the broom handle was riddled with nails and tore up Bob's hand pretty bad.
  

• Holly, my fairly full time employee at the shop (could hardly manage the place without her, really) grew up on a dairy farm.... hence, the work ethic of an ox. They have a herd, still, of about sixty Holstein and her dad is running the place with her three brothers. Last night while trying to hitch a wagon to the back of his tractor, he got his finger caught between the pull and the wagon and lost half of his pinky finger. . He went in today to have the skin sewed up around what bone remains and will have a half of a pinky on his one hand forevermore.
  

• I've been operating this 12" deli slicer for about two and a half months now and always say a little prayer of gratitude every time I finish a round with it and still have all of my own fingers. I don't know if there is some kind of cosmic universal curse on fingers this week or what but........... I have to have the blade rotating to really get the thing clean. It spins. I spray.... bleaching while wiping it down (carefully) with a rag. Today though, in lieu with that cosmic universal curse on fingers, the blade got the better half of the tip of my ring finger. Went in deep and left a fat chunk of skin dangling from the cut... I pulled the skin off since it was just too much to realistically adhere back to the finger at any point and when people suggested I go in for stitches I had to explain that there really wasn't anything to stitch back together... it's just kind of a hole in my finger now. Bled like a mo-fo. Heavy bled like a mo-fo for two and a half hours. Like... bleeding like a mo-fo through heavy gauze and band-aid every few minutes for a solid two and a half hours. I considered closing up shop to avoid bleeding in people's pastries but I was able to duck away into the back room every few minutes to swap out a new bandage. Regular customers and good friends jumped behind the counter to get their own drinks so that I could keep my hand above my head with good pressure right on the cut.

That was at 2pm. It's five minutes to eight now and the band-aid/gauze set up I've had on
now for a few hours is starting to seep through again. I closed up the shop with a big fat yellow glove on that hand... avoiding getting the cut wet. I'm now going to go into the back kitchen and prime the old wooden staircase and beams because I can't put it off any longer and I've been telling myself all day that it was going to get done tonight. So it will. I'll keep the glove on.

But maybe I should dip the glove in Elmers glue first, sprinkle a little glitter onto it so that
I can at least look like Michael Jackson while I do my painting. If anyone still has their old
Thriller coat, or maybe the shiny socks, send them up or drop them off at the shop. I could
start a whole new trend.

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!?