Greetings to all of our loyal newsletter readers!

Well, my luck in picking terrible weather days for all of our special events has remained perfect -- perfectly horrible! Our summer Pajama Party got rained upon, so we had limited turnout. We served 26 hearty pajama clad customers though, so at least a few people got to take advantage of the deal. We'll try again next year!

The rain obviously scared off the Victoria's Secret models as well, so I guess I'll have to wait another year. I'm certain that they'll attend the next one!

One of our young customers called me and asked me if we would be doing another party this summer. I hadn't thought about it, but it seems like a good idea, so maybe we'll do something else for the day before school starts up again at the end of the summer. Stay tuned for details.

The weather has settled back into another rotten pattern of cool, windy, overcast days. This has been a terrible season in terms of the weather thus far.

The Fourth of July week was spectacular though, and we had great traffic at the store. Let's hope that this is finally the real start of some summer weather (though every time I say that, we end up with a week of rain.)

Funny Story of the Week

On the weekend before the 4th of July, I was at the store and one of my serving team leaders was keeping herself busy during a slow perid by dipping waffle cones in chocolate and covering them with colored sprinkles.

I noticed that in keeping with the weekend's theme, she was using red, white, and blue sprinkles to cover the cones -- I had bought a carton of these special colors at my food supply house a few weeks back.

"Oh, good, you found the July 4th sprinkles!" I remarked to her.

She looked at me a bit odd, and said "No, I've been picking out the red, white, and blue sprinkles from the normal rainbow sprinkles..."

And she's not even a real blonde -- I'd call her color more of a light brown...

Mad Maggie's in the News

We've had a few mentions of our stand lately in the local media, so I thought I'd list some of them here.

- As I wrote about in a previous newsletter, Pat Whitley's memorial day edition of his Sunday morning restaurant show focuses on "People'ss Choice Ice Cream". I heard about half of the show, and heard us mentioned by several callers. (FYI, the votes from this show plus those from the Labor Day weekend one are totaled, and the top vote getter receives an award, so plan to call in for the Labor Day show, maybe we've got a chance of winning this this year!) - A couple came to the window and told us they read about us in the Eagle Tribune's "North Shore Guide". I haven't been able to locate a copy of this -- apparently it was a special section added to the paper in late June. If you happen to have a copy of this sitting around, I'd love to read what they wrote about us! - There's also a new publication called "Edible Boston" in which we were mentioned. Again, it was a group that came to the window who told me about it. I've tried to track down a copy of the magazine, but it's a tough one to find. If you come across a copy, I'd love to see it!

If you see or hear us mentioned anywhere, I'd sure love to hear about it, so don't be "a-scared" to emai me, or just yell in the window at me when you're getting an ice cream!

Pint for a Pint Blood Drive

Unfortunately, we had to cancel the blood drive that we had planned to have at the store, as we just don't have the facilities to support the registration room that they needed, and our landlords weren't eager to help out by clearing room in the flower market.

Luckily, we were able to work with our New England Red Cross contact, Kerry Ellen, to team up with another scheduled drive. So on July 6th, in cooperation with St. Theresa's church in North Reading, we gave out coupons for a pint of ice cream to 74 willing donors. (Actually, 4 of the donors were first timers, so they got a coupon for a quart!)

We passed out a lot of flyers at the store in the week leading up to the drive, and the Red Cross sent out a mailing advertising it.

Kerry Ellen reported back that the drive was a smashing success -- they normally have about 50% no-shows during a summer drive, as people have too many other things vying for their attention during the summer. This drive had nearly 100% of possible collection, and Kerry Ellen thought that the ice cream incentive was a big part of the reason for the high turn out. They collected 66 pints of blood, and passed out 74 pint coupons (some willing donors get rejected during the pre-screening process, normally due to low blood iron levels or some such reason.)

As of today, we've had 38 folks come by to turn in their coupons and claim their free pint. Hopefully, we'll see the remainder of the coupons show up in the next week or so.

We're extremely pleased to have been able to help out with this. The Red Cross is one of my personal favorite charities, and I'm happy to have been able to help them reach their goal. I've already told Kerry Ellen that we'd be happy to repeat the promotion for the next scheduled drive in September, so stay tuned for news of that one!

Think Before You Speak!

A customer came to the window this week, and knowing my penchant for Blonde jokes, yelled to me "Hey Steve, want to hear a great Blonde Joke?"

Maggie happened to be there, and all four of my serving team at the time also happened to be blonde. The five of them turned to the man with annoyed looks.

"Hang on a sec" I said, "Can't you see that my entire team here is blonde? Do you really want to tell that joke?"

"Good point", he replied, nodding to me knowingly, "It's not going to be very funny if I have to explain it five times..."

Mad Maggie's Summer Outing

In past years, we've toyed with the idea of bringing our serving staff out to a summer get-together to thank them for all of their hard work in helping us to keep the store running smoothly, but for some reason it's never happened. Probably, because Maggie can never seem to come to a decision on where to go.

This year, I decided to take matters into my own hands, so I planned our first ever summer outing for the night of Tuesday, July 11th. I told no one where we were headed -- not even Maggie. Taking off on an old joke: What are the three best ways to spread news? Telephone. Telegraph. Tell-Maggie. (Guess that one's out of date in this Internet age...!)

I let the kids know that we were going "someplace", and gave them some rough hints (along with a lot of mis-directions to keep them guessing), but no one other than me knew the exact destination. It just killed them too, to not know -- they spent a lot of time in the week leading up to the outing pumping me for answers, but I kept quiet!

So Tuesday night, we closed the store at 5pm, piled into several cars, and formed a caravan and headed into Boston for the night.

