Hello, I have never written a blog before so bear with me. I am fairly challenged with the internet so thank goodness that I have Eric Jett, our old cook, who is becoming a webmaster to help guide me through the process and post the blog's. Thank-you Eric Well, I have been at this baking business for nearly 28 years now on April 7th. I was just a young enthusiastic twenty two year old returning from Paris after working there in a bakery. I was alive with excitement and wanted nothing more than to recreate a Paris style bakery here in Santa Cruz. I fell into a space for rent in the old Courtyard Commons behind the Bookshop Santa Cruz. I didn’t have a dime to my name and thankfully my amazing grandparents lent me $17,000.00 and weeks of their time to help me put the bakery together. My grandfather helped me build the walls and sheet rock them, my boyfriend’s parent Jim and Paula helped me lay the vinyl tile on the floor. My grandma kept us all fed. Bruce, my dear friend, helped me carry the first 30 quart mixer over the cobblestones and set it in place. After a month of nonstop work I was able to bring in the ingredients and start baking some pastries. I remember falling to sleep late the night before I was to get to work and start baking at 4am, worrying, “What if no one comes to buy any of the pastries?”

I called my dad the next day and screamed, “We sold everything and had to make more!” He was so happy, he had had the same worry I had the night before.

When it would rain during the years of the original downtown bakery our landlord, Ron would arrive with plastic drop clothes and white buckets. He would duck tape and nail one end of the plastic drop cloth to the end of the center leaking beam in the retail section of the bakery and gently drape it towards the other end. At the other end he would nail two buckets to catch the water that ingeniously meandered down from the one end of the drop into the buckets. It worked like a charm. The only problem was that it was incredibly ugly. The bakery that I had so painstakingly put together with the sweat of my whole family and many of my friends was scared by this massive blue drop cloth, not to mention the buckets. Ron would smile and pick up his tools and leave satisfied with his ingenuity again. I begged Ron to fix the leak. This could not be done. He had put concrete on the roof in case he wanted to make it into a patio someday, there was no fixing it. Planning for someday was a favorite pastime of Ron’s. It was never enough to take care of what he had. Ron always had big future plans. These plans kept what he already had from being the best it could be. Ron Lau has made us better landlords. If a tenant calls with a leak we fix it immediately. We simply call a roofer.