Category: Bidness

Weeds and grass roots

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments
The front yard
The House Back East™ gets a front-yard makeover.

The rain has abated for the moment and the home-improvement projects have resumed with a vengeance.

The deluge reminded us of just how badly the garage roof leaks — it had become less of a garage and more of a free car wash — and so the roof got replaced yesterday.

The back yard
The back yard looked like a scene from “Platoon” before Herself and I spent an afternoon defoliating it by hand.

Also ongoing is landscaping at The House Back East™, which had developed a bumper crop of noxious weeds during our extended monsoon season. The front yard has gotten a colorful layer of mulch, and the much larger back yard is awaiting similar treatment.

You want a reminder of how feeble you have become in your dotage, spend an afternoon doing squats while pulling a metric shit-ton of weeds. The next morning, assess the plummeting property value of your crumbling temple of the soul. Comparables from the immediate vicinity probably won’t help much, if your wife is seven years younger than you, lifts weights and does yoga.

Speaking of things getting fixed up, a group of local investors has transformed the old Ivywild School, shuttered due to declining enrollment, into a mixed-use development that houses Bristol Brewing, Old School Bakery, the Meat Locker deli and any number of other worthwhile operations.

“This is a celebration that says, hey, if people work together, this is what can happen,” partner Mike Bristol told The Gazette. “We can do this again. Not me personally, but as a community. We can do other things like this.”

Yes, please. And thank you.

Roll another one

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 31 Comments

Tattoo shops? Sure. Massage parlors? No prob’. Adult bookstores? You betcha. Predatory lenders, pawn shops and payday-loan outfits? Why not? Grog shops, alehouses and “smoker friendly” death merchants? Damn’ straight.

But retail marijuana sales? Hell, no. Are you nuts? That’s a jobs-killer, man!

No, sir. What we need here is a downtown baseball stadium, an Olympic museum, a new Air Force Academy visitors center, a shitload more Kum & Gos and. …

Uh, Mr. Mayor? Can we have a hit off whatever it is that you’re smoking? We’re gonna need an appetite to choke down all this pie in the sky you and your developer pals are pushing on us.

Industrial tourism

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Eat me
I dined at the exclusive Vitamin Cottage in Dillon, selecting a delicious potato salad and San Pellegrino from the extensive menu of shit one can eat in one’s car.

Yesterday I visited, briefly, what the late, lamented Ed Quillen once called the Interstate 70 Industrial Tourism Sacrifice Zone. Nothing wrong with the place that Peak Oil can’t cure.

It had been several years since my last visit to the Zone, and peer as I might between the rare gaps in  traffic I could detect no signs of intelligent life.

There was existence, of a sort — the Breckenridge-Frisco-Silverthorne-Dillon clusterplex remained as relentlessly active as an anthill, busily raising a bumper crop of orange road-construction cones with one pincer and separating rubes from their rubles with the other.

I was in the Zone to meet a shooter from Steamboat Springs, whose current project required the Co-Motion Divide Rohloff I’ve been evaluating for Adventure Cyclist. Time was of the essence, and shop mechanics are crushed this time of year, so we didn’t care to wait for the lengthy disassembly-shipping-reassembly process, which can involve brown-suited gorillas using the box as a trampoline in between ZIP codes.

So I drove north from Bibleburg, and Doug drove south from Steamboat, and we met in the parking lot of a Silverthorne Wendy’s, as seemed appropriate, given the locale.

We were clearly members of the same tribe — Doug was driving a black Subaru with a bike on the roof, and I was driving a silver Subaru with a bike in the back — and neither of us was overjoyed to be in the Zone, though in its defense I will note that it was not on fire at the moment.

We discussed the Divide Rohloff, cycling and our own communities’ respective revenue-enhancement models — his, a vastly enhanced network of cycling trails (Welcome to Steamboat 2013!); mine, a downtown stadium for the Colorado Rockies’ farm club and a U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame (Welcome to Bibleburg 1913!).

Then we shook hands, jumped into our respective Subarus, and off we went.

Having taken the scenic route north, through Woodland Park, Hartsel, Fairplay and Breck’, I decided I owed it to science to take the interstates home. It being seven-ish I enjoyed mostly smooth sailing despite the $160 million Twin Tunnels expansion project until I approached the Air Force Academy, where I began a 40-minute crawl through three more road “improvement” projects to Chez Dog.

Those should do wonders for tourism. It certainly made me want to go somewhere. Take me out to the ball game. …

All the news that fits, we print (part five)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

While we were amusing ourselves with rich people who trade our newspapers, websites and magazines like po’ folks do tips for making a tasty stew from a handful of weeds, a sheaf of unpaid bills and the family pet, a friend who works for The New York Times wrote to note that another round of buyouts is in progress, the fourth in five years, to be followed by layoffs if enough employees don’t take them.

In other words, jump or be pushed.

“Merry Christmas,” notes my friend, sourly. Indeed.

Things appear even grimmer in Cleveland, where the staff of The Plain Dealer is fighting back against cuts planned by Advance Publications by taking their case to the paper’s dwindling readership. They’ve produced a TV ad, created a Facebook page and plan a “Save The Plain Dealer” party on Thursday at the Market Garden Brewery and Distillery, co-owned by ex-paperboy Sam McNulty. The New York Times reports that the brewery is releasing a new beer, 7-Day Lager, which it says is “best when enjoyed daily, because one a day keeps ignorance at bay.”

Advance has already cut back several papers to three days per week, among them the storied Times-Picayune in New Orleans. With that in mind, McNulty invited Steve Newhouse, chairman of Advance’s pixel pirates, to join the party. Newhouse would not say whether he would attend, though McNulty offered to underwrite the trip.

However, Newhouse did say that the company was “working to develop a localized approach that will allow us to continue to fulfill our commitment to quality journalism in an increasingly digital world,” adding, “I support the work of our team in Cleveland and have passed on your input to them.”

This, of course, is chairman-speak for “Fuck you.” Eschew obfuscation, Stevie old scout. In other words, speak (and deal) Plain-ly.

• Late update: Also going tits-up: The Daily, Rupe Murdoch’s iPad-only daily “newspaper.” Nieman Journalism Lab takes some lessons from its surprisingly successful failure.