coming soon to satchel’s is the “satchel’s is for dog lovers official t-shirt.” this dog, buster, is featured. i drew this dog and his owner this morning and i am quite excited about the new shirt coming soon.
tomorrow at 4 the employees are supposed to hang their art show. we’ll see how many show for that. monday is the employees trip to the beach. it’s just a big happy family up there.
friday night was slammin busy, saturday night not so much. but saturday day was jammin. overall it was a good week. i talked to lots of happy customers and i ate deep dish pizza 3 times this week which is probably a personal record. tonight i had pepperoni, red onions, garlic and carrots, light bacon and tomatoes. wow. it was so good that i’m going to officially make red onions the next new topping at satchel’s, next time i change the menu, which could be a few months.
we buy maybe 700 pounds of cheese a week. the price has gone up almost 50% in the last month. it’s crazy. all the food prices are going up all the time. our prices will have to increase too at some point. i hate to do it, but i have to keep up with the market. it’s crazy that prices can go up so quickly and the minimum wage can get a boost once every 20 years or something…
tonight went okay. i made a few mistakes. i don’t think anyone else did. that should teach me. i want to be perfect but i’m just as human as the next guy.

here’s the woman who owns the dog, buster. she is the first customer to be featured on a satchel’s shirt. she seems pretty nice. she must be smart because this was her third day in a row to eat at satchel’s. i forgot her name. remembered the dogs name though… sad.
anyway, i’ll try and scan the image of the shirt i drew for all you blog readers to get the first glance at the newest latest…

that’s the first thing i ever scanned and tried to put in a blog. i don’t know if it worked, let me check…
well, it seemed to work out okay. pretty cool, eh?
anyway, i could ramble all night about matt bell, about the new drainage at lightnin’ salvage, about taxidermy recital, about the pies tonight, about the customer tonight who told me how much he appreciated my greg brown albums… i could tell you how much i worked this week, about the new projects underway at satchel’s… the list goes on and on… but i’ve got other fish to fry. good night.

when it rained last week and LSE flooded, drainage jumped to the top of my list of things to do. yesterday when one of our 2 air conditioners went out, that jumped ahead of the drainage. the drainage issues are being handled by my contracter and some workers. the broken A/C part will not be in for a few days but that is better than the few weeks i was being told it would take to get the part which was on back order. i’m sorry, but i can’t wait through july to have the A/C fixed at the restaurant. my neighbors and A/C superstore RE Michel found the part on a new jersey shelf.
the drainage ditches are being dug and rocks are waiting to go in, the A/C part is on the plane and flying towrd us now. a new bench is getting built in front of LSE. stuff is happening up there, all kinds of stuff besides just pizzas and salads. today there was a major meeting of the minds to discuss the bocce ball court. i’m going to play some bocce this 4th of july and we’ll further discuss the court to be built. once the drainage is taken care of the bocce and new garden will be close behind. keep an eye out.
pictures coming soon. stay cool.
employee art show is getting hung on sunday. come check it out next week. if there’s room, i may put a piece up, about poverty. it may be the dog days of summer but up at satchel’s the engines are getting stoked and running full power.

well, john dreamed up and organized the first annual night of a thousand ukekeles at lightnin’ salvage tonight. i’d say it was a big success. we were short of the thousand by about 980, but everyone there seemed to have a great time and we all heard some good ukelele music. there was a group with ukelele shirts, and a couple groups with other instruments, even a kazoo and a pretty large toy baby grand piano. it’s been a long day for me. i started my day at 8am, packing my truck with shovels and things for the drainage work that needs to happen at LSE. the crew showed up there and shoveled their hearts out all day while me and the contracter talked and talked and talked about each area and what we thought should happen. there’s surprisingly a lot of thinking and talking that has to happen to make the most of our drainage issues. i thought i was done at 4pm, but then one of the air conditioners at satchel’s was not working and i messed with that for an hour, to no avail. at 5:15, i finally went home and showered and was back at work by 6. it turned out that i was the sound guy for ukelele night and i really don’t know much about sound boards except if they start to give feedback then turn it down fast. the lounge was packed and the people were having fun. i raced back and forth from the sound board to the kitchen, where the new guy was making pies and i was checking them. they were backed up in there and i tried to imbue a feeling of speed in there, then back to the sound board for the next ukelele participant.

