Excerpt from an email interview with the new Nothing But Austin blog... a bunch of old info for some of you, maybe a few intersprinkles of some new bits...
When you decided to end your career as a "profoundly bored" software professional, did you face any backlash or lack of support from friends and family?
They had grown pretty used to seeing my flounder around so I wouldn't say that was a terribly difficult stage. My folks gave me the great gift of a college education in engineering but weren't very heavy-handed in advising me to make use of it or tell me how to run my life. They were certainly quizzical about the soup peddling thing at first but after my stints at teaching yoga and freelance writing, it wasn't a real shocker. They knew I was very engaged in it and happy and proud so that was fine.
When you first started your business, you say you sent an email to your friends asking for $10 in exchange for soup on their porch. How effective was that? Did people laugh at you or embrace your quirkiness?
Embrace. Like any bootstrappy business, it began with friends, friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends. Basically the South Austin circle. People may ridicule the bumper stickers that describe the South Austin thing, but I have to say they're all true. People loved the Soup Peddler. It wasn't just kitsch, but there was really good food and there was really good writing to go with it and there was a sense of belonging to something insider and cool. Back then, it was a different culinary scene with zero avenues for someone with my limited culinary experience to make a go of it. So it was audacious in its way, like "hey, I'm going to work outside of the system and see if my blood, sweat, and tears can make this thing work." And people really felt that gesture, they felt my passion and energy and supported it. It touched a nerve quite dramatically so much that The Soup Peddler became a sort of folk hero.
Your name: The Soup Peddler is pure genius as you peddle to deliver soup and you're "peddling" (selling) soup. How did you come up with the name?
Marijuana. Smoking it, then sitting and thinking.
Were their other names you had before being called The Soup Peddler?
Yes, when I first started it, it was called the Soup Subscription Service by Savory Soul Sustenance. Believe it or not. But probably two or three weeks into the business I came up with the name. It took probably a half hour to design the logo, which hasn't changed since.
Do you have any ambitions to sell your soup in grocery stores or other retail outlets?
We are opening our own retail outlet with one of the founders of Daily Juice, it will be a nice Jo's Coffee-style kiosk on the corner of Lamar and Manchaca called Juicebox/Soup Peddler. I've been chronicling the development of that project at blog.souppeddler.com and it's a pretty interesting read for folks who are into entrepreneurship, design, or architecture.
When I think of your name "The Soup Peddler" and the way in which you deliver your product, I immediately think of a comic book superhero. Any chance you would develop a costume as uniform while delivering soup along the streets of South Austin? That would be interesting?
There have been many thoughts of caricaturization of The Soup Peddler character once I sort of separated myself from that legend. I wrote a slightly fictionalized book of memoirs that was fairly successful on Ten Speed Press, selling over 10,000 copies. There have been thoughts along the way of turning it into a screenplay, a stage production, an action figure, etc. But I don't really have a media department and I've been kind of busy with various things like my life, my family, my interests, and my business. Cool thing is (see attached file) the Zach Scott Theatre did a production some years ago called Keeping It Weird which was a stage play developed from the verbatim remarks of Austin luminaries and weirdos including myself. The superhero costume was derived from comments in my interview regarding tension living up to people's expectations of me as a local hero. The costume still lives in the props department at the Zach. Spandex is for the young.
You've gotten tons of local and national press coverage in print, online, and television. What's your secret to gaining so much press attention?
Do the work yourself. Serve up the story on a silver platter. Media folks are super-busy and it is very, very difficult for them to find content that is interesting, subjects that are honestly friendly and helpful. Of course much of it comes from having an interesting story, but that really comes from authenticity, being true to your passion and community. The other part is really doing the work for the press, knowing what their needs are and providing for them. The camera crews, the sound crews, the reporters, whatever... be really nice to them, feed them, ask them about their day, be real, be humble. It makes everyone's day go better.
You started your business with only $60 in your bank account. Were you afraid of failure? Did you have a Plan B? What motivated you not to quit with such great odds stacked against you?
Some people say that the greatest point of risk for a venture is Day 1, and it goes down as you go along. That's one way of looking at it. From a purely statistical point of view, yes, the odds of the business succeeding are at their worst on Day 1. But you have other weighting coefficients along the way like the amount of debt involved that change the magnitude of the downside of the risk. So in one sense, the risk was at its lowest when I only had sixty bucks and not a whole lot of heartache on the line. You can't forget the value of naïveté with regards to the entrepreneurial spirit: This is someone looking at a gorgeous sunrise while a raft of churning storm clouds are encroaching from the west. I'm saying I didn't know what odds were really stacked against me so I paid them no attention. I always say that if the me of back then came to ask the me of now what I thought about starting The Soup Peddler, the me of now would have laughed the me of then out of the room.
