Coming out of the Dark Ages - The Website Edition

Harros!

This is just a quick little post to let you guys take a sneak peek at the initial phase of our website redesign:

We're still fiddling around with the background and the colors, but I think we're in the home stretch...FINALLY (you can smack the image with your mouse to see a larger version of the design)!

For those who may be curious, pop on over to http://www.99designs.com/ to take a look at how we ran our contest for the website. This is crazy idea and you get to see how the minds of artists work from all different parts of the world. Our eventual winner came from Espana of all places. Take a leap here http://99designs.com/contests/11671/ to see all of the artists who submitted designs. It was definitely a tough tough decision.

Hopefully, we will have the new site up soon (as long as I get off my lazy butt and start coding this bad boy). As always, thanks for stopping by to say "hello".

Smoochies,
Len

Coming Soon? Uhhh...Maybe.

So after some fumbling around and sitting on our "COMING SOON" signs for about a month or so, Ash, Tina, and I finally decided on stringing the suckers up. After three (3) trips to our location and two (trips) to Home Depot, we finally had the correct weapons and ammo to hang up the signs. We thought that it would be a good time to get the notice out to people since it seemed like things were moving at a pretty quick pace. Boy were we wrong.

What you will find absent from this post is the usual light humor we bring around due to the major hair-yank-inducing frustration I have been faced with for the past few weeks. After we had continued to demolish the space and start framing out the kitchen, we have now hit a few snags that have caused more delays, including but not limited to: a minor conditional use permit application to ensure that the Shark Club does not gobble up all of our parking spaces during our hours of operation, the need to now install hood vents over each Shabu station rocketing our build-out expenditure by a large amount that I would not like to repeat because it makes me weep uncontrollably, and delays from our property management company with changes that we were told were already approved of months ago - again I will spare you the details so I can refrain from grabbing the plastic knife from my take out lunch and raking it down the length of my arms repeatedly. There is much more to cringe about, but we'll just leave it at that for now. I think you get the idea, though.

Regardless, we are plugging away at finishing up our final design touches with the help of our good friends Tania and Jen and making last round changes to our soon to be newly updated website! We should be making a decision on our website within the next few days, so drop back in for a visit soon and let us know what you think. If you do not see a post in more than a week, just know that my plastic knife is pretty darn sharp.

Please throw some good karma and vibes our way so we can hurry and get this fella up and running soon!

Smoochies,
Len

Drunken FroYo - Thank You, Come Again

Greetings Earthlings!

I'm asking whoever is reading this to please excuse any spelling or grammatical errors as I woke up at 5:30 AM this morning, after going to bed at around 2:30 AM, and my grey matter has yet to recover.

I realize that it has almost been a full month since our last post, but things have been going pretty crazy in Shabuland. I will get to that in my next post, though (shut it! It won't take another month!). For this entry, I simply wanted to thank all of our friends and family members that came to enjoy a night that filled our heads and eyes with amazing artwork and our bellies with alcohol infused frozen yogurt along with beer and wine. For those of you who were looking for me at the end of the night at Proof Bar, please accept my sincerest apologies for not bidding you adieu, adieu, to you and you and you. My brother, thankfully, noticed that my swagger had turned into a stumble and navigated me back home in one piece before I could spray anymore people with my saliva.

We had a great turn-out - high fives go out to Steve, Howard, and Spence for putting this together and letting us utilize their space and yogurt machines. Constance, as always, thank you for being our resident paparazzi for the night (please click on the image above to see more pics from the night). We hope everyone had as great of a time as we did. For those of you who missed us that night, some of the artwork still remains at Cantaloop and is still available for you to start or add to your collection. So, stop by for a peek or just to get some tasty yogurt. If any of you local artists are laying your pupils on this post and are interested in showcasing your art, feel free to poke me at leonard@californiashabushabu.com any time!

Smoochies,

Len