Well, the rental officially fell through. Basically, there were two landlords involved who pretty much didn’t communicate at all. In order for us to rent this space, we needed both the main floor (living space) and the basement (currently unused, and a disaster area – very much needs to be cleaned up – we would have used it for storage as well as Janene’s art studio). One landlord said heck yeah, and the other came back with not a chance (she thinks they’re gonna clean it up and rent it out – for $700 / month….)
Anyway, they’ve both been so flakey that I’m not sad that we’re not there, at least from that standpoint. Everything was handled remarkably unprofessionally, and it was just a joke. I do feel bad for the gal whose lease we were supposed to take over, as now she’s stuck – and she’s moving to Arizona end of April.
On the other hand, the joke’s on the landlords (who wouldn’t give us the space because – and I quote from her email – “we really need the money right now”). What they haven’t figured out yet is that in order to get that place rentable, it’s gonna cost them (according to the contractor who looked at it for them, and the Energy People (who have to run all new gas lines)) upwards of $10k – $15k. Yeah. For someone who has a money problem, that’s gonna hurt. Plus, turns out the downstairs is more like 650 square feet (and not 800) – they’ll never rent it for what they think they will.
Oh well, they’ve screwed themselves over.
It did lead to a fun day today for Janene and I, though. We drove around and looked for (and at) possible rental houses, all the way out to Snohomish. Ran into Rebecca (one of the administration at Country Village) who turns out to be a landlord at a place we were looking at, so that was fun. Cool place, too – unfortunately after talking about it we decided it really wouldn’t work for what we need.
While out we ate lunch in Snohomish, and Janene got Caramel Corn (a favorite of hers). It was a fun day. But I’m just wasted – not enough sleep last night.
Oh yeah – watched a couple of movies last night. The Forgotten and The Legend of Zorro.
The Forgotten was AWESOME. Very enjoyable. Not gonna say anything else so I don’t spoil it. Although I will give the warning that if you’ve lost a child, DON’T watch this movie – it’d be way too hard. Otherwise, it was GREAT.
The Legend of Zorro was fun, but definitely had its cheesy parts. Overall it was worth the couple of bucks to rent it and the couple of hours to watch it, even if it did mean we didn’t go to bed until like 2 am.
Finally took out our Christmas tree today. It was “pretty dead” – as in, falling apart. Kinda funny that we hadn’t been home long enough to take the thing down and outside. Sure opens up the living room, though. And the fire hazard is now out in a dumptser. The tree actually was in much worse shape this year than the end of last year, but I think that’s because it didn’t get watered once early on, which really cut down on it’s ability to … live.
Man, I’ve really been enjoying Simon & Garfunkel lately. I think I need to get a CD. Them and Green Day – I’ve really liked a lot of their new stuff. What a combination.
Got my new copies of After Effects Pro and Premier Pro this last week – haven’t installed them yet, but am pretty excited. I do wish my laptop was a little beefier, but I’m not sure how that would be accomplished given how much is packed in here now (and how heavy the sucker is…). Oh, I also spent some time looking at Windows Vista on Microsoft’s site. Looks interesting, and will probably BE interesting to see how well they can deliver on their concepts. It’s funny to me (having used a Mac extensively) to watch the Windows environment continually headed the direction of more simplicity and integration. Speaking of, I WOULD love a Mac – just no cash for that right now.
Have you checked out The Weed Patch’s website yet? It’s pretty basic at this point, but is coming along. I’ll have the ecommerce stuff release here very shortly, at least in a “temporary” format while I get the full ecom site released somewhere down the road. But getting it going now will help seed the search engines, and get people to realize they can shop online, which will hopefully boost our sales. I’m hoping to really ramp up the online sales here over the next several months.
In other projects (outside of the store) I’m working on the newest version of NWChurches.com. I tried to see if any of the original team was interested, but haven’t heard back from any of them (which is really kinda strange – makes me wonder if they even got that email…) so I guess I’m on my own for now. Oh well. For those of you who don’t know, NWChurches.com is an online, searchable database of all the Christian churches in the Northwest. I also own findachristianchurch.com, and am still holding on to the dream of getting that up for the entire USA. Guess we’ll see. There’s a few things I just don’t know how to do on the coding side, so when I reach that point I’ll be stuck for a while, I’m sure.
Not like I don’t have enough other things going on.
Janene’s been getting art supplies in left and right, and is working on getting her new online venture up and running. She’s going to be selling both her art as well as hard to find art supplies on her website. More power to her, I think she’s gonna be doing VERY well in short order. But only time will tell.
Oh, and before I forget, Happy Birthday Grahame McMaster! We all hope you and Bob had a GREAT day today. 🙂
And with that, it’s time to move on with my evening. Which, I hope, means leftover pizza and sleep – holy crap I’m tired.