June 2009

Woo-HOO! Major estate sale triumph

June 25, 2009

Un-freaking-BELIEVABLE! I just scored enough red bricks to build the coveted garden wall at the downtown house and probably pave a couple of patios: for about 15 cents apiece! The things are selling for 65 cents apiece at Home Depot. They’re practically brand-new: the “estate sale,” as it develops, was actually a foreclosure sale. The [...]

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Entrepreneurs: Your Auto Network

June 25, 2009

An auto mechanic turned radio personality and Internet entrepreneur: Cary Lockwood is the first star of Funny’s new series interviewing men and women who find creative new ways to jump off the treadmill. I came across Cary after finding his website, YourAutoNetwork.com. At first glance, it looks like an Angie’s List for car mechanics, except [...]

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Tomorrow: Birth of a new series

June 24, 2009

Tomorrow morning begins the first in what I hope will be a long-running, fairly regular series. I’m calling it Entrepreneurs. Every now and then I meet or hear of someone who has an unusual or even unique enterprise. Many of these small businesses are interesting in their own right. Some are especially interesting to PF [...]

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Beloved Yard Dude Back, & Other Quotidian Stuff

June 24, 2009

So Joel G and his palm tree charro showed up this morning. What a performance! You know what charreada is? It’s Mexican rodeo on steroids, and uno charro is a cowboy on steroids. A really good charro is indistinguishable from his horse: when you watch such a rider, you understand where the idea of the [...]

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Stress Control: Identifying rational and irrational causes of angst

June 23, 2009

Lately, I’ve developed an attitude. I’ve come to loathe what remains of my job so much that if there were a reasonable way to cover my health insurance between now and the December 31 canning day, I would go out the door today. Such resentment feels irrational to me: shouldn’t I be grateful that the [...]

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Beloved Yard Dude Gone

June 22, 2009

Gerardo the Yard Dude Extraordinaire has disappeared from the scene. He’s not answering phone calls, and that’s not like him. So La Maya (another of his clients) and I are worried something’s happened to him. Of late, he’s had a hard time getting good workers, partly because many migrants are staying in Mexico for lack [...]

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