Most entrepreneurs in your situation who "put everything on the line"
work an insane amount of hours to get their business up and running. How many hours were you working to initially build your business and when did you become profitable?
It has always been profitable. That's the nice thing about truly bootstrapped, organically-grown businesses. There was a whole lot more DIY and sweat equity in this business than real equity funding. In fact, there has been no equity funding. For a while, I worked pretty darn hard. But after you achieve a certain point of scale, you're able to extract yourself to work solely on the business instead of both on and in the business. That's a much better arrangement.
Did you have any secondary form of employment to maintain income while building your business?
No. I didn't really require much income at the time. Just getting-by money. But I'm a big man now and a fully functioning member of the economy.
From all the press I've seen about you, you seem to take life so casually. What words of encourage can you provide for new entrepreneurs who are looking to break into business but fear the loss of stability from their 9 - 5?
Do the numbers. I ALWAYS have my business plan spreadsheets open on my laptop. I am ALWAYS looking at numbers. There was a database system years ago called Delphi. There's another biggie called Oracle. Get it? Databases and spreadsheets are meant to ANSWER QUESTIONS. Entrepreneurship is all about answering questions. Numbers answer questions. Fears are based on unanswered questions. Figure it out. I'm not trying to be opaque here, just honest.
South Austin is famously known for it's food carts/trailers, but you're the only company I know who delivers soup on a bicycle.
Er, uh... we haven't done that for about five or six years now.
Since becoming "The Soup Peddler," have you had any competitors? If so, how has it affected your business?
We've seen some competitors come and go, some trends come and go. Basically we're in the realm of restaurant alternatives. The whole thing where you would schedule an appointment to go "cook" or mix a bunch of pre-prepared foods together, like Super Suppers or Dream Dinners... that's gone. The trailer thing is a wonderful thing but I'm fairly certain it has passed its peak already. The Snap Kitchen/My Fit Foods thing is the new one. It looks pretty strong right now, it could work, or it could be a dead end. Nobody has really challenged us on the prepared foods delivery. It's pretty headache-filled, so it's a long row to hoe to get where we are with it. We are certainly not immune from competition, but we still seem to be surviving in an original little niche and supported well by our very very very well-valued customers.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
The Juicebox/Soup Peddler Project VI
I am terribly sorry for the long lapse between posts on this topic and any associated sense of loss, confusion, or meaninglessness that you may have experienced as a result. Let's pick up where we left off in the story. All is running along basically well. The architects are finished up, the engineers are doing their thing, the banker is finishing up our papers. We're kind of burning through a lot of money, but all is cruising. It's time to work on the design and branding a bit.
I have a complex relationship with branding and packaging. I generally just don't like them. Example:
I hate this in a bunch of different ways. I hate it because it commercializes and degrades hippies (please don't bring this up. It completely blows this argument.). I hate it because of its blithe assurance of "all natural," a term which seems to exclude no terrestrial substances. I hate it because it says "World's Greatest." I hate it because it says "Woodstock." I hate it because it says "For The Rocker In You." But do I hate it any more than this?
Tough call. It's easy to lambast the obvious enemies of sensibility such as chicken dinosaurs, but frankly the truth to lie ratio is about even on the two packages.
Here's the problem. As much as I can't stand brands and packaging, they're still something that we use to navigate our world of consumption, and when they're done right, they're not offensive at all. Of course you need a name, right? You can do punny, you can do old-fashioned self-descriptive, and you can do mod. I think those are the only choices. Punny is something like "Sew Much More" or "Sew Easy". In fact, over 85% of sewing stores have punny names. Old-fashioned is "The Ice Cream Man" or "The Flower Shoppe" or really any business that uses the word "Shoppe" or "Olde" or "Ye". Mod is probably the most common branding trend these days. The shorter the better. Baby store named "Waa". White tablecloth barbecue joint called "Rib". If you can exclude letters entirely, all the better... you get down to the bare basics, like a novelty shop called "?!" or a gastroenterology practice called ":".