then to the kitchen: faster, faster. it was not a relaxing evening but i did enjoy myself despite the sense of responsibility. my family was there eating and listening and playing which was the best thing about being there for me. my son seemed to be having the time of his life and my daughter even sat in my lap to watch john sing. i worked a solid 13 hour day and arrived home to eat a “small” satch salad which filled up one of the largest bowls we own. thanks gainesville for coming out to support ukelele night. we should make it an annual event, and maybe next year we get those other 980 ukeleles on stage.
where can you see this kind of thing? only at lightnin’ salvage.

took the family down to wild waters today. it turned out to be a nice adventure for us. it rained pretty hard in the middle of the day and we all had to get out of the water and wait. i’d guess it was an hour and a half or two hours before they let everyone back in the water and on the slides. most people had left but somehow we managed to wait it out. to keep them entertained, i let my kids beat up on me for one hour, and then we got some ice cream and ended up in the gift shop. i could have avoided the gift shop if it weren’t for that rain…
the hurricane was the best slide. you had to ride a tube for that one. the wave pool was nice too, though, and the kiddie section was amazing. i could definitely get behind opening a water park in gainesville. of course, it would cost about a million dollars i don’t have. i’d have a tube ride (like one we went on in california one time called the lazy river) where you could float through the whole park on a tube, get off on little islands and play in forts with water guns, or get off at slides or take the lazy river to the zip line… there’d be a real sketchy rope bridge too, that you could try and get accross but it’d be okay if you fell in because the water wouldn’t be far below and it’d be deep enough. of course no insurance company would ever touch it, this satchel’s major water town deluxe.

the picture above is of the van before it got as ragged as it is now. over the years of kids playing in it, all the windows don’t work, the shifter broke off, the doors don’t close good. the curtains had to go… boy, it seems like yesterday when i was driving that baby to work every night.

i’m trying to collect the signs the homeless people hold when they stand by the traffic lights. i pay $5 each for them, which may sound like a lot to you, but just think how much it is to them. not to mention that once you buy their sign they have to stop and go make another (or get a drink and make another…) i’ve only got 2 so far. i’d like to hang 5 or 10 of them in the employee art show next month. if anyone reading this wants to help me, please buy a sign and drop it off for me.
a few years ago you didn’t see this type of thing but on the expressway off ramp in big cities sometimes, now they are everywhere. the other day while i waited at university and waldo road, 3 of the 4 lights had signers. i didn’t stop to buy them all, i was with the family.
part of my idea is to buy up their signs and put them together. i mean, you can’t not be aware of them but to hang them up in a restaurant as art takes the awareness a step further.
my vision was to get a small jar of paint and a few pieces of cardboard and a brush and hand them out to these folks and tell them that maybe if they had something to give out, people would give in to them more freely. i know i’ll give $5 for a sign, but i give nothing for just standing in the heat looking desperate. if they sold tiny paintings, maybe they could get $2 for each one and maybe people would start to collect them from different people, and maybe they could make money this way. how cool would it be to stop at the light and get a cheap painting instead of feeling guilty? they all must have some expression in them like everyone does.
anyway, i haven’t done it yet, get it together to even set up one bum. i’m busy. i have lightnin’ salvage flooding in the rains, i have the restaurant always needing my attention. ukelele night is tomorrow. there’s a house i’m trying to renovate while i deal with a vandal neighbor. the kids are always wanting to do fun stuff. my daughter’s having a birthday party soon…. i could keep writing out my excuses all night.
i talked to one signer, he said he’d do it. but i never got back to it yet. sometimes when i’m running around and my cell phone is vibrating my brain, and i’m swiping my credit card again, and i’m trying to keep my calm in the midst of some problems, it all seems like a dumb idea, trying to start a revolution of signers turning into folk artists…
it’s late and i’ve got a loooong list to hit the groound with tomorrow. good night.

