Hump Day Musings...

Hope everyone had an amazing weekend & is enjoying this effed up week of weather so far. WTF Mom Nature? Did us yinzers do something to piss you off? Ill be honest, this is far from my least favorite weather...I kinda dig gray cool & rainy.  It makes green look so much greener and you can see all the world start to lush out...and I like that.  Granted, I do love those crisp bright sunny days as much as any normal person, but I also genuinely enjoy days like the last few that are wet & chilly.  Complain all ya want...I personally love the mix of SWPA weather...hence I live here.

Spent all afternoon/evening/night working on the menu for the new store.  I cant procrastinate this anymore. We are less than 5 weeks from opening the doors and we cant open with no menu.  Ill be honest, Ive been so damn swamped with tedious bullshit that I hadnt really given this menu more than a passing thought - and since I was planning on completely re-conceptualizing the menus for this particular breed of restaurant and that can get time consuming in the lay-out/design department as well as the actually thinking of the menu items area thats a horrible thing.  I got The Wizard to let me take this restaurant concept and make it more Chef driven and allow my kitchen mangers to get more involved and have more of a say so in what they are cooking - in my opinion if they genuinely CARE about the food they are putting out it benefits all parties involved.  This also means that I can stretch out of the bar food confines The Wizard stuck me in years ago and show him what its like to own a restaurant, not a glorified beer bar.  I have no idea why hes all of a sudden willing to listen to me about these few things but I refuse to question...Ill just say thank you jebus! and take what I can get.  I was pleasantly surprised by how well it came together from the nothing that was in my head.  Im digging the design so far, I think I walked the line between my good taste and The Wizards silly hang ups for him to let it pass.  Content wise I lightened it up a lot, removed a lot of items, freshened up some old favorites and took it in a healthier & food centric direction.  We shall see what the end result looks like, but for 1 day of super heavy work I was pretty happy...now to just get it finished by the end of the week. Oiy!

All plans for my own thing have been perpetually sidelined at the moment.  Between work, home & this new fitness thing Im trying out I just dont have the inclination to work on it.  The Mister has had some interesting opportunities present themselves in the last couple weeks and I am tempted to sit back and see what develops with him before I make any moves.  I am still totally in love with the idea of my bakery/coffee shop, but the more I am rolling around what I initially planned to do in my head the more I am sure that I am trying to be everything to everyone ~ and that my friends is a recipe for failure.   The menu I had written for Mindys was recockulously huge.  I had a little bit of all my favorite things to eat & make on there and that is one fuck of a list.  Who's going to make it all? And beyond that I have never in my life eaten at a restaurant that was that unfocused, with that broad of a menu, that was able to execute precisely or perfectly. This is a problem. I cant handle half-assery. So I need to streamline the concept.  And I just cant decide in which direction I want to trim.  Bakery & coffee shop with limited soup/salad/sandwich menu or more cafe style with exceptional coffee? It all comes down to the baking. I either do the bakery, and do it right, spend the time to make what I want to make and make it better than anyone else or I keep it a fast casual cafe style menu.  Im leaning toward wanting to go the bakery route. But Im still not 100% sure.  And I cant do a damn thing until I am. I think I would love the bakery more.  Feel free to chime in with opinions...

But then I had this other EPIC idea that I passed along to my dear sis-in-law that she should leave sunny San Diego with her man & her cats and return east to The Burgh where she can rent the space next door to where I want to open my place and open a funky bookstore!  She has a thing for libraries...like currently in grad school to be the Queen of All Things Library, but also happens to be a truly unique human that I, for some unknown reason, have decided really needs to do this.  Im not talking about a B&N or that other mega huge cant ever find a goddamn thing and why are there so many people sitting everywhere reading the books they are supposed to be buying at the bookstore bookstores, Im talking about someplace funky, like the Open Mind in Sewickley used to be until he closed it...a bookstore with personality. Yeah I have no idea WTF Im talking about...the only thing I know about books is I like to read them...but I think it would be cool to join the 2 places and create a whole unique space.  Now all I have to do is convince her this is brilliant enough to warrant moving back across the country to where it isnt always so sunny with her whole life to jump off a cliff with me...should be sooo easy!

Im off today with no plans outside of Game 7 tonight.  There is really nothing pressing I need to do, theres a few chore-y like things I really should do but if I dont they'll still be there tomorrow...I feel like Im playing hookie ;-) 

Happy Mothers Day!

Been busy this week so Ive been quiet.  Not a nad thing but I wanted to give a shout out to moms...mine & all the other ones out there!!

Some of my favorite Mom memories....

• Standing in the middle of mine & my sister's room with a yellow carbon receipt in her hand yelling "I KNOW I paid for carpeting in here...LOOK I have the receipt, it says it right here that I paid for carpeting!!! I want to SEE it. NOW! Get all of the crap off the floor ~ and DO NOT just cram it in the closet because I paid for carpeting in there too ~ and FIND MY CARPET! I do not know how you live in this mess. CARPET! NOW!
• Sneaking into the kitchen to steal pie dough cookies out of the cupboard with my sister (again...we got into a lot of trouble...) all night long cuz ya know, mom definitely wouldnt notice that when she went to bed there were 20 and when she woke up there were 6...
• Completely thrashing her kitchen flinging pumpkin guts from one end to the other while carving pumpkins at Halloween and lining up for pics in front of our lit up jack-o-lanterns
• Blowing up an egg in the microwave that my sister & I tried to hard boil {note to others: this is a bad friggin idea...just dont do it!} that in turn blew the door off said microwave and across the kitchen and splattered egg drop from the ceiling down, like dripping off the ceiling fan, a just ridiculous mess.  Dad coming home & freaking out and mom just smiling, overseeing clean-up and when Dad walked away saying "Dont worry about it girls, I wanted to get rid of that thing anyway, now I get a new microwave!"
• Telling her when I was around13 that I swore to god the only reason she had kids so was that shed never have to sweep the stairs or clean a bathroom again and her just laughing at me as she shook her head and walked away.
• Telling her that I wanted to skip college and go to a Culinary School and why...and her telling me to go for it, that if I was sure this was what I wanted then that was what we would do. And we did.  And a year later when I told her I wanted to move 2000 miles away to work at a hotel at 18 years old her doing everything she could to make sure I didnt fail and that I was as set up as I could be.  
• And while I was gone for 2 years, on my only trip back home, when I was so miserable being away for a gazillion different reasons, when all it would have taken for me to not get on my flight back to Colorado was her telling me it was ok to not to and that it was ok to stay home she didnt. She didnt give me the easy out, even though I know she wanted to so badly, she let me do what I knew was the responsible thing and she put me on that plane...and thank god she did, that 1 decision would have effected everything in my life right now...and I like where I am.

Thank you mom. I know those 2 little words dont look very big...but they pack a powerful punch.  thank you for helping me learn to be who I am, thank you for being there for me at every turn, thak you for being you, thank you for being my mom.

Happy Mothers Day to all the moms out there...what you do makes your kids who they will be.