Dear Friends,

I am down south in Key West at our newest store, helping Joe, Joe, and Riane get this location going on the right foot. It is a great little store and it has been a pleasure to meet all of our Key West customers from all over the world.

I even ran into a few from Vermont and several who have been buying from Smalldog.com for years. It is a busy time down here as the annual Fantasy Fest is in full swing. Grace went to the Pet Masquerade with Fantail and Max, and there were some hilarious dog/human lookalikes there!

There are some great new products from Apple that were announced this week. We had the presentation playing in the stores via Apple TV and in our conference room for the employees to gather and watch. The new MacBook Pros seem to be a great upgrade to a solid machine and I am very encouraged by the progress with the iPads, too.

One of the most significant events was that the Mac OS upgrade to Mavericks is free and so is iLife and iWork (Pages, Keynote, Numbers). Apple has a great line-up for the holidays and we are excited to have the new gear ready for you.

I had a great and productive trip to China and I will be working to bring some new products to Hammerhead and Chill Pill Audio as we get samples and work on packaging. The flying was the only poor part of the trip, but only because it was 29 hours to fly to the other side of the world. It literally took me another 5 days to recover from jet lag, but I am now back in the Eastern time zone.