working the 9-5

This has been a weird, but nice, start to the week. As some of you might know, we've moved into our new facility in Charlestown, which happens to be about a mile from where we live. Because our electrician (Scott Boudreau, don't know if you ever read these, but here's a plug for you: Scott Boudreau Electric, best electrician in town*) is unplugging our Leominster facility, and hooking us up in Charlestown, we've hit a short production halt.

In lieu of the normal hike out to Leomnister, we've been making the 2 minute commute to our new place, moving stuff around, setting up tools/equipment, and doing a lot of computer work like trying to prep for our new equipment when the money starts growing on trees, which, with modern advancements in technology, should be any day now (I hope we get a really big money tree because we just got quoted $60,000 for the INSTALLATION of our glycol chiller, which is basically a refrigeration unit for our tanks. The INSTALLATION!!)

Yesterday our remaining cans shipped over here, which was a pretty hairy scene. Our cans come in units of 8,160 cans/pallet, stacked about 9 feet high. Each pallet of cans probably weighs less than 100 lbs, so you basically have this giant tower that's very prone to wobbling because it has no weight. So we had about 16 pallets of cans to unload off a truck, and we were borrowing our neighbor's forklift, which was finicky at best (foot down on petal, engine rumbles, no movement, foot down a centimeter more, full speed ahead). To add to the difficulty, if the pallets of cans are 9' tall, the box of a truck is 9'2". So we basically had an hour of heart attacks trying not to dump 150,000 cans all over the loading dock. All in all, we finished the job, picked up a few gray hairs, and maybe wrecked a hundred cans...not too shabby.

Tomorrow night (Thursday), we'll be at the Beacon Hill Pub from 6-8 doing some sampling and whatnot, so if you're in the area, drop by. On Friday at 5 we'll be at Gordon's on Main st in Waltham, and on Saturday at 1 we'll be at Idylwilde Farms in Acton.

Good talk, see you out there.


*Based on a sampling of 1 electrician, but in fairness, he's very good