sorry for what? oh, just not posting much. like i have alluded to before, i have too many irons on the fire. i keep projects going on so many burners and then the ovens are full too. i’ve started writing more in my personal journal and frankly i can cover more ground when i am not writing in the public sphere. which honestly is why i was thinking about stopping the blog… i mean, i like to write, but in this forum i have to keep things pretty mild. there are lots of things i just don’t want to talk about, things that are too sensitive, too secret, too personal, or too much… so i water water water it down to just talking about work. and then i narrow it down again to talking about work in general terms. anyway, it’s hard to explain, but it just feels a little stifling. i will try to post friday or saturday evenings, or possibly some other time if there is something pressing i need to get off my chest, but this is a busy time of year coming up, and i start my day at 6am, and my life is a full on roller-coaster ride until about 10pm. if you ever had a restaurant and a 2 year old and 5 year old then you might know what i’m saying.
don’t give up on me yet, but don;t expect too much either. maybe i’ll come through to the other side….

my new paintings will be up in december, along with some works by lenny kesl.

i’ve got a new schedule where i work a few lunch shifts. this is good news for me, especially if i can spend more time with the family at night.
training a few new people these days… seems that we’re growing a new skin of folks, interesting how even a stable restaurant sees so many people come and go. people are searching for their place in the world, and some people drift our way for a while. so many things carry them off… a new job, a new city, a different plan.

part of me is so tired that i just want to move the family to hawaii for 6 months and hope that they hold it all together while i’m gone. the other part of me keeps chugging along, thinking i’m just about ready to retire, while working harder than i’ve ever worked in my life every minute of every day.

i will say this: it’s pretty much out of my control in a lot of ways, i mean, the restaurant has more going on than i can keep up with and some things just fall through the cracks… BUT… i do spend probably too much time, every day, working on the beast. there’s a new prep guy, there’s new day kitchen people, there’s new pizza makers, there’s new servers and phone answerers… there’s even new actual phones. i spent my entire day off, 8am to 5 pm, finding, buying, and installing a new bank of phones. i went to best buy, office max, lowe’s, sam’s, wal-mart, home depot, circuit city, and finally office depot, trying to find a phone system that would work for my restaurant. yes, you may wish to read that last sentence again slower.
i gotta tell you, it gets to me. if i never stepped in best buy or office max or office depot again, i would be the luckiest man on the planet. and as much as i want to never go there, my business takes me there. one day i may find the perfect “personal assistant” and my life will get instantly longer, (while they would waste their life driving from corporate nightmare to corporate nightmare)

a guy was asking me today about why in the world we close on mondays. i wish he could walk in my shoes for 2 weeks. that man would probably end up just opening fridays.

satch says: it ain’t easy bein’ cheesy.

there is something i love about routine. i don’t have a very strict routine but i envy routine sometimes… like the fact that some guy named josh comes in for pizza every single friday night. i love that.
we have a lot of regulars who come in regularly. some even on a strict routine. there’s the lady from the sherrif’s department and her husband who come in every tuesday. she drives a mustang. i swear, i’m an idiot for not knowing her name. she is probably THE most regualr customer we have… when i go up there, it doesn’t matter what time or day it is, i always see the same faces. it’s as if the same 500 people are eating at my restaurant every week, and then there’s the other thousand or so that rotate. i love them all for loving the pie, i love them all for waiting for a table and food, but it’s those every week regulars that i love most of all, (besides my wife, kids, mother, family, and employees, of course.)
somehow we’ve managed to create a solid thriving local scene in a short time.
so, maybe if i set up a routine, i could blog 3 words or 3 pages once a week, on saturday nights, and that would be a light enough commitment that i could continue the blog into 08. my personality makes me think i need to blog all the time to keep it interesting, or have great new photos all the time to keep it hot… but then comes sustainability and reminds me that it’s the turtle, not the rabbit, who wins the race.
like cooking pizzas, it’s all about pace.

well, since i left my camera in my greenhouse and then sprayed it with water it stopped working. so i took the work camera home and now there is no camera at work. this is sad because i would have gotten a picture of thanksgiving dinner tonight. today is josh’s birthday and so we all pitched in and made a dish. there was ham and turkey and dressing (thanks tammy) and sweet potato casserole and green bean caserole, and mashed potatoes and soup, gravy, some crazy fried cauliflower thing div made, mac and cheese, 2 pies… it was amazing. and there were STILL employees getting pizza to eat for dinner…
it’s been a busy week. i’m beat.
later

well, i had this idea that danny could wear an orange vest and help people learn to play bocce and work the back area. i drew cool stuff on the vest, like the LSE logo and stuff, and i imagined it would get all faded and broken in and danny would be a local celebrity. but my wife told me that no one would want to wear that bright orange vest. and sure enough, he tried to like it, but ended up hating it. he even went to the trouble to send me this photo.

