Monday, August 13, 2007

More to read about.......

I'm thinking that my personal and professional lives are mixing too much, especially when I post a New York Times article on both.......This one is too good, however......

Crazy Summer. I've got a huge back log of photos, and too many stories. They will have to wait for the Fall..............

Off to Resorts, and Carrying Their Careers
By JOHN LELAND, The New York Times


STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. — Time was you could tell the urban refugees in places like this: corporate achievers who quit the rat race to open a bed and breakfast or a candle shoppe.

Jim Moylan represents a new tribe in this bucolic mountain town, named for its loud sulfur spring. Mr. Moylan, 59, is a lawyer who specializes in securities and commodities work. When he moved from Chicago in 2003, he did not downscale his career for the small town, keeping his secretary and associates in Chicago and his clients around the country. He conducts his practice by fax and e-mail, just as he did in Chicago.

In Steamboat Springs, Mr. Moylan dug into local affairs, joining three city committees, the Rotary Club, his church finance council and the editorial board of the daily newspaper. “I just wanted to get involved in the community,“ Mr. Moylan said, sitting in a bookstore/wine bar off the town’s main street.

As technology enables people to live and work wherever they want, increasingly they are clustering in resort playgrounds like Steamboat Springs (pop. 9,315) that have natural amenities, good weather — and, now, lots of people like themselves.

In places like Nantucket, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Teton County, Idaho, the migrants are creating hybrid communities, implanting urban incomes, tastes, careers, ambitions, restaurants, cultural activities and networking opportunities into small towns that until recently could support none of these, and for which there has been little planning and still no consensus.

“You are seeing a transformation of rural communities,” said Jonathan Schechter, executive director of the Charture Institute in Jackson, Wyo., a nonprofit organization that studies small recreational towns.

Into quiet resort spots the migrants have come, laptops on their knees: fund managers from New York, software developers from California, consultants, proofreaders, engineers, inventors. “The same processes that led to the suburbanization of the United States after World War II,” Mr. Schechter said, “are now producing a virtual suburbanization in places like Jackson or Steamboat Springs.”

From 2000 to 2006, population in the 297 counties rated highest in natural amenities by the United States Department of Agriculture grew by 7.1 percent, 10 times the rate for the 1,090 rural counties with below-average amenities, the department reported.

In towns that once emptied after the ski season or the beach season, these “location-neutral” migrants are complicating the traditional dynamic between tourists and locals. Here as elsewhere, average homes have become unaffordable for teachers, firefighters and others — the people who created the good schools and community closeness that newcomers said drew them. The rate of change “is causing a whiplash,” Mr. Schechter said, “because the towns don’t have the political and economic systems in place to deal with them.”

Routt County, which includes Steamboat Springs, is one of the first places to identify these new émigrés as a source of economic growth and, paradoxically, community stability. A 2005 survey found that as many as 1 in 10 year-round households was involved in a location-neutral business. Unlike retirees and second-home buyers, who are also roosting in vacation towns, they send children to the local schools. “Without kids, you don’t have a community,” said Scott Ford, a counselor at the Small Business Resource Center at Colorado Mountain College.

Cloistered in home offices, isolated from the local economy, location-neutrals are often invisible even to one another, except when they appear on local committees.

Many work as hard as their urban counterparts, often juggling commitments in several time zones, but can step from their offices to a hiking trail or mountain stream.

In Steamboat Springs, a pawn shop and loan store amid the expensive restaurants on the main drag illustrates the growing inequality in a region that produces few middle-income jobs. Each day 1,500 workers commute to Routt County from neighboring Moffat County, an hour away. Meanwhile, the airport, once filled with tourists, caters to people in business suits.

“You’ve seen changes in politics,” said Carl Steidtmann, the chief economist for Deloitte Research, who moved from Brooklyn two years ago. “The county tipped Democratic in the last election. You see the tension in the City Council. It went from being pro-business-and-development to more conservationist.” He added, “Twelve years ago, not everyone you met had a Ph.D. or was from New York. There are still a lot of locals here, but that aspect is changing.”

Peter Parsons, 45, who runs a microchip design company in Boulder, Colo., a city of 92,000 about three hours away, moved here five years ago to raise his three children in a small-town environment, keeping the company in Boulder. “It’s a real town,” Mr. Parsons said of the appeal of Steamboat Springs. “If your kids are running around, adults will see them and call you.”

He has kept a Boulder telephone number and does little to remind clients he is not in the city. “I wouldn’t have been able to come here with my family if it meant opening a coffee shop,” he said.

To combat isolation, he volunteered at the school and at church, and briefly moved from his home office into a town-run business incubator “in order to meet people,” he said. Now his office overlooks the ski slopes and is a short walk from a fly-fishing spot; computers vie for desk space with hand-tied flies. He still has to persuade associates that he has not slowed down or retired.

“We have big discussions about what it means to be a local,” Mr. Parsons said of his fellow location-neutrals. “Some people snub anybody who hasn’t been here a long time. And some people think they know everything when they haven’t been here long.”

The Routt County Economic Development Cooperative has embraced the new tribe as an asset, especially to an area with no strong industry other than tourism. Location-neutrals tend to volunteer heavily in civic organizations and local government. County interviews with 61 location-neutral businesses found they held 120 volunteer positions.

