Sitzfleisch ...

Sitzfleisch literally translates to sitting flesh, but it is a German expression for having patience. We sat a lot today, a little over six hours, straight! That's when we were up, more precisely, our item was up.

See, part of opening a restaurant is that you need a lot of things, some of which we buy at auction. So today we went to an auction. It started at 2pm. We actually went for an eight foot bench, which is almost too short, but for the right price we make anything work.

Well, it turned out that the bench wasn't so great, and someone already had left an absentee bid, but we did see a few other things that looked interesting, amongst them, a table with four chairs.

At roughly 1000 items up for auction it took until after 8pm until the table and chairs came up. By that time we were determined to make it ours. The auctioneer started at $50, but I signaled to E! to wait. Nobody bid, and after a little while the auctioneer dropped the starting price to $25. E!'s arm went up. Going once, going twice, gone ...

You could argue that spending six or seven hours waiting to get one item sounds like a lot of time, but time is something we have, and money is something we want to preserve until we open the restaurant. We have seen places spend too much money on trying to open up, and then don't have enough money left to run the restaurant.

Dirk