Hello there! Long time no see / chat / write.

I always think about writing and then I get this big mental hump that feels impossible to overcome so then I just don’t write anything. It is 11:12am on Tuesday and I will give myself 8 minutes to write whatever. I woke up this morning feeling incredibly sluggish and tired, but it’s worn off and I feel more energized now. Maybe my peanut butter sandwich and black coffee is helping, or maybe the sunlight. I usually work from my office which has no window and really no ventilation except for sometimes I smell a poo smell coming from whatever connection it has to the bathroom. Glamorous!

I am currently sitting in our newest project (!) a new bakery that we took over last week. It happened rather quickly – we had been toying with the idea of finding a more suitable location for our bagel empire (lol) and went to see a few places where we thought “well it could work here…if we just put in an elevator here…” — crazy things like that. Then late one night, Luis found this bakery being advertised, but not for the space but for the machinery inside, which was for sale. So he went deep-diving into the depths of the internet (which he is bery good at) and found an ad for this bakery about 20 minutes from home and 15 minutes from the shop. We went to see it and just a few days later, after some back-and-forth negotiating, it’s ours. It’s quite big, professionally built, a little dated, and has everything we need to start working tomorrow.

Since we are crazy and want to make space to put in a huge machine, we decided to knock down a wall and rebuild it – a process that we thought would be fairly quick and not too dirty, which I say now looking out at a thick layer of dust…..

Anyway, construction is just about finished. They will come back on Thursday to paint with washable paint and then we will be ready to dive in head first with cleaning materials and give the place a good scrub. We are hoping to be in here on July 1st to start working, but there are still logistics to figure out. How will we move the bagels? How will we do it somewhat cheaply? Not small questions, but not impossible. Right now the biggest hurdle is figuring out how to get here myself. I am thinking electric bike. I finally just fixed my access to the Madrid electric bike system which has been blocked for weeks so fingers crossed that it works. I have been relying on Uber, which gets expensive fast, but isn’t horrible at around 8€ per ride.

Ok, it is now 11:19 so I shall go. The morning involved replying to emails, uploading invoices to our Google drive, and updating our accounting, as well as working on a food handling course that everyone on our team is doing. It’s 7.5 hours, somewhat interesting, but dense and in Spanish so requires concentration. I have been doing it during 15-45 minute chunks and have officially reached 3 hours and 28 minutes of access time. Just 4 hours and 2 minutes to go….but who is counting? As soon as these work guys finish up for the day (they are cleaning up now), I will lock up and try biking to the embassy and if I don’t die along the way, I will work there for a few hours and then head to Mazál!!!

The end.