Why I Oughta...

Thanks to our good friend Dannee down the block, we were not only alerted to this awesome White House cookie kit - she also gifted one to us after one of her trips to Trader Joe's!  And guess what?  The girls loved putting them together.  Of course they did, right? What's more fun than a gingerbread house?  Nothing, I tell you.  Nothing. This is a pretty fun, seasonal item, that is a great way to do something fun with our kids, but also, kinda, sorta talk to them about the White House and the president and the upcoming election.  Did they listen to any of it?  Probably not.  But, still...frosting!  cookies!  Candy! And, from a business stand point, the person at the gingerbread factory who came up with this idea is pretty clever.  I can hear it now.... "Hey, Bob!  Fire up the ovens!  I have an idea." "But...it isn't Christmastime yet.  We have months to go until the public wants our stuff." "You're right...it isn't Christmas, bu

If you looked closely at the photo I posted last week of the girls at Menards in front of the Halloween section , you may have noticed the Lemax Halloween house display.  Oh, that's right.  You're normal, so you wouldn't notice such things.  But me?  The keeper of Mantleburg?  And lover of Christmas Villages ?  I see these things.  And that's why, on our subsequent trips to Menards, I looked closely at all the various Lemax Spooky Town buildings. This first one, up top in the box, and down below unboxed, is the "Scariest Halloween House".  You can find the official description and details here on the Lemax site . Alas, we're not in the business of having a 'spooky town' for Mantleburg.  It has been a few years since Mantleburg even made it out of it's boxes and I know the Mayor isn't happy about that. Maybe when we have the new house - and the library (hint, hint, Nat???), there might be a way to bring out Mantleburg and who knows?

Way back at the beginning of August, we spent a weekend up in Coloma where we hit up our usual haunts like the Great Lakes Antique Mall, Silver Beach Pizza in St. Joe's and the Hilltop Harding's grocery store. But, we also timed it right in order to be able to partake in the 2016 Glad-Peach Fest goings-on.  You know....carnival rides.  Cotton Candy.  Avoiding the expensive pay parking.  Those kind of things that every local hometown fest has going on. I've written about the Glad-Peach Fest before on the blog.   Here's a post from the 2013 fest taken from just about the same spot as the photo above/below. The festival celebrates both peaches (harvest time for them!) and gladiolas - the flower.  They don't do a great job of incorporating the peach theme, frankly.  And each year we're up there, both Nat and I talk about how if we had the time and were able to get involved, there'd be so much more peach-stuff.  I'm talking peach cobbler, peach ice

If you look closely at the photo above, you can see a woodpecker on our new suet feeder in the yard.  It is the wood thing hanging from the post on the right.  If you can't see it, and I don't blame you, here's a cropped version with a helpful pointer of where the woodpecker is below: The girls and I bought this suet feeder - which features something called a 'tail prop' at Menards recently and it is hanging there right next to our finch/thistle seed sock.  The thistle seed sock is our second or third of the summer and brings in a lot of pretty yellow finches to the yard.  But, as the weather is turning cooler, we wanted to try our hand at a suet feeder.  I've tried them before - the metal grid-like ones - with no luck.  Either the suet melted away or no birds ever came or the squirrels got to it.   And after poking around on the web, I think I figured out it was because we didn't have a 'tail prop' suet feeder.  Turns out, woodpeckers -

It wasn't just Rockets and poutine up in Toronto , I also had a chance to grab what I thought was a local cider.  Turns out, it is from the Danish brewer Carlsberg Group and sold all over the world .   Didn't love it.  But, kinda liked the whole "Cidre de Pommes Aromatise" on the can.  

At the very same Estate Sale that I picked up that hobnail milk glass pitcher and the big set of vintage ornaments, I picked up this book from 1982 about the Chicago White Sox.  It is written right at the point when Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn took over the club and installed the big new "Diamond Vision" scoreboard out in centerfield with the old Veeck-era exploding pinwheels on top.   I thumbed through the book and it talks about the new arrivals like Carlton Fisk, Greg Luzinski, Tom Paciorek, Rudy Law, Ron Kittle, and Greg Walker who were all - incredibly - in their first or second year on the South Side.   Reinsdorf took over the team from Bill Veeck in 1981 and if you read the opening of this book (which...in the fine print states that the White Sox themselves cooperated with in terms of photographs and such), it reads like a love letter to the new ownership's commitment to making the Sox a winner.  And...just in looking at that list of players that they br

I was sitting in these internal meetings for Edelman in Toronto a few weeks back and my past hit me square between the eyes.  One of the speakers was Joshua Gans , a professor at the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto who speaks widely on the concept of disruption.  It was an appropriate topic for us at Edelman because our agency is undergoing a transformation of sorts as we head away from pure Public Relations to becoming a Communications Marketing organization.    He runs a blog called Digitopoly and covers disruption and economics. Welp, during his talk, he cited a few examples of organizations that made moves based on the marketplace and talked about their being three factors in disruption: 1.  First...can you guys see the disruption coming? 2.  Can you identify and organize a response?  And... 3.  Can you execute on the response and adopt it to your organization. He also talked about the three type of responses: 1.  Beat them. 2.  Join them. 3