I've been messing with the photos on the
front page of the site:
they now have text captions built into them, and the top left one
will always be a picture from an older gallery of the next upcoming
event, if we have any. I'm still not totally happy with how those
overlays look, but I guess it's ok.
Oh, photos, we've got photos. Just in,
Gram Rabbit at
Pop Roxx.
I love that band -- you should
go buy both of their
albums immediately. They put on a fantastic show, and not just
because of the gogo dancers in full-on furvert suits.
Also up,
Ayria + Life Cried +
The Panic Lift. Ayria's not bad. They've played here a few times
before, and, eh, I've seen it. The first two bands were that same old
cookie monster crap again. Scream into your one vocal effect, bent
over at the waist like you're really, really constipated. Repeat
until done. Don't bother to turn off your one vocal effect when doing
between-song banter:
"Thang-a-lang-a-lang-a-lank yooga-looga-loo!"
At least they didn't dress like
Cobra Commander this time.
(Would it have been better if they had been dressed as bunnies
instead? Well, obviously, but that still would have been insufficient.)
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So, yeah, still no kitchen. This may sound familiar to those of
you who were following along when we went through the permit dance
four years ago. Whenever you build anything, you need a bunch of
inspections, and the last one is Building, who is (also) a
meta-inspection, who looks at the signatures on your job card that say
that the earlier inspections were passed.
Our other inspections are finished, and the building inspector
comes out, and says, "Where's your fire inspection?" Our
contractor says, "Where's the checkbox that says we need a fire
inspection?" The inspector says "Oh, you always need a
fire inspection." (And I say, "Why didn't our contractor know
that?", but that's neither here nor there.)
Then we schedule a fire inspection. Three weeks go by. The fire
inspector doesn't like our sprinkler heads (we need the kind that poke
out instead of the flush-mount for some reason.) That means: we need
to get someone out here to change them. Three weeks. Then we need to
have Fire come back. Three weeks. Then we need to have building come
back. Three weeks.
And this is how we've been perpetually two months from completion
for almost a year.
You can't even pipeline these visits and schedule the inspector
for the day after the work is done, because half the time contractors
just fail to show up, meaning now you're late and have pissed
off the inspector.
Its kind of insane how much this room has cost already, given that
it's basically just a hallway with three sinks and a table.
Part of the screwage here is that, for commercial space, you're
required to use licensed contractors. In your home, you can just get
some Time-Life books and go crazy, and as long as you do the work
right, you'll pass the inspections. But you aren't allowed to DIY in a
business. It's a conspiracy of some sort, specifically designed to
make my life suck.
And even if you were feeling like a scofflaw, it's not like a
kitchen could just "appear" one day without that being noticed...
_________________________________
Anyway, assuming our kitchen ever opens, what do you think we should
serve? What would you want to eat here? Think in both categories
"dinner" and "snack".
We don't have a grill, or gas, or a hood, which means we are
limited to things you can make without open flame or a vat of grease:
microwave, hot-plate, and toaster oven, basically. (And a majority of
the food needs to be prepared on-site, for permit reasons.)
Drunk people, of course, like the grease. But putting in the kind
of exhaust hood we'd need for that would have been an additional
$20,000! Shoot me.
It's been incredibly frustrating around here lately; I walk around
and see thing I want to fix, or improve, or just change for the sake
of variety, and it all costs money that we don't have.