the court is up and running. currently it is free to play. we’re trying to get folks interested. but eventually we will charge $5 per game, to help recoup the cost of the landscaping out there, and pay for the extra employee. bocce is a simple and easy game to learn. it’s worth checking out.

so, good ol’ jim was always in the kitchen tonight, running food. jim, and some others were working doubles. i hate it when they do that, but they like to make a lot of money in a day. i know they are worn out though. satchel’s is usually busiest on saturdays so it’s a long day to see it through lunch and dinner. i said something about jim writing about work on his myspace and he mentioned that he reads the blog and likes it. then i got home to an email from someone who was asking that i keep it going… so these things make me want to figure out a way to continue it past january… i don’t know… i am so busy and sometimes it’s hard to keep up with all my projects…

saturday night. it went good in the kitchen. we heard a rumor that there was a 2 hour wait and soon after we slowed to a trickle of tickets. we had 3 tickets up so i went to investigate and found about 10 open tables. seems that the wait had gotten so long that lots of people just left. so we are paging folks and no one is coming to claim the table. our phone paging system is a recording, so we don’t know if they have left or not. we just know we have 10 empty tables… so i tell div, just keep paging people, page about a million people and let’s fill up these empty seats… i checked back in the kitchen and still nothing happening there. i started paging everyone on the list and finally folks started showing up to claim tables. folks who were told an hour and 15 minutes were getting tables in 20 or 30 minutes. then things started finally moving again, but for 30 minutes or so we were frozen up.

it was a big relief to have a good night after last week. i was certainly glad there was no game and we could just have a normal saturday night where we know what to expect. velveeta underground played LSE and they are always fun.

“everybody take a couple days off,” that’s what i like to say on saturday nights. we’re closed sundays and mondays so the beauty of that is that people get a weekend. of course, some people work other jobs and don;t get 2 days off, but that’s their fault, not mine. mostly i think if you work at satchel’s and you want to get shifts, you should be able to make a living in gainesville off of this one job.

did i tell you what a great crew we have these days? it’s like a big happy family. i love these people i work with. they are funny and witty and smart and interesting. i’d tell you all about it but i want to write a new menu back and take a shower and relax….

friday night. smooth like milk chocolate in 90 degree weather. like that melting it does when you hold the chocolate in your mouth for a while. sweet like that, and easy like sunday morning. i think we may have had the best crew ever assembled tonight… at every station and each person working in unison like a machine. the pizza machine… my close second place name for the satchel’s. i wanted to make a machine looking sign, with car parts and welded steel. with old motors and transmissions and fan belts and fan blades turning slowly in a breeze. the front of house was happy, the kitchen was at ease. the customers seemed to be enjoying themselves… all around nice, maybe because if the cool weather. we christened the bocce ball court tonight, well, thursday night actually with ricardo, but tonight danny said at one point there were 21 people in the back bocce court area… i can’t ask for more than that.
the pizzas were looking good except for a couple thin spots. i made one wrong pie, wrong toppings, wrong size, as soon as i put it in i had no idea what it was. but it turned out it was a late night snack for employees.
danny got folks to play bocce and the only sad thing that i saw happen today was that danny decided he did not like the bright orange vest after all. i had high hopes of the bocce court employee wearing an orange vest to look official and be easily noticed. but although he wore it, and tried to like it… it turned out it was too darn bright and obnoxious and two people made fun of him and so the vest saw it’s first and last night on the court.
what can i do so folks know he is the employee, the go-to guy? the official bocce ref? hmmmmm.

i have good days and bad days like anyone else, but mine tend to be more extreme sometimes probably because i am a freak. today was one of the extremely good days, maybe because the weather was so gorgeous. maybe because i enjoy my job so much, maybe because i saw some dreams become reality in my personal projects…

the slice of meatball, red onion, zucchini, pepperoni pizza i ate for dinner rocked my world to the core. how can a meal be so incredibly good? is it because i only had half a steak and cheese calzone this week and hadn’t eaten a slice? is it the sauce or the crust or the toppings? i don’t know. but i remember when i used to tell my wife or my sister or my mom every week.. “we had the busiest day ever today at satchel’s…” and those days are not so frequent anymore. our “busiest day” is prettty much reserved for spring graduation nowadays. but lately it seems like every week i am discovering “the best slice i ever ate.” now that is an incredible thing… to be so in love with pizza and then eat the best slice you ever had every week. seems like we’re doing something right. praise the lord.

