Propane Progress

Yesterday’s adventures started out with headaches because of the propane. Irving still hadn’t called back to let me know what was happening with the moving of the propane tanks, so I decided to start investigating elsewhere. I called Kevin Munroe, the manager of the Superior Propane outlet in Moncton, and explained the situation. Although he knew that I already had an account with Irving, and wasn’t necessarily going to switch suppliers if I could things settled with Irving, he was extremely helpful and answered a lot of questions that I had (which was more than Irving had been able to do up to that point). He told me that he could probably get someone down to help me within a day, if I decided that I definitely needed their assistance, which was good news.

After talking to Kevin, I called Irving back and told them that I had called three times without any satisfactory answers about when the tanks could be moved. After explaining quite clearly that I was going to get Superior to do the work if Irving couldn’t resolve things quickly, I finally was told that Irving would send a contractor down on Friday to take care of the problem. I’m still not holding my breath that this will go smoothly, but at least it sounds like things are finally in motion. However, knowing what I know now, if I had to start over, there’s no question that I’d set up an account with Superior.

Jeff spent most of the day packing items up at the old restaurant, and removing the cabling for the old security system, POS terminals, ethernet lines, and that sort of stuff. He filled half a dozen milk crates with cables and connectors and equipment. It’s going to be a challenge to reinstall all of that stuff in the new restaurant. While he was doing that, Alison did a lot of painting and touchups. I spent most of the afternoon running errands and “facilitating” activities, and got the office set up so the computer and printer can be used again.




Finally, Amanda and Tiffany moved all the patio furniture from the old restaurant to my house. I now have the best equipped patio on my street. In fact, I could probably have a “patio party” that fills my front lawn. Not having a patio at the restaurant next summer is going to be a major problem. Sackville is a very tough market in the summer, when the students at the University have gone home for a few months. With the US dollar being punished, our tourist traffic is probably going to be decimated next summer. Add the loss of the patio to that, and I am very concerned about our ability to function effectively in June, July, and August. Without question, I am going to have to seriously scale back operations this summer, or possibly go back to being a seasonal operation. The only possible thing I can think of that might keep us open for regular hours in the summer would be if the town would permit us to set up a sidewalk patio like the Bridge Street Cafe has, but I don’t know how receptive they’d be to that idea.