Update of August 23-24
Monday morning (the 23rd) I spent waiting for the batch freezer calibrator. Hey... does that sound familiar? Like something I had to do Wednesday and Friday of last week? Yeah... well I rescheduled the appointment for Monday. I waited all morning, as the appointment was for the first thing in the morning... and kept waiting, and waiting... and I wrote something that I've already posted on my blog about that whole experience.
At any rate, while I was waiting for the batch freezer dude, Sysco came. They had a whole load of small boxes for us... intelligently referred to as "smallwares". I don't order smallwares, the ADs do... so I didn't know what we got in until I looked through it all. Nate, the AD, was there and he told me everything we had gotten and helped me to know what we still needed. Boy howdy was that fun! Huh? Fun! You heard me, fun!!!
And, as soon as everyone seemed to be doing what they were supposed to, the health inspector finally came. He was just some dude with an American flag hat, and he didn't seem as thorough as I thought he'd be. He just needed to see the few documents I heard he needed to see and he walked through the store with me telling me to get things done that I knew needed to be done, and that was it. We passed the health inspection. Sweet, huh?
So sweet, in fact, that Stephen (the manager of the North store) and I got a UHaul and we used it to move a shitload of boxes from Wells to North. We had to move all these boxes because I purchased a LOT of stuff for the North Avenue store about a month in advance (because of all the delays to the opening).
So that happened, and we figured since we had a truck, we might as well go desk shopping. So I got to drive a UHaul on the street of Chicago (fun, as you might expect) from the new store to Office Max. Now, don't get me wrong, I love Stephen to death, but he asks a LOT of questions. And he's also not very sure of himself... so, even after he found a desk he liked and I said it was okay and in our price range (I again felt like mah dad) he kept looking at other desks. What a goof! We ended up just dropping the desk off at the store because I had my writing class that night.

My writing Level 4 class was in a different room Monday night. It's odd, but you don't notice how much that kind of thing effects you unless you really pay attention to it. You get used to writing in a certain space... but then you go into a different space and everything about writing seems foreign. Regardless of my digression, we didn't spend a lot of time writing. I had a couple of my scripts read and we went over what worked and what didn't. It was a fairly productive class, even though it was only four of us and the space was alien.

Hey... today is Albion's first day of classes. I just want to wish everyone good luck this year.

Tuesday morning (the 24th) was spent at the new store. Since we finally passed the health inspection, we were able to start pretending to actually get things done. I showed up at about 10:40 am, 40 minutes later than I was supposed to have. It didn't matter because I was the first one there. Nate, the AD, showed up a few minutes later. Nate seemed fixated on getting lots of people (he wanted 100) to the North Avenue store to make all sorts of stuff happen there. Whoops! Can't get you 100 people, but I know I count as at least a dozen people.
But I didn't count as a dozen people when Josh and I attempted to put the desk (purchased yesterday) together. He and I, honestly, spent at least an hour working on putting the desk together. Why so much time? I think we were both really tired and weren't really paying attention the first time we put it together. We paid attention the second time, though.
From the gratuitously long desk assembly, we proceeded to the fantastically awesome job of cleaning all of the brand new pans, spades, knives, and cambros. This was made more awesome when we saw that there were stickers on most of those items and that Josh had absentmindedly tossed them into the sink without looking. Wet stickers are both easy and complicated to unstick.
While we were cleaning literally every piece in the store, Sysco came with our initial food order. This wasn't a huge deal, but it meant that I would spend the next couple hours makin' ice cream (which I haven't done in a long time). This has nothing to do with anything, I guess I'm just happy that after all this time I'm still good at something I used to do all the time. Let's hope other things are like that. ZING! What? I was talking about jumping rope? I've got nothing.
Nothing except for a run to CostCo with Josh! He had never been there before, so I showed him the ropes (see how I bring it back to rope? I'm brilliant!). We were getting the initial candy order for the store, which is a LOT of candy. We actually got up to the register and had to start saying what we needed to put back to get it under the amount of money we had. It was all very chaotic. So chaotic, in fact, that we ended up getting about 8 boxes of Butterfinger for free. The woman didn't notice, and we didn't notice until we were out the door. I guess this makes me an immoral person, but I was honestly too tired and kind of happy that we were getting something for free after all the money we dump into that store. I'm going to Hell... who's coming with me?
Josh did, because he didn't care either. And we proceeded to run to Wells to get more shit from the basement for the new store. Then, with candy and shit in hand, we went back to the North Avenue store.
Remember we had been cleaning all the new stuff? Well all that new stuff makes a whole lot of new waste. And that new waste goes into a dumpster. Old waste goes into dumpster... all kinds of waste goes into the dumpster! And, since we've got so much new junk that needed to be thrown away and only one dumpster, someone had to make more room. Guess who that was? Yep... I spent some time jumping into a dumpster. I climbed up into the dumpster and used my large man-weight to compress all kinds of boxes, ice cream mix waste, and cleaning products. It wasn't bad to dump into the dumpster, but let us keep this chore in mind for later in my post, shall we?
After playing in the dumpster, I was hungry (gross, yet funny transition). The group of us cleaning at North all went to dinner at Chipotle. Chipotle is awesome!
After dinner, I had to run back to Wells to get even more shit. This time I took Adam with me. While on our way to the store, Andrea called me. She proceeded to tell me a story of earlier today. She started this story by saying how much she hates who she's become... then she talked about who she was in the process of getting a facial and was on the phone yelling. This was the extent of her terrible story... that she was yelling on the phone while getting a facial. Oh, poor facial :( Do you remember the time I was standing in a dumpster? Let's not compare days... I pretty quickly ended the phone conversation... and proceeded to have a terrible time trying to get to sleep because I was so angry at how out of touch she's become.