But their enthusiasm has not always rubbed long-timers the right way, Mr. Ford said. “If they haven’t bonded with the community,” he said, “they begin with the ‘You people’ speeches: ‘What you people don’t understand is...’ When they start that, it’s almost impossible.” Sometimes disputes spill out in the local newspaper or its blogs, where old-timers and newcomers point fingers.

Thomas Miller-Freutel, a partner in a directory-assistance startup, knows this chasm firsthand. Though he has lived here since 1990, first as owner of the Steamboat Inn, he sometimes struggles to balance his fast-paced work life with the small-town community.

“I have to switch gears from what I was doing in other parts of the world to sit down and be productive as a community member,” he said. “You have to be careful not to say, ‘Look, I deal with people all over the world and this is how it’s done.’ You have to change gears in a small town.”

For Bill and Stephanie Faunce, who run a marketing company for cable operators, small-town life often means starting work at 7 a.m. and quitting at 11 p.m., but with breaks to hike, ski or be with their two young children. Their goal in coming here was not to slow down but to eliminate urban distractions and pressures.

“There are no stressors here,” said Mr. Faunce, 43. “In L.A., it took 90 minutes to get to the office, so we had a Mercedes and a Land Rover. Now we drive a Suburban. In three years we’ve put 15,000 miles on it.”

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Goooo Dave!

More Cross Postings.....but this one is a good one. Dave Gee, our partner who runs Oregon Growers and Shippers just got some crackin' press.......

Go Dave!

By FLORENCE FABRICANT
Published: July 31, 2007
Cooling Off in Montauk With an Assist From New Orleans

In steamy New Orleans, refreshment comes in the form of sno-balls: ice that has been shaved to a powder and drenched with bright syrup. The dense ice absorbs the syrup, making it more sorbet than slush, and more refined than the Italian ices known to New Yorkers.

Eric Tilstra, right, who grew up in the Crescent City, thought it was time for beachgoers in Montauk, N.Y., where he was born, to experience sno-balls. It took him more than a year to get the equipment, the permits and a bright orange truck. Now, on Monday through Wednesday evenings from 6 to 10 p.m., and from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. the rest of the week, he dispenses Belly’s Sno-Balls from his truck at the Kirk Park lot at the Montauk Village beach on Route 27.

The sno-balls come in three sizes, which cost $2, $3 and $4, and in 28 flavors, including mango, watermelon, sour apple, vanilla and chocolate. There are mixtures like vanilla-chocolate “yummy-tummy.” A nugget of cream, actually frozen condensed milk, is 50 cents extra.

In the Market: Nature’s Bounty in All Its Colors

Good weather has blessed many crops in the New York region this year, and abundance at the Greenmarkets is a result. “There has been enough rain, but not too much,” said Fred Wilklow of Wilklow Orchards in Highland, N.Y.

Tomatoes, top, and corn are in extremely good shape, as are zucchini. Squashes, including patty pans in various colors, sizes and patterns; herbs; a rainbow of peppers; four or five kinds of eggplant; five kinds of carrots; verdant okra; lettuces; cucumbers; green beans; and shell beans, which are just coming in, fill the vegetable stands. Velvety flat yellow Romano beans are $3 a pound from Berried Treasures in Cooks Falls, N.Y.

Spring was cool, so ramps, garlic scapes and strawberries showed up a bit late, but the scapes will be around most of the summer. Strawberries were still being picked last week, almost a month later than usual. The Tristar variety, which lasts through September, is now available.

Peaches and other stone fruit are benefiting from hot, sunny days. New Jersey expects its peach season to be a long one this year.

Blushing Red Jacket apricots, above left, are also enjoying a richly flavorful harvest right now.

Cherries, including sour ones ($6 a quart from Caradonna Farms in Milton, N.Y.), are having a fine season, and the berries include gooseberries, golden raspberries and red, black and white currants.

Farmers are looking forward to more good crops, including apples and pears.

PB&J Upgrade: Breaking Out the Good Stuff

Stick to your old-fashioned roots and the market will eventually wake up. Take the Koeze Company’s Cream-Nut peanut butter, for example. It has been made in Grand Rapids, Mich., from dark-roasted Virginia peanuts since 1925. Coarsely ground in small batches and lightly seasoned with sea salt, it is neither creamy nor chunky but totally irresistible.

Jeff Koeze (pronounced COO-zee ) runs the company, and is the fourth generation of his family to do so. He uses vintage slow-grinding machines to produce exceptionally nutty-tasting peanut butter, which has been sold nationally for only the past year or so. When freshly made, it is well emulsified into a creamy consistency. The oil eventually floats to the top and has to be stirred back in. This does not affect quality, only convenience.

Fairway and Barney Greengrass stores have new shipments. Zabar’s also sells it, as do Marlow & Sons and Stinky Bklyn in Brooklyn. A list of other stores is at creamnut.com. A 17-ounce jar is about $6.

And to go with your peanut butter? Jelly, of course. These days, many preserves are touted as being “all fruit” with “no added sugar.” All that means is that syrupy grape or apple concentrates are used as sweeteners, with minimal reduction in calories. Oregon Growers and Shippers, which sells a line of preserves that use seasonal fruit grown on small farms in the Pacific Northwest, bucks this trend. Its preserves are sweetened with cane sugar, tipping the scale in favor of fruit.

A dozen flavors include marionberries, huckleberries, cherries and strawberries. Most are $6.50 for a 12-ounce jar from growersandshippers.com. In New York, Ideal Cheese Shop sells the jars for $5.95. The huckleberry is $8.95 but out of stock until next month.