Where was I? Right. I was about to defend the Great Truths behind The Soup Peddler brand. Like it or not, I'm the man behind a brand myself. The Soup Peddler conforms to both the old-fashioned and punny models of branding. Well. We all know that The Soup Peddler doesn't pedal soups to his little neighborhood of Soupies anymore. I probably could a little bit. Maybe I should. Okay, maybe I will. I do remember, though, long before most of you knew me or heard of me, deciding whether to spell it "peddler" or "pedaler" and I am sure glad I chose the former. I wisely thought, "There'll come a day..." The nice thing about my brand is that there is at least a real "brand story" behind the brand. A thin veneer, I'll admit, but there's a grain of truth.
Permit me a little flashback: Here's a peek at the first flyer that I designed for Soup Peddler.
Note the absence of the name Soup Peddler. It was only after a few weeks in business that I discovered the punny cleverness that is The Soup Peddler. I grabbed a .jpg of a pennyfarthing off the internet somewhere and utilized a particularly Olde Tyme sort of typeface and put together the logo we all know and love. Lots of folks have come along to try to update it. A Linux logo designer I stayed with in Italy tried to update the bicycle:
Which I kind of liked. When I asked the Soupies if I should change the logo to this, they shot it down. Another design firm tried to sell me on their services with a cartoonish logo of a bicyclist with a bowl of soup on his head and motion lines indicating the speed of my deliveries. I sadly don't have that file anymore.
When we set out to do this mashup business, Matt and I discovered that we would not be able to use the Daily Juice brand... a long story with a surprisingly complex corporate structure behind it. We needed to do what we were both kind of reluctant to do: invent a new brand for the juice portion of the store. We kicked around a bit of the old-fashioned self-explanatory: "Austin Juice Co." We tinkered a bit with the mod: "Slurp". "Ooze". None of this fit Matt's persona or style, really. But then we finally settled on something that came from our literally little architectural situation, our little box on the corner of Lamar and Manchaca, something with a half-measure of self-explanatory and half-measure of mod: "Juicebox".
Both Matt and I were fortunate to be acquainted with the lovely, the talented Jennifer Braham of Brink Creative. Jennifer is a design phenom whose work colors much of Austin... her work for Uchi (timeless), The Peacock (well-designed but doomed), Kick Pleat, Big Red Sun, etc., is unwaveringly excellent and sophisticated. We went to her with vague notions and rode on her magic carpet, witnessed her prodigious output, and basically followed her lead in a choose-your-own-adventure design process.
She interwove my input ("How about a little more serif?") with Matt's ("I need something kind of like a 21st Century tiki hut mixed with old-school hip hop and robots") with aplomb and grace. Each visit we would scan ten different options, choose one direction, and come back the next with to find ten different branches off that idea. It was stunning. She is a serious pixel-pusher and approaches the work with boundless whimsy. An honor to be part of her process. But still, it was strange to put the cart before the horse, to design a brand for a business that didn't exist. I guess that's how it's done.
Here was part of Round 1:
Fresh! Inviting! Simple! Combines the brands in a palatable way. We showed it to our respective wives and got a double (er, quadruple) thumbs-down. Too Mall Court. Too Chili's. In fact, Jennifer was having a very hard time with my brand because it's so elemental and complete and burned into her brain. She was reluctant to change it but tried her best. I was excited about a break with the past, a move into the future; it's something we all yearn for in one way or another. But after Meredith said "Chili's", I could never look at it without thinking Chili's. Like when an old girlfriend said that my favorite Joe Satriani song sounded like the theme from Top Gun, it was ruined forever.
We decided to let the Soup Peddler brand rest and focus on ways to develop Juicebox as similar but different, complementary but contrasty.
Jovial. Homemade. Pineapple-y. Matt walked around Jennifer's office trying it on, trying to feel the new brand and see if he could physically embody it. He understandably has a very, very strong affiliation with the Daily Juice brand, so this whole process has been fraught with weirdness for him. For the founder of a business, for these real, bootstrapped brands, there is such a strong identification that it becomes very personal. So there's a bit of an adulterous element here for Matt, there's a lot of hesitance and trepidation. Ultimately, he didn't feel it for this design. He gave Jennifer a raft of confusing, conflicting directives on where to go next. She gave it another shot.