chances are if you ate at satchel’s tonight, you waited a long time. it was a pretty hard night for me. the pie guy calling to-go times is pretty new at working busy nights and he made some bad calls. also, there were quite a few mistakes, which slowed us waaay down. it was pretty bad. pies were coming out at 45 minutes for a while. most of them looked good, but we forgot toppings on a lot. i don’t know that i forgot toppings but toppings were forgotten. slices were made wrong, we heated up spinach for one pie, sausage for another, zucchini for one. i can’t even remember all the mistakes. it was real busy too so had we been without mistakes we would have had a challenge on our hands but add in mistakes and we’re screwed. i was chained to the oven. i wish i could have aplopgized to all the people who waited too long or didn’t get their food exactly right, but it’s too hard to step off the oven on a night like that because then things get even worse. no one is watching the oven like me and with one pizza maker out of the kitchen, we get even more backed up. at least our hostess had a better handle on the paging system.
i’m pretty fried from that frenzy tonight. i’m glad to have a couple days off. the plan is to pick some blueberries tomorrow, make a pie to take to a cook-out tomorrow night, and hit wild waters on monday. should be fun.
we’ll take a needed break and crank up the ovens again tuesday for the people.

i tell you, without showing pictures of my kids, i got nothing to show. that’s my life, those kids. pizza is like my hobby.
tonight we tried out our new guest paging system, much to the hostess’ dismay. a friday night is not the night to try out something new, but… well… my bad.
anyway, so many people were leaving with our coaster pagers that i had to do something. so, this new system calls your cell phone when your table is ready. no pagers to get stolen or lost. well… it took some figuring out. turns out half the numbers of people’s phones are long distance, which i never considered. meaning, our long distance bill is going to go crazy. and there are other glitches too but nothing we can’t work through. it was stressful for me, and the hostess, but we made it. the pies were awesome as usual. we didn’t have a single mistake.
next week we’ll start the long process of digging french drains and trying to work out our drainage problems. we’ve got a pretty good sized property there and a lot of water to manage when the big rains come. i’m going to try not to let it stress me out.
i saw half of the holopaw show last night at common grounds. i thought they sounded better than ever.

i showed up early at work to install a curtain on the walk in cooler to keep the cold air in and the warm air out. but it was raining pretty hard and i stopped in lightnin’ salvage to chat for a second when the flooding came on. LSE is in a low spot and the amount of water pouring off r.e.michel next door and the lse building was too much. i ran behind the building to get a better look and i was walking 8 inches deep in water. judy and i mopped and wet-vac’d it up for over an hour. we must have sucked 40 gallons of water out of there. so now drainage has suddenly moved to the top of my to-do list.
so much for the walk in curtain. it’ll have to wait because when i was done with that problem i had to clean up and start cooking. and for a rainy night we were real busy and boilin’ oil was kicking down some great bluegrass in lightnin’ salvage and no one knew that a couple hours previous it was an inch deep in there. boilin’ oil is going to play the 3rd wednesday of each month starting in september. real nice guys and great music. if you ate at satchels tonight you had a damn good pie. i know cause i cooked them all. it was a good night for pizza and the pepperoni, meatball, broccoli, and extra cheese slice i had at the start of my shift was out of this world. i am still amazed when i sit down to eat and the food rocks my world. how can i eat it every day and it still taste that good? how?

