Just a couple of bits of mental housecleaning this foggy Monday morning here in Outer Podunk, as I'm working up to getting ready for work:
An addition to my shop-in-yer-jammies post: Higher Grounds Coffee , located in Leland, MI -- one of my favorite getaway places -- is another great coffee purveyor that sells exclusively fair trade coffee. The company was featured on our local news this morning because it's selling a special decaf coffee blend to help fund a clean water project for its coffee growers in Mexico...it needs to sell a few more pounds of fundraising beans to reach its $8,000 goal. Higher Grounds hasn't updated its website to include this new blend, but if you e-mail the company you can find out more. Higher Grounds also has partnership programs if your church, workplace or organization would like to sell its products as a fundraiser. Check 'em out.
A few more garage-moment songs: One of our local PBS stations reprised its Veterans Day programming last night with a program featuring favorite songs and dance tunes of World War II, which I enjoyed muchly -- gotta add "I'll Be Seeing You" to my all-time favorites list. And even though it's not a song -- "Sing! Sing! Sing!" -- you can't just turn that tune off, no way, nohow. And I'll sit in the garage for many classics of the Motown songbook -- "Ain't Too Proud to Beg," "Reach Out," "Stop in the Name of Love," many more.
And speaking of music...if you've collected music over the years that you haven't listened to for awhile, it can be fun to pull a random cassette out of the basement box once in awhile for old time's sake. I've been doing this (the Intr pid having an old-tech tape deck), and rediscovering some good music, as well has having a few "What was I thinking?" moments. On the way to church yesterday I listened to an old Bob Dylan tape, "Another Side of Bob Dylan," that I think I originally retrieved from a $3.99 bargain bin back in my college days -- grooving to favorites like "It Ain't Me, Babe" and forgotten songs like "To Ramona," chuckling over some of the dated hipster language and basically enjoying the lyrics. Dylan describing a woman's lips as "wet and weird" -- jarring at first hearing, but after thinking about it, the phrase had an almost Beowulf ring to it, as if Bob had been French-kissed by Grendel's mama. Well, who knows what he was smoking back in those days.
UPDATE: I fixed my link. Thanks, Gene!
4 comments:
If you're ever out of Higher Grounds coffee, maybe you might try the Starbucks Challenge?
Hmmm...it's worth a try. The nearest Starbuck's is 35 miles away, and in my experience the help there is more susceptible to -- what was that phrase? -- communication breakdown -- than most. (As in -- they're not people who actually like coffee or drink their own coffee, so if you throw non-Starbuck's coffee-aficionado jargon at them you get the deer-in-the-headlights stare: "Huh?")
You might also be interested in Lutheran World Relief's Fair Trade Coffee Project to get fair trade coffee into your church. They also have fair trade chocolate...mmm...chocolate.
Our church served the fair trade coffee for awhile...not sure why they stopped, but I suspect it was a casualty of rural frugality/practiality. I'll tell you though...I go on regular retreats around the state, and I love it when congregations have the LWR coffee and chocolate on sale in the narthex; I stock up while I'm there, because my other alternative is my food coop 45 miles away, and I never know when I'm going to get down that way. And I need my coffee.;-)
I was recently at a church in Grand Rapids that was selling really beautiful cellophane-wrapped gift baskets filled with LWR fair trade goods -- they had coffee, hot cocoa and tea themed sets featuring mugs, the beverage of choice and other accoutrements.
Post a Comment