Weekend of worry, wonderment, and Triple Cream

This past week involved a certain level of stress and concern for my fledgling foray in screen printing shirts for other peeps. Alex and I got a commission to print up some shirts for one of the local street food celebs, Brian of the Magic Curry Cart, and he needed them absolutely no later than Saturday. Of course I said we'd do it, regardless if we were actually ready to do it or not. Since relocating to our new shop we hadn't actually printed anything. All of our screens are basically fucked up and we're going to end up having them redone. This was not cool considering we only had a few days to get ready to print. Oh, and did I mention that we were going to be using a new exposure unit so we'd really be winging it as far as burn times? No? Cause we did. Basically all this boiled down to a possibly very awkward phone call to Brian having to admit that we suck. At some point during the week I had this genius idea to call up another screen printer to see if they had more efficient cleaning methods and if they could possibly rescue some of our screens. I called a shop that I think is pretty cool. They're called Free Gold Watch and they're pretty cool peeps. Unfortunately, they couldn't get the screens clean, which would substantiate my assertion that the screens are in fact fucked up. But, Free Gold Watch came to the rescue and agreed to sell me two pre-coated screens. Also Steph came to my rescue because she schlepped it all the way to the upper Haight to drop off my screens and pick up the new ones. Having pre-coated screens totally made our lives much simpler for the fact that we didn't have to coat screens. Sweet! Flash forward to Thursday night, twenty four hours to go time. My use of the word "flash" in the last sentence was a bit of unintentional foreshadowing as we now had to fire up the light table and expose the new screens. With fingers crossed, we forded a river of 300 souls attending a reception at the gallery in order to take a leap of faith. Faith in our completely arbitrary calculation of four minutes and fifteen seconds of burn time. Mind you, if we got this wrong our new screens would be useless and we'd have to re-coat them. We seriously didn't have the time to deal with that shit. Suffice it to say we were damn near money with our timing as the screens came out perfectly and we were ready to print the next day. On Friday night we bought a brand new tub of gooey yellow plastisol ink and got down to business. Oh yeah one last thing, Brian gave me an order for t shirts which I fulfilled to a T which meant there was no margin for error in printing. Just ask Steph about our margin for error when we printed her shirts. Anyway, we nailed it and dude was pretty fucking impressed if I do say so myself. It looks like we'll be getting some more orders from the food cart peeps. In a round about way my culinary studies are paying off.

On Sunday it was Oscar night. Normally I'm not into awards shows, but Steph loves them. She likes to keep up on her pop culture. However, this night we chose to coincide the Oscars with our oft-postponed Cheese night. As I said previously I am a member of the cheese of the month club. On hand we had  St. Andre, Port Salut, Gorgonzola, Blue, a nice Gouda, an English Cheddar, and the piece de resistance a triple cream raw milk cheese, which was said to taste of the pasture. I also whipped up a Gorgonzola sauce and a cherry and sweet onion chutney to make uber-grilled cheese sandwiches. We invited a few friends and proceeded to have an enjoyable Oscar night. I predicted Precious would dominate, but I was blind sided by Hurt Locker which I conceded made perfect sense. As a dude I prefer a movie about blowing shit up to a movie about a girl carrying her dads seed. But, that's just me. Oh yeah, curiously enough we completely forgot to document the party in a photographic sense. I think I'd attribute that to the fact that we were having a pretty good time.