Space Hunting

We have an appointment to look at a space on Thursday morning. Currently in the space a carpet store/warehouse. They've got some extra space they're not using and they are willing to modify their building to give us a discreet space.

I'm not expecting any great shakes, but I could be pleasantly surprised. The location is not terrible. It's near the power shopping corridor of town and it's close to bus lines that run longer than the ones that service our current location. It still nowhere near the center of town, which makes me a bit leery. It has a big lot full of free parking, but it does need to be resurfaced. Numbers haven't been brought up since whatever modifications we request will affect what they charge us in rent.

Still, it has possibilities, and the chance to have an approximately 4000sf space laid out pretty much to our specifications makes this something we at least have to look at and consider.

As it stands, nothing is definite, but it's all possibilities...

peace... GopherDave

Day 11 of 362

Still the same shirts... still the same sweaters... I cannot wait for various shipments to get here...

UPDATE: New Shirts (along non-Jeans pants) have arrived. Unfortunately, from a boredom standpoint, the shirts are all white. Oh well, that just means less times doing laundry for me. YAY!

Beyond that, I took my lovely wife out to breakfast and reconnected with her in a social aspect. It was nice. Afterward, I went to the store, moved tables, and placed orders. With Causal MtG happening at the store tonight, it's looking like a pretty boring day.

peace... GopherDave

Day 10 of 362

Okay... Day 10 of 362.

First off... YAY! I've reached double-digits in the streak! AWWW! I've got 90 more days to make the three-digit milestone of 100!

However, that does mean I can break out more of my extensive (and ever-growing) necktie collection to show off. Okay, that last bit only really excites me. =P

So, 10 of 362. That means that I have achieved 2.76243% of my goal. It's a small percentage, yes, but it'll grow.

Today at the store we have our next Warhammer 40,000 league starting up. It's an escalation league starting at 750 points and increasing by 250 points every two weeks for the next eight weeks. We're also using a rules variant called "the Rules of Engagement". Looking over the document, it seems harmless enough, but deeper thought indicates that it favors the horde armies like Orks, Imperial Guard, and even Tyranids to a lesser extent. *SHRUG* We'll see how it goes. If nothing else, hopefully our players will have a good time with it.

Tonight is a night where I get off from the store early as I will be relieved by my lovely wife. I'll probably just come home and zone out with the kids. If I am feeling productive, I'll work on my HERO6E/Champions game for Wednesday night and actually have something prepared (GASP! SHOCK! HORROR!).

Ehhh... who knows... the day is young and I still have stuff to do.

Until later... GopherDave

[Monday Music] -- STAN RIDGWAY/Partyball

Partyball is the third solo album by one Standard Ridgway. For those who have no idea who this man is, go find most any 80's  compilation and listen to the song Mexican Radio by Wall of Voodoo. Mr. Ridgway was the lead singer of Wall of Voodoo from its inception until the finish of the tour for Call of the West (the album that spawned Mexican Radio). Then he took his leave of the group to do his own thing.

I also own the first two solo albums from Stan (The Big Heat and Mosquitoes). Both of them are very good, but for some reason I keep coming back to this one. The Big Heat has some very strong songs, but the instrumentation sounds a bit robotic. Mosquitoes compensated too much, taking the singer/songwriter vibe a bit further than I like. Partyball hits a happy medium where Stan just lets his stories flow, and that's what these songs are. Stories... Stories sung in an earnest, nasal voice. It's the earnestness that sells the songs, even when they veer into the oddly surreal.

From the worker's lament/daydream of I Wanna Be A Boss to the tale of rah-rah spirit turned ironically erroneous in The Roadblock, Stan connects with working-class common-sensibilities like no one else I've ever heard (and before anyone brings up Bruce Springsteen, please keep in mind that I consider the Boss a hack).

There are tales of the absurd here as well, most notably Uba's House of Fashion, where the protagonists of the song are those looking to shed their beaten, damaged skins, and take on a new form where life can't recognize them anymore to continue beating them down.

Perhaps a nice condensation of how Stan paints his songs, here are some of the lyrics for The Overlords...

Well I been breakin' rocks up on Coolie #3
I know it's been forever, thought you'd never hear from me
The weather up here is rotten
Rainin' granite all the time
And both moons are glowin' purple
And there is no sun to shine

I been diggin' down in a tunnel
That goes twenty miles down
And I know my life is cheap
When I hear that rumblin' sound

Oh the overlords, got me workin' overtime
Oh the overlords, well they never make it rhyme

And there is something in the air
That is burning in my throat
A big, black cloud is passin'
Droppin' acid on my coat
the overlords got me workin' overtime

It's been ten years and a day
After world war nine
They pushed us to make meaning
And from their meaning was our crime...

From those few stanzas, you know that the main character of the song is a slave labor grunt in some oppressive, dystopian future. His life sucks, and he knows it. How does it end? Well... go track down the song, if not the album.

Partyball is not ground-breaking, but it is solid and challenging. There are understated grooves to many of the songs which initially masks the bleakness and irony of the lyrics, and it makes for an interesting dichotomy.