This met with Matt's unadulterated enthusiasm. It took me a few minutes to get with him on it but his attitude was infectious. He sold me on Mr. Juicy by strutting robotically around the room. Mr. Juicy is, essentially, Matt Shook in avatar form. Fresh, enthusiastic, constantly on the move. There's also a kind of compatibility between this and Soup Peddler, that slightly asymmetrical off-kilterness. Contrasty in style, the typefaces are nice together. And Jennifer even made a little girlfriend for Mr. Juicy. Lucy Soupie:
(stay tuned for themes of impending disaster...)
I have a complex relationship with branding and packaging. I generally just don't like them. Example:
I hate this in a bunch of different ways. I hate it because it commercializes and degrades hippies (please don't bring this up. It completely blows this argument.). I hate it because of its blithe assurance of "all natural," a term which seems to exclude no terrestrial substances. I hate it because it says "World's Greatest." I hate it because it says "Woodstock." I hate it because it says "For The Rocker In You." But do I hate it any more than this?
Tough call. It's easy to lambast the obvious enemies of sensibility such as chicken dinosaurs, but frankly the truth to lie ratio is about even on the two packages.
Here's the problem. As much as I can't stand brands and packaging, they're still something that we use to navigate our world of consumption, and when they're done right, they're not offensive at all. Of course you need a name, right? You can do punny, you can do old-fashioned self-descriptive, and you can do mod. I think those are the only choices. Punny is something like "Sew Much More" or "Sew Easy". In fact, over 85% of sewing stores have punny names. Old-fashioned is "The Ice Cream Man" or "The Flower Shoppe" or really any business that uses the word "Shoppe" or "Olde" or "Ye". Mod is probably the most common branding trend these days. The shorter the better. Baby store named "Waa". White tablecloth barbecue joint called "Rib". If you can exclude letters entirely, all the better... you get down to the bare basics, like a novelty shop called "?!" or a gastroenterology practice called ":".
Where was I? Right. I was about to defend the Great Truths behind The Soup Peddler brand. Like it or not, I'm the man behind a brand myself. The Soup Peddler conforms to both the old-fashioned and punny models of branding. Well. We all know that The Soup Peddler doesn't pedal soups to his little neighborhood of Soupies anymore. I probably could a little bit. Maybe I should. Okay, maybe I will. I do remember, though, long before most of you knew me or heard of me, deciding whether to spell it "peddler" or "pedaler" and I am sure glad I chose the former. I wisely thought, "There'll come a day..." The nice thing about my brand is that there is at least a real "brand story" behind the brand. A thin veneer, I'll admit, but there's a grain of truth.
Permit me a little flashback: Here's a peek at the first flyer that I designed for Soup Peddler.
Note the absence of the name Soup Peddler. It was only after a few weeks in business that I discovered the punny cleverness that is The Soup Peddler. I grabbed a .jpg of a pennyfarthing off the internet somewhere and utilized a particularly Olde Tyme sort of typeface and put together the logo we all know and love. Lots of folks have come along to try to update it. A Linux logo designer I stayed with in Italy tried to update the bicycle:
Which I kind of liked. When I asked the Soupies if I should change the logo to this, they shot it down. Another design firm tried to sell me on their services with a cartoonish logo of a bicyclist with a bowl of soup on his head and motion lines indicating the speed of my deliveries. I sadly don't have that file anymore.
When we set out to do this mashup business, Matt and I discovered that we would not be able to use the Daily Juice brand... a long story with a surprisingly complex corporate structure behind it. We needed to do what we were both kind of reluctant to do: invent a new brand for the juice portion of the store. We kicked around a bit of the old-fashioned self-explanatory: "Austin Juice Co." We tinkered a bit with the mod: "Slurp". "Ooze". None of this fit Matt's persona or style, really. But then we finally settled on something that came from our literally little architectural situation, our little box on the corner of Lamar and Manchaca, something with a half-measure of self-explanatory and half-measure of mod: "Juicebox".
Both Matt and I were fortunate to be acquainted with the lovely, the talented Jennifer Braham of Brink Creative. Jennifer is a design phenom whose work colors much of Austin... her work for Uchi (timeless), The Peacock (well-designed but doomed), Kick Pleat, Big Red Sun, etc., is unwaveringly excellent and sophisticated. We went to her with vague notions and rode on her magic carpet, witnessed her prodigious output, and basically followed her lead in a choose-your-own-adventure design process.
