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I am heartened in these dark monetary times about a few things. First, alternative energy is really, truly becoming mainstream and the politicians are really starting to get it. The tax credits for solar, wind and geothermal are going to be renewed, and when President Obama gets in office, his […]

Getting ready to scoot up to Maine on Friday night, and visit the summer rental Kentski made famous in his article in PreviewMA magazine and GoNOMAD. We’ll leave around 5, and travel through the night downeast, to arrive around 10 pm in Boothbay Harbor ME. I love this kind of […]

Lately people have come into the cafe looking for our copy of the Wall Street Journal. They seem to want to read it more than ever, with the tough times that everyone is talking about on Wall St. Today I found a story about a man who remembers the 1929 […]

People were happy in Deerfield yesterday, so I guess our big plan worked out well. I was sequestered at my little tent at the edge of town, giving out the maps, so I didn’t really get to many tag sales, but the streets were full and I got many reports […]

Ok, well now I am nervous. Today’s the big day. I’ve sent out emails to everyone I know, I have talked on WHMP and WHYN, trumpeting this big news, and tried hard to convince Channel 3 in Springfield to put us on their evening news. I was up at 5 […]

There are some tiny bits of good news, you just have to look a little harder. For instance, last night I read in the WSJ that the number of illegal immigrants coming into the US from our southern border is plummeting. Maybe it’s because there are so fewer jobs, or […]

On my way to my last trip, I took a Greyhound bus and then the subway from Times Square all the way out through Brooklyn to Howard Beach. It’s a long ride underneath some of the city’s worst neighborhoods, passing notorious stops like Van Siclen, New Lots and Euclid Avenues […]

In the cafe today, a well-dressed man in a jacket and a pretty blond wife came in, followed by a youngster wearing a blue blazer. The man strode up the counter with a confident air, and asked if we could make him a poached egg. We told him that we’d […]

I found a fascinating tidbit on the web this morning, since I got up very early. It was about abandoned cities, and in the story I read about the Ryugyong Hotel, a 105-story hotel shaped like a mountain that is abandoned in North Korea’s capital city of Pyongyang. The building, […]

I am trying to be productive amid the din of the chaos that running a cafe creates. Scheduling is much harder than I ever thought it would be, and the cacaphony of who can’t work when and who wants to get more hours when they want them is intimidating. It […]

One of the most basic things I’ve always tried to teach my kids is to make eye contact when you are speaking to someone. It’s simple and you’d think it would be something you don’t have to teach. Yet it was painful for my son Sam at some points in […]