Dear Friends,

I had an awesome trip out to my home town of Chicago. Grace and I met there and actually got married at city hall in Chicago. I realized as we were at Wrigley Field, watching the Cubbies beat the White Sox, that I had taken Grace on a date to Wrigley 50 years ago. We had a hot dog and a Goose Island to celebrate.

It was a very hot motorcycle ride to the midwest but we managed to miss all the rain and thunderstorms. We were drinking gallons of water to stay hydrated as we tooled through the corn and soybean fields of Ohio and Indiana. We got home to blueberry bushes loaded with berries.

The day after we got home, we headed down to the NBA Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, MA to pick up Pirate, our new bulldog puppy. Fortunately, the breeder was able to meet us halfway and the Hall of Fame was a good central spot. Pirate is a handful and is already hanging out at the office with me. Now if he would just quit untying my shoelaces.

I have been participating in the 3rd annual Vermont Road Pitch. Each year some 20-30 entrepreneurs, educators, business leaders and venture capitalists hop onto their motorcycles and ride from town to town in Vermont to listen to business pitches. I met up with the crew in Barre to hear some pitches and then onto Randolph for some more. Great new business ideas but the best ideas I thought were from the non-judged high school students. One was making sunglasses from recycled plastic harvested from the ocean—very cool.
Friday I head to Hyde Park and Grand Isle, Vermont for more pitches. It is great fun and good to hook up with other business men and women who share a passion for motorcycles, too.

This week’s Kibbles & Bytes special features the Apple Factory Reconditioned 21.5 inch iMac. This iMac carries the same 1-year Apple warranty as a new machine and has been reconditioned by Apple to be as-new. We are bundling it with the AppleCare protection plan which takes that 1-year warranty and makes it 3 years and takes the 90 days of free Apple tech support and makes it 3 years as well. Here’s a great opportunity to add a sleek and powerful desktop Mac at an unbeatable price. This iMac features a 2.9GHz Intel i5 processor, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB drive. We are also bundling a 1TB backup drive with this special. So you get the iMac, AppleCare and the 1TB Seagate backup drive for only $1299.99!