First stop was the Hard Rock Cafe, where we had a nice dinner -- or at least, nice in teenager terms: burgers, chicken sandwiches, and fries! (I was surprised to see several of the kids order Caesar salads. Guess all of that ice cream they eat has got them thinking of watching their weight at other times!)

After dinner, we walked over the the Charles Playhouse, where we attended a performance of "Blue Man Group". If you've never seen this, I highly recommend it, it's a really fast paced, fun, exciting performance, very well done. The ending will just amaze you!

All in all, I think my serving squad had a fun time out. Most had never seen BMG before, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Now I've got to start thinking of something to top this for next year -- news reader suggestions are more then welcome!

As a footnote, as we were leaving the store at around 5:15 (yeah, I told Maggie and her sister to be there no later than 4:45, so of course they rolled in 25 minutes late...) a couple of groups came to the window as we were piling into the cars, and seemed angry that we were closed. I explained to them that we were closing for the night for a company outing, and they seemed peeved that there was no one to serve them. (I'd normally have run back inside to scoop for them, but we had reservations to meet.) We've had signs up for the past two weeks explaining that we'd be closed for this night, and I left large signs in the window explaining the same, but these people just weren't happy -- guess there's just no appeasing some folks!

If you stopped by on Tuesday and found us closed, I apologize, but hope you understand!

Flavor News

The bad news on the flavor front is that the lousy spring weather has been awful not just for ice cream sales, but for strawberries as well!

I normally pick 50 lbs or so of fresh strawberries at this time of the year, and we have Fresh Strawberry ice cream and sorbet for a few weeks. This 4th of July weekend, I went to pick and found that the berry crop is absolutely terrible! Lots and lots of over-wet berries, rotting on the plants and the number of good ripe, plump, juicy berries was very small. I picked for about an hour, and ended up with around 8 lbs of berries, and they're terrible -- they have little taste, and are pulpy and not really worth using.

Guess I'll keep using our canned berries, unless I can find a good shipment of imported California berries at my fruit distributor!

We do have a couple of other trial flavors in stock though.

The first of these, "S'mores", was a suggestion sent in by Nikki, the little sister of our scoop squad team leader Jenny. It's a chocolate based ice cream, with chocolate chips, and a graham cracker and marshmallow streak. This one still needs some work -- I think next time I make it, I'll use real broken up Hershey bars rather than our chocolate chips, and mini marshmallows rather than a marshmallow streak. But it's still a fun summer flavor, and the kids seem to love it.

I also found some nice flavorful peaches this week, and spent a couple of hours cleaning and preparing them, and made a "Peach" ice cream with them. I still think the flavor is a little delicate, but it's not bad.

Come on by and ask for a taste!

Also, my main production assistant, Janae, was on her way to Turkey Hill Farm in Haverhill, MA to pick some fresh raspberries and blueberries. So hopefully, we'll have some flavors based on these "real soon now."

(If you enjoy fresh berries, I highly recommend visiting Turkey Hill Farm. It's a clean, well run, family owned, pick-your-own farm. It's the easiest berry picking you'll ever come across, and the folks there are super nice. And this year's spring rains and the hot weather of the past couple of weeks has apparently produced a bumper berry crop. Take the kids, get there early, and pick yourself some fresh healthy berries! You can view information on their website at http://www.turkeyhillfarm.com/)

Moon Bounce

With all of the lousy, wet weather this spring, we've only had our Bounce House up a few times. One of our customers asked me about it, and I thought "Yeah, we really should be putting that up more often."

So, we're going to make an effort to put it up every Friday night for the immediate future to see how it goes. If you are planning to come to the store some other night, don't be afraid to call ahead and ask us if we can put it up -- if I have enough serving team members on to have one keep an eye on it, we'll be happy to blow it up. (It only takes a few minutes to put up, the bigger job is rolling it up at the end of the night and putting it away!

Staff Profile

OK, I've spent enough issues this spring avoiding picking on any single team member, so this week's focus is on team member Brendan.

I hired Brendan early this year to help out on the production team. I normally hire one kid each summer with an eye towards teaching them how to make ice cream, so this year I specifically hired Brendan as part of our "Production Squad". He's picked things up quickly, and now is doing a bang up job of helping to keep our flavors in stock.

Brendan lives in Andover, and attends Catholic Memorial High in Lawrence. He'll be entering his Sophomore year in September, and he plays on the school hockey team.

He's done such a great job on his production duties that Brendan's now jumping in to the serving team as well for a few shifts each week. He's been a great addition to our team, and I'm happy to have him on board!

Promise Kept

As I wrote in an earlier newsletter this year, one customer with small kids asked me if I'd consider extending our fence a few sections to minimize the chance of kids running into the street. I thought it was a great idea, and I've been trying to get to it, but it seemed like everytime I went to the fence dealer down the street, they were closed!

I finally caught them in over the 4th of July weekend, and picked up the fencing, and spent that Saturday morning digging a few fence holes. So we now have a hopefully safer area for those with small children. If you notice any other things that can be improved around the store, please point them out to me, I'm always interested in hearing about them!

Newsletter Coupon

Here's a newsletter coupon with a twist (and one that you can't lose at, regardless of the outcome): Bring this coupon to the store, and whomever is serving you will play "Rock, Paper, Scissors" with you. Here's the deal: If you win, you get a free small cone (with any other purchase). If they win, you still get 75 cents off, but have to add 25 cents to their tip cup (just to give them some incentive to actually try to win)!

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OK, time to run, got lots of flavors to make in preparation for the predicted

hot weekend we've got coming up. Hope to see you soon at the stand!