I've been messing with the photos on the front page of the site: they now have text captions built into them, and the top left one will always be a picture from an older gallery of the next upcoming event, if we have any. I'm still not totally happy with how those overlays look, but I guess it's ok.

Oh, photos, we've got photos. Just in, Gram Rabbit at Pop Roxx. I love that band -- you should go buy both of their albums immediately. They put on a fantastic show, and not just because of the gogo dancers in full-on furvert suits.

Also up, Ayria + Life Cried + The Panic Lift. Ayria's not bad. They've played here a few times before, and, eh, I've seen it. The first two bands were that same old cookie monster crap again. Scream into your one vocal effect, bent over at the waist like you're really, really constipated. Repeat until done. Don't bother to turn off your one vocal effect when doing between-song banter: "Thang-a-lang-a-lang-a-lank yooga-looga-loo!" At least they didn't dress like Cobra Commander this time.

(Would it have been better if they had been dressed as bunnies instead? Well, obviously, but that still would have been insufficient.)

So, yeah, still no kitchen. This may sound familiar to those of you who were following along when we went through the permit dance four years ago. Whenever you build anything, you need a bunch of inspections, and the last one is Building, who is (also) a meta-inspection, who looks at the signatures on your job card that say that the earlier inspections were passed.

Our other inspections are finished, and the building inspector comes out, and says, "Where's your fire inspection?" Our contractor says, "Where's the checkbox that says we need a fire inspection?" The inspector says "Oh, you always need a fire inspection." (And I say, "Why didn't our contractor know that?", but that's neither here nor there.)

Then we schedule a fire inspection. Three weeks go by. The fire inspector doesn't like our sprinkler heads (we need the kind that poke out instead of the flush-mount for some reason.) That means: we need to get someone out here to change them. Three weeks. Then we need to have Fire come back. Three weeks. Then we need to have building come back. Three weeks.

And this is how we've been perpetually two months from completion for almost a year.

You can't even pipeline these visits and schedule the inspector for the day after the work is done, because half the time contractors just fail to show up, meaning now you're late and have pissed off the inspector.

Its kind of insane how much this room has cost already, given that it's basically just a hallway with three sinks and a table.

Part of the screwage here is that, for commercial space, you're required to use licensed contractors. In your home, you can just get some Time-Life books and go crazy, and as long as you do the work right, you'll pass the inspections. But you aren't allowed to DIY in a business. It's a conspiracy of some sort, specifically designed to make my life suck.

And even if you were feeling like a scofflaw, it's not like a kitchen could just "appear" one day without that being noticed...

Anyway, assuming our kitchen ever opens, what do you think we should serve? What would you want to eat here? Think in both categories "dinner" and "snack".

We don't have a grill, or gas, or a hood, which means we are limited to things you can make without open flame or a vat of grease: microwave, hot-plate, and toaster oven, basically. (And a majority of the food needs to be prepared on-site, for permit reasons.)

Drunk people, of course, like the grease. But putting in the kind of exhaust hood we'd need for that would have been an additional $20,000! Shoot me.

It's been incredibly frustrating around here lately; I walk around and see thing I want to fix, or improve, or just change for the sake of variety, and it all costs money that we don't have.