Dear Friends,

I got caught in some rain riding home from Burlington last night, but with the warm temperatures it was not too bad. I was at the S. Burlington store which was jumping all day. I was very proud of our team as they handled the big volume of customers despite the glitches we had that day with our database.

It has been a great season for blueberries and my breakfast these days has been a bowl of berries, which is a great start for the day!

I went down to the Harpoon Brewery in Windsor Vermont on Saturday to check out the New England BBQ championships and to watch Hapy compete in the Strongman competition. It was a beautiful ride and the place was jammed with 50 or more BBQ vendors, a huge Harpoon beer tent, some live music and big guys that made Hapy look small doing fetes of strength. I was amazed at how much Hapy could dead lift, but the larger guys were lifting over 700 pounds.

There were some great new products coming out of Cupertino this week that are covered here in Kibbles & Bytes. I am very excited about the new offerings and will be moving to try out the Magic Trackpad as soon as we get one in. With less fanfare, Apple upgraded Safari this week and implemented the extensions gallery that will allow you to install and uninstall extensions easily to the browser. I have started playing with various extensions on the gallery and have found some that improve my surfing right away. Hapy is debating whether he will move to the new 27-inch iMac with a second 27-inch LED Cinema display or the ridiculously awesome 12-core Mac Pro.

I am leaving on Wednesday to head to South Dakota for the Sturgis rally. Grace, Tony and I have decided that we will take up to a 100 mile detour to see oddball roadside attractions. I downloaded a couple of apps for my iPhone and iPad to find these for us. Our route is going through Canada to Michigan UP, through Wisconsin and Minnesota and then to SD. Tony will ride with us on the way out but Grace and I will stop in Chicago on the way back for our annual Cubs pilgrimage to Wrigley Field.

I’ll be staying in touch with my iPhone 4 and my iPad and I’ll carry a Bluetooth keyboard for late-night writing. I found that I can type faster and more accurately with the BT keyboard and that makes the iPad the perfect compact platform for me—that and the eight pages of apps I have now!

Things are really picking up on the construction of the Manchester, NH store. I’m heading over on Tuesday to do some final interviews for new members of our Small Dog team. We have a lot of steps to complete, but it is an exciting and heady time as we create a new store.