i’ve talked about the troubles at work recently and how we were defeated just like the gators. i forgot to mention that the ATM has been giving us trouble too, causing my blood pressure to skyrocket. just the other day i got an email, “why don’t you take credit cards?” and i’m sure the guy who wrote it was one of the folks waiting around for the ATM to get fixed… i wrote him a book back, detailing the issues with credit card companies and ATM’s. i’ve actually written a new menu back about the dilemna which will come out soon. suffice it to say that the owner of the ATM in question, is trying desperately to solve the problems. we are trying to stay cash only, and make sure we have backup plans for when or if the ATM should go down. stay tuned for info about it. we should have some real solutions here before long.
did i mention the bocce ball court is ready to go? customers just don;t know about it yet so it sits idle every night. if you really want to have a fun date, come on down to LSE and ask to play bocce. it hasn;t caught on yet so you can have a few drinks and play bocce still and not fight any crowds. don’t sweat it if you don;t know how to play, it take 3 minutes to learn and we have instructions and everything. 2 people can play, but it’s better if you have 4, 2 teams of 2 each.
only a couple months left before i give up this blog, well, maybe i’ll extend it a bit into 08. we’ll see. i’ve got this plan i’ll explain later.
gotta go.

i feel about as broke down as this supra. can you believe someone would try and sell this piece of junk? i was laughing so hard i had to double back and photograph it. this could be my favorite photo of all time. but i must say, i feel as broke down as this old car. last saturday i told you the story of our troubles at work, and then the gators lost too. if i was the urban meyer of my team, i felt defeat last week just like he did. well tonight i felt defeat again, an even harder blow than last week, just as tonight the gators got beat for the second week in a row.
we were going along as usual until about 7:30. then the orders kept coming in. the to-go orders were stacking up even though jake was giving over an hour times. and we all thought the in house orders would start to dwindle as the game got closer. they didn’t. they came is as fast and furious as always. so now we’ve got 20 or so to-go orders, and just as many in house orders, and two ovens. the ovens are full of new pizzas, and we’re waiting with pies to go in. when i started seeing in house orders that had been up for 30 minutes and we still didn’t have them in the oven, i knew it was a bad scene. especially since there were tickets lined up and the oven was full and the pies were all still uncooked. it wasn’t long before we were making pies for people in house that had been waiting 40 minutes, and we were just making the pies. i cannot remember the last time that happened. i thought that kind of thing couldn’t happen to us anymore. i thought we were better than that. and it’s hard to say exactily what went wrong. obviously, to go orders is what was the problem. we should have been giving 2 hour times when we were giving one hour times… but i don’t know if that would have solved our problems… i’ve never seen it so bad. folks in house waited up to an hour and 15 minutes for their food after ordering it. to go orders were all runnning 15 minutes late. the pies were not cooked as perfectly as i would have liked. some were undercooked but had to go. some were too dark but it was too late to correct those. i had the oven on full blast and that cooked things differently than usual, but i had no choice. we had more orders on the board than i’ve ever seen. tickets would each have 3 and 4 pizzas on them. there would be 4 calzones on one ticket, or 3 pizzas on several tickets. tickets like these take up half an oven. and that is only one of 30 or more tickets to be made… we crashed, we burned, we lost.
of course, the gators didn’t get quite as humiliated. they made a great show and only lost in the last minutes again. they showed what a top caliber team they are but in the end it is another loss, no matter how good they showed. and tonight i’m sure we lost customers. the food took too long. every other table was asking how long for their food. people picking up to go food were crowding the hallway waiting, after calling in over an hour previous. and in the kitchen, we did all we could. we gave it everything we had, but we just didn’t have what it took to knock it out. it knocked me out tonight. i have a whole weekend now to think about what went wrong and how we can do better next time. the key has to be in those to go times. folks will just have to learn to call in two hours before a game if they want a pie from us.
usually it’s the night before a home game that slaughters us, and even then, we usually handle it with only a few pies going out at 45 minutes or maybe a couple at 50 minutes. tonight we must have sent out 10 or more pies at over an hour. embarrassing. humiliating. defeat.
so pizza fans that suffered tonight, please forgive us. it wasn’t for lack of effort, but lack of experience. i would think that after 4 1/2 years doing this, not much could surprise us, but we still lose a game now and then. i am about as wiped out as a man can be. exhausted. overwhelmed. defeated. hopefully, my personal projects don’t kill me over the weekend and tuesday i can start all over.
remember, you can be the best and still get beat.

spinnaker took stage with plenty of anticipation and energy. they jangled some hearts like the soft rain that was falling.

anders parker was on hand to show the sound of the seasoned musician. he started out mellow but by the end was rocking like you didn’t know one person could…

the deep and holy sea played lights out, in whispers and pretty notes, orchestra and gritty and brightly painted wood. i rocked in a chair i found by the side of the road, to the last song with my eyes shut, having a pretty good time for a stressed out businessman.

tonight, wedensday, october 3rd, at lightnin’ salvage, music…. from 6 -9 is new song night. come see various local musicians try out a few songs on stage. then at 10 our first fall late night show starts. the cost is $6 to see 3 bands. spinnaker, anders parker, and the deep and holy sea. the weather has cooled off. you know you could use some stress relief, so come out for a mellow night of music and good times.