Day 22 of the #Best09 Blog Challenge: What is my Favorite "New" Business of '09

Note: As I uploaded my content, it seems perfect to tell you the subtitle which popped into my head for this post is “Everything Old is New Again, Sort of like this Blogger… in 2009” … made me giggle briefly, anyway.

Gwen Bell’s Best09 Blog Challenge has been like having several hundred playmates gather in the playground for the month to hold a festival of reflection upon the past year not based on what we might choose on our own, but through Gwen Bell’s promptings. Some of the prompts haven’t fit me perfectly, but it has been a blast to go through and work with them anyway – sometimes massaging them to fit me and sometimes just diving headlong into whatever shows up.

My favorite of the “whatever shows up” is the wide variety of bloggers I have encountered.

Today’s prompt is:

December 22 Startup. What's a business that you found this year that you love? Who thought it up? What makes it special?

I wish I could say the start up I found was a women owned, women managed business that employed people using a new paradigm model right here in Bakersfield but… I am not aware of any of those.

 

Note to Bakersfield readers: if this describes a place you love, please let me know.

 

Now, my favorite new business this year may sound like the antithesis of that sort of business but bear with me, please.

 

GooseLoonies, which I discovered yesterday has a longer name which is “GooseLoonies Uptown Café”.

 

This is a new/old start up. I used to go to Goose Loonies regularly when it was on 19^th Street. It was a place everyone in my wildly divergent aged family would agree to go and oftentimes on Sunday mornings you would find me there, eating their incredible breakfasts while my children were in Sunday School at our church, caty corner from there.

I got a lot of writing done in the crazy, football loving atmosphere. Team Jersey wearing people would be hooting and hollering and I would be writing and writing and writing and smiling and drinking my coffee and in my own space of heaven before attending the service at my "other" (some might call it "actual" church.) Both were like sanctuary to me. The waitresses knew me and liked to hover around me sometimes, asking me questions, chatting with me as I wrote and drank coffee.

 

I first went to the new GooseLoonies a couple months ago after a show. I am a downtown person rather than a “what I call edge of the Earth” person, which is where many of my cast mates choose to go after shows. I like to stay in-town and I prefer to support local eateries/drinkeries and GooseLoonies fills both of those desires in a setting that fits me perfectly. It is even in a “less than cool in this moment” location, east of most of the downtown action and for now in this moment, that appeals to me too.

 

They have lots of beer selections, tasty after-show type wings and pizza food to share with a table full of thespian types and their friends… I arrive there hungry and tired from a night of active creativity and leave there with an enormous smile on my face and a full belly.

 

It works. It makes me feel content.

 

So simple!

 

And to cap it all off, how about a review from Pete Tittl from the Bakersfield Californian? It includes photos, if you want to see.