I sitting in the morning at a diner on the corner

On my last day at the Z, I casually mentioned that I would be interested in purchasing the Tea Bazaar. I knew that Matteous was interested in selling and I loved the space and wanted to keep the original concept of the restaurant, just expand upon it. I meet with owner of the building on Monday. My parents came down to look at the space on Wednesday and tell me that maybe, just maybe, I wasn't getting ready to make the biggest mistake of my life. I made my offer on Friday and miraculously it was accepted.

And that's how I bought a restaurant. With typical Mary Beth aplomb and complete disregard for potential ramifications I became an entrepreneur. I mean, I've lived pretty spontaneously for a good 26 years and it's worked thus far so why not keep a good thing going.

I had essentially no start up capital, because, well, having bought a lot of shoes in place of having a savings account, I had no money. I took my severance package bought a lot of cheese and a few veggies and in less than a month I had a vacation and opened shop.

It has been relatively smooth sailing-- aside from the fact that my parents will not eat here because they don't like my "hippie food" with weird ingredients like garlic and basil and they made me buy Lipton tea bags to make them sweet tea because they could not find one that they liked out of the 48 varieties that I have on hand. My mother cannot imagine how anyone can eat "hughmoose" and my father cannot stand the smell of Earl Grey much less drink it.

Also, they have been working on my patio for the entire month of August. It couldn't have been done in June when the whole place was closed for a month. In addition to that, my landlord hired every derelict in the downtown area to perform said construction work, so the quality is not quite the best. In fact, a lot of it sucks and they had to redo it again.

Honestly though, if those are the only, for lack of a better phrase, stepping stones that I have to deal with, then I'm not doing too bad. In fact, it's almost been too easy. I keep waiting to start hating it or have something go really wrong and so far that hasn't happened. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.