She interwove my input ("How about a little more serif?") with Matt's ("I need something kind of like a 21st Century tiki hut mixed with old-school hip hop and robots") with aplomb and grace. Each visit we would scan ten different options, choose one direction, and come back the next with to find ten different branches off that idea. It was stunning. She is a serious pixel-pusher and approaches the work with boundless whimsy. An honor to be part of her process. But still, it was strange to put the cart before the horse, to design a brand for a business that didn't exist. I guess that's how it's done.
Here was part of Round 1:
Fresh! Inviting! Simple! Combines the brands in a palatable way. We showed it to our respective wives and got a double (er, quadruple) thumbs-down. Too Mall Court. Too Chili's. In fact, Jennifer was having a very hard time with my brand because it's so elemental and complete and burned into her brain. She was reluctant to change it but tried her best. I was excited about a break with the past, a move into the future; it's something we all yearn for in one way or another. But after Meredith said "Chili's", I could never look at it without thinking Chili's. Like when an old girlfriend said that my favorite Joe Satriani song sounded like the theme from Top Gun, it was ruined forever.
We decided to let the Soup Peddler brand rest and focus on ways to develop Juicebox as similar but different, complementary but contrasty.
Jovial. Homemade. Pineapple-y. Matt walked around Jennifer's office trying it on, trying to feel the new brand and see if he could physically embody it. He understandably has a very, very strong affiliation with the Daily Juice brand, so this whole process has been fraught with weirdness for him. For the founder of a business, for these real, bootstrapped brands, there is such a strong identification that it becomes very personal. So there's a bit of an adulterous element here for Matt, there's a lot of hesitance and trepidation. Ultimately, he didn't feel it for this design. He gave Jennifer a raft of confusing, conflicting directives on where to go next. She gave it another shot.
This met with Matt's unadulterated enthusiasm. It took me a few minutes to get with him on it but his attitude was infectious. He sold me on Mr. Juicy by strutting robotically around the room. Mr. Juicy is, essentially, Matt Shook in avatar form. Fresh, enthusiastic, constantly on the move. There's also a kind of compatibility between this and Soup Peddler, that slightly asymmetrical off-kilterness. Contrasty in style, the typefaces are nice together. And Jennifer even made a little girlfriend for Mr. Juicy. Lucy Soupie:
(stay tuned for themes of impending disaster...)
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
The Juicebox/Soup Peddler Project V
When we last met, we were discussing my absolute joy with the architectural design process. The vision was beginning to focus, to cohere in my mind.
And then, The City.
The City gets a bad rap... it's very easy to complain about the dysfunction of bureaucracy. But I have to say that thus far, this has been a fairly wrinkle-free* process in terms of interfacing with the City.
But here's the thing: One wouldn't think, using basic analytical skills, that a takeout kiosk like the one we were planning would require a restroom for customers. After all, every mobile vendor and food trailer from here to East Pleasant Valley is free of that regulation. (For the record, I don't have the least problem with this.) You just apply a little
and you're good to go. Unfortunately, math only goes so far in the real world, so my excellent architect, Micah Land, received word that a restroom would be required for this concept. So we just lost 50 of our precious 213 square feet.
"It's definitely going to be a tight fit," said Micah.
In the first of a series of what is surely to be an oft-repeated joke, I said, "I think we should think outside the box here." If we have to put in a restroom, we might as well get a decent amount of seating out of it, and if we get a decent amount of seating, we're going to need all of that already scanty square footage to serve those folks. Micah went back to the drawing board with Michael et al and I began to walk away scratching my head.
"Oh, I also found out we're going to need a grease trap."
It was then that I realized that a new business venture is a lot like a new relationship. "This is going to be gangbusters! We're going to just be printing money!" is akin to "My new girl, you know, she's a supermodel. And she is absolutely crazy about me. But as various pesky little realities insinuate themselves upon the scene, it slowly morphs into: "Well, it turns out she's actually just a hand model, and she's also dating this other guy that she's pretty into."
It's not really that bad, and a grease trap requirement really isn't the kind of thing that ought to send someone to the medicine cabinet. But there is definitely an interesting psychological aspect to the whole entrepreneurship thing; an entrepreneur's cortex features a certain anti-negativity synaptic web structure that has to be cemented together with some very stout adhesive.