i’ve been a bit out of sorts lately, probably because i have been out of my regular routine. now, a routine can become a rut, but no routine can also be that. anyway, tonight it feels like my mojo is coming back. i’m excited about going to work tomorrow, i have inspiration and plans for my week ahead. i’m an artist. when i was younger i didn’t like to say that because it sounded so pretentious and silly. but now i’m older and i can admit to myself and the world around me that i am actually an artist. my art manifests in many ways, and tonight as i was in the studio painting, it came to me in the way of a creative idea.
i have a certain history with homelessness, one i will not get into detail about here. and what was sticking in my mind tonight is those people on the side of the road holding signs. i want to help those people somehow, and it’s not like i sit around trying to figure out how to help them, or it’s not as if i give them money because i don’t, but i always wish i could do something to improve their quality of life a bit so they didn’t have to stand out there holding signs all day. tonight i got an idea.
there was one time when i was heading home at lunchtime with a deep dish pepperoni sausage, carrot and zucchini pizza for some guys working at my house. i stopped at a red light and there was a guy holding a sign, “homeless and hungry.” i gave him a slice of that pie and a napkin and watched as he slurped up a big bite as i pulled away. i slurped up a bite myself a moment later and so i know if he could feel anything at all, he was feeling a bit lightheaded and transcendental at that moment. that hot slice was about the best thing in the world at that moment and i eat pizza and delicious foods all the time. what must it have been like for him?
anyway, doing something for someone in need always feels good. the problem with those sign holders is they don’t seem to do anything. well, that’s part of my idea. and also part of my idea is to help them make more money and, well, that is what a lot of people wish for anyway. i can’t tell you about my idea just yet. i have to work on it over the next couple weeks and see how it goes. i’m a busy guy so it won;t be easy for me to find time to hatch this idea, but if my trial run goes well, then i’ll have plenty of inspiration to make more time to carry it out and at some point the idea will take off on its own.
excercise and painting. these are two things i was able to do today that i rarely get to do. and if i’m lucky enough to do one in a day, i seldomly do both. today i got to both, probably because satchel’s was closed and i am coming out of my funk.
i’d really like to tell you about my idea. but if things work out, i just may have more info coming soon, and even visual aid by the first week in july. if things don;t go well, well… i might never mention it again.
2 days off is awesome. c and i went out to dragonfly tonight. i’d have gone to paramount but i thought it was closed. turned out it was open… next time.
come out this week for some great music at LSE. ekendra dasa on tuesday night. boilin’ oil on wednesday night, dj nora thursdays, sweet harmony friday and dino lorenzo saturday. that’s a good line up, let me assure you.
(FYI: the idea has nothing to do with pizza. )

well, here’s a picture of me from my last birthday ( i think). the cake is shaped like a lightnin’ bolt, for lightnin’ salvage, of course. actually, it was my birthday in 06 now that i look at the date of the photo. LSE was just a babe in the woods, just hatching. and i was all wrapped up in it and my mom made me a lightnin’ bolt cake and the “theme” of the birthday was JUNK. my son and my wife bought me some junk from a thrift store. it was a great day.
it’s almost 1:30 am. i need to get to bed. i worked pretty hard tonight. i went in at 2pm and just got home. things went pretty well. the pies looked great and business was real steady. shade tree played lightnin’ salvage, i wish i could have heard them.
some crazy guy keeps tagging in the men’s room. this loser goes in there every week with a sharpie marker and writes all these websites on the walls. all the websites are about the 911 conspiracy theory. so, i keep going in there and painting over the tags. i don’t want people to think that we are 911 conspiracy nuts and that we are promoting this craziness. tonight i had to paint the top of the soap dispenser because the freak had tagged there. maybe i can get some special solvent that will clean away the marker… hmmm…
can you believe someone actually takes their sharpie into the men’s room every week to write conspiracy theory websites? he’s been doing this for months now.

