To The Man Who Saved Thanksgiving...

Well, it turns out that Mel Zelenak at Maly Commercial Realty is the man who saved Thanksgiving.  After lamenting our permit woes and our likely inability to open our retail location by November 20th, Mel came to the rescue.  He put us in touch with Danielle Clark at the Elks Lodge in Columbia (http://cboevents.com/).  Danielle did some fast checking and low and behold, the Elks want to help us (10 bonus points if you've ever gotten to make a statement like that).  They are renting us their super-fine, 100% commercially approved kitchen for the week leading up to Thanksgiving and we will be baking like the crazy women that we are.  Boom.  Your holiday just improved.  Thank you, Columbia Benevolence Organization.  And Mel, obviously. So...logistics.  We are going to bake pies at the Elks Lodge...probably 200 or so.  Pickup will be on Wednesday - the day before Thanksgiving - at the Inside Columbia headquarters.  Ordering will be done online...hopefully in the next few days.  We are working on that part with the goal of making the ordering as easy and as uncomplicated as possible.  We just finished talking with Danielle about an hour ago, so we have a lot of details to work out about exactly how this will look, but we wanted you all to be the first to know that Thanksgiving pies will be an option this year!  Does the Elks Lodge count as PJP V 1.5?

In other news, I wasn't aware, but apparently you have to have a degree from the Wharton School of Business to navigate the online registration system for tax identification numbers.  First of all, I tried to get our federal tax ID number last night online at 11 pm and the government was closed.  Closed!  How is that even possible...I thought we were past all that, right?  They close at 10 pm EST.  Are there cubicles of people making 10 digit identification numbers?  I demand a 20/20 investigation because there definitely seems to be room for efficiency improvements in this area.  I was on my soapbox for about 30 minutes last night on the insanity of it all, but I really should have shut up because navigating the state tax identification number system...OH MY WORD.  I've been sent to places on the Internet that I didn't even know existed and I never want to go back.

I won't go into the hairy details, but I'm pretty certain you could run and win a campaign on the entire issue of surety bonds.

My head hurts.