As you know, I was the primary writer for The Job Stalker blog over on Chicago Now for nearly 3 years (from November '09, sort of trailing off mid-year in 2012), which was an interesting, if ultimately fruitless (hello ... I'm still not employed!), experience. Tomorrow morning Ed Hubbard (of Nature's Little Recyclers, aka Paganics) and I are going to have a meeting with Jimmy Greenfield (current blogger wrangler for Chicago Now) about formalizing the start of a new blog over there on Green Tech in Chicago. Ed will be doing most of the story development (schmoozing with the Green folks), and I'll be making his text suitable for public consumption ... hopefully we'll be able to keep up doing 2-3 posts a week.
I'm also in the process of setting up a contact form for the Paganics site, and a newsletter to go out to the resulting subscribers. I'd been playing around with names for that ... we've been trying to maintain a "cute" factor with most of the image stuff (since it seems a lot of folks have real problems with worms ... I had a lovely up-close-and-personal shot of the little critters that I'd put together for a Facebook header graphic, and that got shot down as being "gross" ... go figure). Anyway, that graphic over there ===> is one idea that I came up for a newsletter name. Do you think it's too "goofy"? I sort of like it from the obvious play on words, and the Chicago pronunciation angle ("Da Bait" sort of like "Da Bears" ... maybe we need a worm with a mustache that we could call "Ditka"). Unfortunately, I appear to be the only person evidencing any enthusiasm for the name. Pity.
Needless to say, I'm hoping that we're going to get to the point where we'll be selling some significant quantity of worms (and castings, and egg pods, and compost, etc.) soon. We're doing an open house on March 1st down at The Plant and we're hoping to have a more "production" looking operation in place by then. One of the challenges of doing a total "bootstrap" (when none of the participants have other sources of income!) is that simple things, like getting some lumber to make shelving, is a HUGE problem ... one of the things that I hope that Ed will come up with (in his schmoozing with the Green community) is finding some early-stage "angel" investor who will throw a few thousand bucks at us to allow us to start doubling the bins every month or so. The worms cooperate by reproducing at that rate ... we just need to be able to have space for them!
Anyway ... by this time tomorrow, I might have a new blog to blither about in here.