GopherDave Grade: 7.5/10

Track Listing

1.1 (Watch Your Step) - Instrumental Segue
1.2 Jack Talked (Like A Man On Fire)
2.0 I Wanna Be A Boss
3.1 (Mouthful of Sand) - Instrumental Segue
3.2 The Roadblock
4.0 Snaketrain
5.0 Right Through You
6.0 The Gumbo Man
7.0 Harry Truman
8.1 (Venus In Hell) - Instrumental Segue
8.2 Overlords
9.1 (O.K.?) - Instrumental Segue
9.2 Uba's House of Fashion
10.1 (Bad News At the Dynamite Ranch) - Instrumental Segue
10.2 Beyond Tomorrow

Lyrics Copyright (C) 1991 by Standard Ridgway. Published by Illegal Songs/Mondo Spartacus BMI. Used without permission, but with no affront meant to Mr. Ridgway or Illegal Songs/Mondo Spartacus BMI.

Gotta Love Regulars...

Earlier tonight, I had a set of regular customers give me a set of cuff links as a gift. That gesture makes me think I'm onto to something with this whole "well-dressed game store owner"-thing. It definitely lets me know that someone appreciates it.

Now if I only had a shirt with French cuffs... =)

peace... GopherDave

Day 9 of 362

Like the tie? Goodwill... $1.19, plus tax. Sometimes thrifting is good...

Sundays at the game store tend to be slower than most days, and that's the time I catch up on back work stuff, mostly rough financials to give me an idea of how much we can order for the week. Fun stuff, playing with money. It makes me feel wealthier than I actually am. =)

One thing I learned from the original owner of the store was to have multiple bank accounts for the store. One handles your day-to-day regular expenses, while the other(s) act more like savings accounts. You can write checks on them if you HAVE to, but it's better if you can leave it alone. Our extra account is where we store our sales tax money. Each day, I look at what we've collected for tax and shunt 2.25 times that amount of money into the "tax account". Why so much? Simple... Emergency/Special Project money.

If something happens, say, an intoxicated, unlicensed driver totalling your wife's parked car for example, it's good to have a spare $1200 laying around to help replace that car. Sometimes, I'll look around and realize that we are out of "store dice" (dice with the store logo on them). It takes about $350 to get a new batch in. If we have it in the main account, cool. If we don't, then we have the backup account to eat that semi-unexpected expense.

Another thing I learned from the original owner was about credit accounts from distributors. Simply put, DON'T HAVE ONE! If you buy stuff from a distributor on terms and things go south on you (a run of bad sales months, a medical emergency, etc.), that distributor can claim product off of your shelves that you have ordered from them to repay your credit debt. We buy stuff with a bank card tied to our main bank account. Once we buy product, it's ours. If we have a run of bad sales, we'll have enough debt issues without our distributors being among them. We may pay a touch more for product as a result, but the peace of mind from that end is well worth it.

Until later...

-- GopherDave

Kick Out the Jams

Looking over to my right from the computer, I am confronted by my "wall of sound". Basically, the combined CD collection of my wife and myself. At 1200+ titles, it's fairly large. The bulk of it is "mine", but we both get a lot of pleasure out of it.

Outside of family and friends, table-top gaming (Role-Playing games, Miniatures, Board Games, and Magic: the Gathering) and music occupy the bulk of my time. I've gaming for 35 years, and collecting music for a few more. They are both core parts of me. For gaming, the bulk of my writings in this blog will probably deal with the store and the gaming that happens there. Music-wise, I am debating with perhaps adding another twist to the blog and doing a sort of weekly "review" entry where I put down my thoughts on a particular album that we own. If nothing else, it'll get me away from writing about my daily necktie fetish. If the music review thing is something that y'all would like to see, feel free to make a comment to that effect.

For store events this Sunday (today), we have a Pathfinder Society game happening and a D&D4E campaign going on in the afternoon, then board gaming slated for the evening. I am not involved with either of the RPG campaigns, so I'll try to get some work done around the store, including rough financials for the week to figure out where we stand in regard to what we can afford order-wise. There is a HUGE release near the end of the month (MtG: Mirrodin Besieged), so I've got to make certain we have money socked away for that. As for the board games? Normally, I bow out of such, but I am trying to be a better store owner and the more games I play, the more knowledge I will have to pass onto customers so they can make informed purchasing decisions. Thus, I am going to try to get a few games in each week, and stop being a Facebook/Blogger-addicted hippie. It could be worse, though... I could play World of Warcraft (which I don't, and I refuse to).

On top of all that, I need to begin organizing the logistics for Winter War, the local gaming convention we attend. Making all the parts fit around that time is usually difficult, but this year it's made doubly so with the fact that the pre-release event for the next Magic: the Gathering set is on one of the days that the convention is happening. On that day, the wife, the boy, and some selected friends will be running the booth at the convention whilst I go open the store for this one event. Once that event is done, I'm shutting the store down and heading back to the convention. I will be VERY tired.

That's it for now... I've got laundry to do...

peace... GopherDave