Living Around Town

Chapter 9 – Before You Sell: Taking Care of Business Like most new business owners, as soon as you open for business, you’re going to be focused on sales, costs and revenues. So before you put away your rear-view mirror, do yourself a favor and take care of these big three responsibilities: Get Licenses and Permits Depending on your business, and what state you’re in, there are likely applicable licenses and permits to obtain. Know the

I loved coloring. I can’t ever remember a time when I didn’t color. Sitting on my brick stoop in Brooklyn, usually with a magazine underneath our bottoms, a request by my grandmother who thought it would discourage “dysentery.” Her word, not mine. But, I colored every page, neatly too, rarely going outside the lines. If I did, I’d just extend the picture to match my erring ways. When I was sick, home for a few

It happened one day while playing “What is it?” with one four- and one six-year old nephew. We had a sock with so big a hole in its toe that it was really just a fabric tube. The objective of this game is to select some object at hand, ask “What is it?” and then proceed to assign it really wacky identities. There’s absolutely no question of saying, “This is a sock with a big

How could we pass up on a trip to Philly when the great city was only 90 minutes away from our Long Beach Island, Jersey shore, summer rental. My daughter and I, on our annual beach week, did the calculations and it was so worth the drive to see what we could see. We opted for the Franklin Institute and Science Museum on Ben Franklin Parkway and North 20th Street, exactly 90 minutes from door

Recently my family and I went on a cruise. While my extended relations, who organized the trip, had gone on similar cruises for the immediate family, it was an all new experience.  My parents and I once went on a Sierra Club boat expedition, but that was in a tiny vessel for no more than a dozen people. This however was a real cruise; on the Royal Caribbean vessel Serenade of the Seas with over

Call it an unbeatable bit of luck if you are pitching for a really great new job and you have Yogi Berra as the catcher sending you signals from behind home plate.  My longtime colleague Jenny Pollack must have enacted that scene straight out of Field of Dreams when she auditioned with Executive Director Eve Schaenen for her new job consulting for the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center (YBMLC) on the campus of Montclair

If you work in an office, one with a fax machine, you’ve probably seen those mass-faxed offers from travel companies promoting drastically discounted trips to faraway places.  Barbados, St. Maartens, Nassau/Bahamas, Bermuda, or closer to home, like Vegas or Orlando.  $99 for two, or $199 for a family, promotions like that.  There’s usually teeny tiny print that, conveniently, gets faded out, or with half the paragraph missing.  Maybe someone tossed out page 2 of 2.