anyone keen?

Hmmm, so today I’ve been presented with a brand new business problem. As you may or may not know, Cheshire Street (where the shop will be) is home to a rather fantastic bustling market on Sundays from some ungodly hour in the morning up until the afternoon. On the one hand it’s great since it brings loads and loads of business into the street, but it comes with the rather unfortunate side effect that if I want to join in the fun then I have to pay £150 to rent the space in front of my shop from the council and if I don’t then chances are that someone else will and it may well block off the entrance to the shop. This leaves me with the slightly unpleasant choice of having to rent the space from the council and make a loss on it to stop people from blocking me in or having someone else set up in front of me who will without a shadow of a doubt be a strangely smelling mix of fish and fermented grass guaranteed to cure any bowel problems or erectile dysfunction you may be having.

So basically…. would anyone like a market stall? The guy who’s got it at the moment is just about to hand in his notice of withdrawl to the council so if we can get in an application to the council fairly soon then we’ll be pretty sure to get it and so long as you’re selling something funky we can share the space in the shop and the street for the day. I think it would work out pretty well.

coffeetastic

I’ve had the beautiful beautiful machine and grinder combo for a couple days now and I’m finally starting to get some half decent shots out of it. Sadly it’s taken the entire first 250g bag of Venezuelan high roasted coffee to get to this point, but it’s really nice to finally see a couple of shots every now and then with a half decent crema and about 25 seconds on the extraction time. Just a pity that now that I’ve got the grind right for the blend I’m going to go and switch. I’ll probably find that I’m back to square one again tomorrow, but that’s the real joy, right? If I ever get a really pretty cup of coffee I’ll take a picture.

Getting milk frothed just right has been really fun and I’m starting to get pretty good at it. I’m not getting the beautiful velvety microfoam that you can turn into little pictures of ferns with apples and hearts all over/inside/behind/made into it.  Got to study all the online videos I can find, there’s got to be one around that’ll teach me how to express my artistic soul through the medium of milk!

looooooads happening

There can be no structure! It’s far too late in the morning to string all these completely disassociated bits together into some sort of coherent monologue,  so revel in the random subject leaping for the moment and prepare for the stream of news.

Looks like we’ve reached an agreement with the guy in Cheshire Street about getting a shop. It’s a little bit more pricey than I thought it would be originally, but on the plus side we’re hopefully going to get the licence to set up a street trading thing outside the shop on Sundays, which isn’t so much important for that as it is for stopping anyone else setting up outside. Fabulous there and hopefully just got to wait a bit to move in. As soon as things get a bit further with the lawyers and stuff (*secret shudder*) I’ll put up the address and if you really feel the need you can go down and check it out. The guy in there’ll probably have some sort of pretty cool closing down sale to make it worth your while.

The search for packaging has reopened since not getting a reply from Potter’s and it’s not going well… is there nowhere that just sells plain, high quality, nice to touch, brown cardboard boxes? Everything seems to be patterned or tacky or plastic or shiny in a seriously unnatural unappealing sort of way.

I just found out what a mess the accounts are all in and I had to spend most of the morning not managing to sort them out… oh the badness.  At least now all the receipts are in labelled and chronologically ordered envelopes and all the invoices are in a big pile, just got to sort that into one bit chunky document at some point. Most of the morning my room looked like some sort of horrific paper based disaster with piles and piles of vaguely ordered documents in piles around this one clear spot that I was sitting in; it looked quite funky when I got up to get more coffee, kind of like some sort of strange bureaucratic flower. I really should have curled up in the centre, had someone take a picture and then given it a pretentious name. It was terrifying, but clearing out all the unnecessary paperwork and throwing it in the bin was pretty satisfying.

The grinder for the coffee arrived today so I’ve been making some serious ass coffee today, hopefully though that’s news for tomorrow since I’ve only really made one or two decent shots out of the machine today and hardly any decent microfoam… got to practice! Doing all the rest of the accounts should give me reason enough to need it., but I’m not sure if my body will quite be able to keep up. For some reason, after drinking all the coffee I have today, I feel really really really hot and I think my sweat and piss smells a whole lot like Venezuelan high roast. I don’t have the shakes just yet, but I’m dreading what weeks of experimentation is going to do.

Ooh yeah and has anyone got any ideas for magazines/newsletters/blogs/random media that I could send publicity stuff to? I’ve been rooting round a little bit for that too since yesterday, but the list is looking decidedly anorexic. Discovering Daily Candy was pretty cool though.