Entrepreneurs have to wake up each morning and write their own scripts. They write, act, direct, and produce. Some of us do the soundtrack and special effects too. It just takes a lot of gumption to wake up every morning and say, "Listen up, people. This is what we're going to do. I have no idea if any of this is going to work. Who's with me?" At its best, you're a ship captain. Grandeur, bravery. Slick uniform, epaulettes. At worst, you're Willy Loman. All noble artifice and a tired gray suit.
When I first began The Soup Peddler, I had a feeling of riding a conveyer, being constantly whooshed forward, and the ever-approaching series of doors would slam open in front of me. I hold that feeling close and always try to find if the world is being receptive and inviting to me or if it's blocking me at every turn. I'm not sure if that's very sound intuition, because some say the best things are worth the most fight. But who knows where the folks who say things like that actually end up? I do know that that sense is my weathervane. The winds may swirl, the readings change, but the weathervane generally gets it right.
Uh. Where was I?
I was rending my clothes in lamentation over the complexification of our little endeavor. I probably regained my composure with a little dip at Barton Springs. Soon enough, it was time to head back to the Hsu Studio and see what they had cooked up for me.
Oh. Okay. So you're saying... elegant, modern, simple, clean, breath of fresh air, bracing, stimulating, vital. Everything that screams soup and South Lamar. Everything that could scream soup and South Lamar.
I got my mojo back!
(to be continued)
And then, The City.
The City gets a bad rap... it's very easy to complain about the dysfunction of bureaucracy. But I have to say that thus far, this has been a fairly wrinkle-free* process in terms of interfacing with the City.
But here's the thing: One wouldn't think, using basic analytical skills, that a takeout kiosk like the one we were planning would require a restroom for customers. After all, every mobile vendor and food trailer from here to East Pleasant Valley is free of that regulation. (For the record, I don't have the least problem with this.) You just apply a little
If a = b And b = c Thena = c
End If
and you're good to go. Unfortunately, math only goes so far in the real world, so my excellent architect, Micah Land, received word that a restroom would be required for this concept. So we just lost 50 of our precious 213 square feet.
"It's definitely going to be a tight fit," said Micah.
In the first of a series of what is surely to be an oft-repeated joke, I said, "I think we should think outside the box here." If we have to put in a restroom, we might as well get a decent amount of seating out of it, and if we get a decent amount of seating, we're going to need all of that already scanty square footage to serve those folks. Micah went back to the drawing board with Michael et al and I began to walk away scratching my head.
"Oh, I also found out we're going to need a grease trap."
It was then that I realized that a new business venture is a lot like a new relationship. "This is going to be gangbusters! We're going to just be printing money!" is akin to "My new girl, you know, she's a supermodel. And she is absolutely crazy about me. But as various pesky little realities insinuate themselves upon the scene, it slowly morphs into: "Well, it turns out she's actually just a hand model, and she's also dating this other guy that she's pretty into."
It's not really that bad, and a grease trap requirement really isn't the kind of thing that ought to send someone to the medicine cabinet. But there is definitely an interesting psychological aspect to the whole entrepreneurship thing; an entrepreneur's cortex features a certain anti-negativity synaptic web structure that has to be cemented together with some very stout adhesive.
Entrepreneurs have to wake up each morning and write their own scripts. They write, act, direct, and produce. Some of us do the soundtrack and special effects too. It just takes a lot of gumption to wake up every morning and say, "Listen up, people. This is what we're going to do. I have no idea if any of this is going to work. Who's with me?" At its best, you're a ship captain. Grandeur, bravery. Slick uniform, epaulettes. At worst, you're Willy Loman. All noble artifice and a tired gray suit.
When I first began The Soup Peddler, I had a feeling of riding a conveyer, being constantly whooshed forward, and the ever-approaching series of doors would slam open in front of me. I hold that feeling close and always try to find if the world is being receptive and inviting to me or if it's blocking me at every turn. I'm not sure if that's very sound intuition, because some say the best things are worth the most fight. But who knows where the folks who say things like that actually end up? I do know that that sense is my weathervane. The winds may swirl, the readings change, but the weathervane generally gets it right.
Uh. Where was I?
I was rending my clothes in lamentation over the complexification of our little endeavor. I probably regained my composure with a little dip at Barton Springs. Soon enough, it was time to head back to the Hsu Studio and see what they had cooked up for me.
Oh. Okay. So you're saying... elegant, modern, simple, clean, breath of fresh air, bracing, stimulating, vital. Everything that screams soup and South Lamar. Everything that could scream soup and South Lamar.
I got my mojo back!
(to be continued)
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