we did make one pizza twice. we did have half a cake leftover, and there are always the employees who are supposed to pay a dollar for the beers the drink after work and they just keep pouring beers and paying nothing. i am right there. do they think i don’t know or care? what if all of my 40 employees decided to drink as many beers as they wanted after every shift? thank god for the honest ones. i should call people out, but instead i just take note for when the bonus comes around. i can always bonus them less all the dollar beers i guess they drank. i wish everyone was honest. i wish no one tagged my men’s room. i wish i didn’t have to have security systems on my properties. look at that picture of me smiling. do i look like the kind of guy who wants to worry about all this?

i better get some sleep. tomorrow’s a big day for guys like me. we get to call the shots. i hope i get to take a nap.

i painted my ipod orange tonight. we’re going to make the big switch at work tomorrow from disc player to ipod i think. the disc player has been acting up. i’ve been avoiding this because i’ve spent 4 years adding discs and deleting unwanted songs and now i have to try and figure out which music on my ipod can be played up there and then i’ll be ipod-less until i decide to get another one.

i have more to say but i’m too tired. i’ll come back when i’m more rested.

i’m the robot who is orange and yellow.
and who is that purple robot with the lightnin’ bolts? ?
well, tonight was a complete disaster. i feel fully replenished from a couple days off and i went to work to check on the new guy. i end up making a list of small things to tweak and then losing my cool over another small thing that at the time seemed huge. confused? good.

my neice and nephew are staying with us for a week while my sister and her husband look for a place to live when they relocate to colorado. well, my freinds from jax got sick with this stomach bug and then my daughter caught it and now my nephew too. the poor lil’ fella, he’s quite pitiful when he’s sick, as anyone is, for that matter. i was planning to stop in to work for a quick check but felt compelled to stay and work more… that’s where i went wrong i guess. my poor wife who now has 4 kids and 2 night managers at satchel’s are on vacation… which means that satchel doesn’t help as much as he would ( at home or at work…)

get the most done in the least amount of time syndrome. which is efficiency at its best in some ways, but when it’s overdone then it is counterproductive. counterproductivity is the point i got to tonight. in trying to be hyper productive i became counter productive. “worry less. accomplish more.” is what i take from that lesson.

effecient adj working productively with no waste of money or effort. ORIGIN Latin efficiere ‘accomplish’.

i’m a guy who likes to make things happen. i’m the robot who is orange and yellow.
why does that purple robot look so “shocked?”
and who made that t-shirt? and why is it on backwards?

i have been advised, because of the whackos in the world, to not talk about my kids here. and because i love them so much, i certainly do not want to take any chances with their safety. this takes away a big chunk for me to talk about when i write in the “home life” category. actually, if i leave out the kids, there isn’t a lot else to report. i could tell you greatly funny stories, and show you pictures that you wouldn’t believe, but i will save all that for my personal memoirs.
then there’s the recent problems with the neighbor and it happened just after i mentioned that i would be out of town for a couple days, so now i do not feel comfortable talking about when i leave my home. if my neighbor were to read this, she may want to take advantage of my being out of town, and she may also be jealous or mad that i get to take a week vacation a year, so i am not going to write about vacation either.
there is another personal project i have been working on for a few months, but because of the nature of the problem with the neighbor, i am not going to bring up that project either.
therefore, my blogs will certainly get much more boring. i will probably write less and have less to say. i will probably mostly talk about work, if i can do that without too much complaining. not that i do not like my work, but it can get very stressful and i get frustrated as i struggle with it often times.
i will try and write insirational visions as they come to me. so there might yet be a jewel among the mud. don’t give up on me.
why. look at these chickens, why are they circling up?

a nice weekend all around except for a couple things. 1. somehow steve’s pizza was forgotten on friday night. steve arrived and his pizza was not in the oven…. weird. 2. our musician was a no show tonight (saturday)… weird. other than that is was pretty smooth. pies were looking great and i even brought home a couple to get me through the next couple days.
i’m not going to get into much else tonight. i’m tired. i plan to take a week off of blogging so don’t be worried if you don;t see anything for a week. i’ve got some other projects i need to tend to. just taking a short break from public expression i suppose.