Some days you are the windshield....

other days you are the bug... Today I was the bug...

So I went to go check out the rental kitchen this morning with Stein. It was ok, not great, but it was licensed and that is really all that matters for our purposes. So we go check it out and the guy says it is $20 an hour... BUT... we have to get a million dollar rider on our insurance AND give a $1000 deposit. And he seems pretty shady. I can easily visualize my deposit not coming back to me. Crap...

So we talk to Mr. E and see if we can use the school kitchen, but it's graduation and the final for Garde Manger, so it is just not a good time for that. We call my old standby the Pleasant Hill community center and they are under construction. I am 0 for 3.

We also finally get a hold of Semi-freddi bread, whose Martinez route is booked. Acme doesn't deliver to Martinez at all.

Then a craigslist ad comes thru on a vacuum sealer for $900, I talk the guy down to $800 but only for4 today.. and it's 3:30, he closes at 4:30 and I am in the East Bay and he is in the heart of San Francisco. Not going to happen.

I also meet with Main St Martinez, the property management group, who are totally awesome and totally rock and make the mistake of bitching about how business UNfriendly the Martinez Business Department is... just as the Mayor walks in the door. So the ladies (who are trying to help me) ask me to recount the travails to the Mayor. I do it in the most diplomatic way I can, but now it is not a private venting... I am basically telling on them to their boss, which was not my initial intent at all. I have to still try to WORK with these people. I got an email (out of the blue) from my Building dept contact tonight that is I am sure a result of this conversation. I am usually pretty ok with my big mouth, but today I wasn't. Plus at the end of the day, I know they don't understand why they are the problem.

They just truly don't understand the connection between telling me my ADA plans for my bathroom are not right with out any guidance about what they thought was wrong with it, or making my landlord bring the building up to 2014 code before we can do anything, or not accepting anything I was told was "grandfathered in" (prior to signing the lease), or asking arbitrarily for things not required as being business-unfriendly. They truly feel they are doing their job to the best of their ability.

One of the Main St Martinez women made an interesting correlation, that when she worked for a major newspaper as a graphic artist, until she worked directly with the salespeople, she really didn't understand the financial constraints involved. I know these guys don't understand that in a few months my alimony ends and I will no longer be able to afford my house. Maybe the Cheesecake Factory can afford to wait a year to open a restaurant, but I can't. I literally cannot afford to pay my house payment after August and they have zero sense of urgency about me being able to operate my business. Why CAN'T I just go look thru the 700 pages of ADA code on bathrooms and figure out what he didn't like? Why can't we spend a year fixing every flaw up to the highest (and not even in effect yet) code?

It's not like I knew these would be issues going in to the lease. In all fairness, we did not decide to fix the bathroom and add a hood til after we leased the property, but the ADA issues have been around in the historic area of Martinez for some time. Bleh. I hope tomorrow is better.