Posts from — February 2009

We will be donating a bunch of adult books to Louisiana Books to Prisoners on Sunday April 5th. Really great work at getting literature to prisoners in the state of Louisiana and are completely not-for-profit. Check out the organization here:

“About Books 2 PrisonersNew Orleans Books 2 Prisoners is a 100% not-for-profit effort to correspond with Louisiana inmates and to mail them reading materials free of cost. Our short-term goals are to encourage literacy, to make prison-life more endurable, and to support prisoner interests to the best of our ability. It is not our place to necessarily “radicalize” prisoners, but rather to use our resources/privileges as the un-incarcerated to pass along materials on requested subjects.

If you have a loved one locked up, please have them write us a letter describing what books they are interested in:

Books 2 Prisoners
1631 Elysian Fields #117
New Orleans, LA 70117

email: books2prisoners@gmail.comBooks 2 Prisoners’ new worknight now takes place on Sundays at 4:00 pm, at Nowe Miasto (223 Jane Place).”

Thanks to Michael at Joe’s Inn in the Fan
for become a Books on Wheels Spring Tour Sponsor!!
Eat Joe’s Baked Spaghetti at:

205 N. Shields Ave.
Richmond, VA 23220
www.joesinn.com

If you are interested in being an individual, group, business, or organization that would like to donate through our sponsorship package, please email us at booksonwheelsva@yahoo.com!

“Hello!

Books on Wheels c/o
Shelley Briggs
612 Albemarle St.
Richmond, VA 23220

or

Tax-receipts will be mailed upon request.

-Shelley

Six Burner Restaurant on Main St. has so graciously offered to hold a benefit for Books on Wheels! For $35 you receive a three course meal with an appropriate beer paired with each course, and a portion of sales will go to Books on Wheels. Dinner begins at 5:30. Six Burner encourages patrons to make reservations to guarantee a spot for the evening. For more information, check out:

Books on Wheels Benefit Beer Dinner
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
Six Burner
1627 W. Main St.
Richmond, VA 23220
$35 (exclude tax and tip)
Three Course Meal and Beer
Dinner begins at 5:30 (you can make reservations for any time after this until 9:00)
804-353-4060 for reservations
Visit www.sixburner.net for more information about the resturant

“Located in the heart of the Historic Fan District of Richmond, Virginia, Six Burner Restaurant is a great neighborhood spot where regulars come in two to three times a week for a meal or a drink at the bar. It has a warm, casual atmosphere and is open for dinner every night except Sunday. The wine list is excellent, yet reasonable, and the menu is varied and unique. In addition to the regular menu, (which changes at least weekly), there are several specials offered at dinner. On Monday through Thursday, an additional Prix Fixe menu is available. Six Burner has an on/off premises alcohol license, so if you find a wine you love over dinner, you can buy a bottle (or more) to take home.

Chef Lee Gregory uses the freshest and highest quality products and ingredients. Lights are strung around the bar and along the exposed brick wall, where artwork of various local artists is displayed. Candles and white tablecloths add to the warm and lively atmosphere.

Ry & Beth Marchant, Owners
Lee Gregory, Chef/Manager
Tracey Love, Manager“

-Shelley

Available to consume your dollars at the new Ellwood Thompson’s Community Coffee Shop!!

March 22nd at Skateland on Hull Street
Doors open at6:30.  Here’s a little more info about the organization:

“That is right, you read that right! Derby is ALIVE, KICKING and BRAWLING right here in RICHMOND. River City Roller Girls, or RCR, is an all-women roller derby league passionate about and dedicated to the proliferation of the sport. Who exactly is RCR and what do they do? Find all this out and more than you ever wanted to know about the girls of RCR and the strategic game of women’s flat track derby.

Something exciting is happening in Richmond Virginia…Richmond’s first all women’s flat track roller derby association, the River City Rollergirls has begun its 4th season! We’re incorporating a new format and 2 new teams in 2009. The new teams will do equal traveling to other teams across the eastern seaboard as well as 6 home games each per year. That means Richmond now has twice the amount of derby bouts per year!

Right now, we’re looking for sponsorship, fundraising opportunities and possible trades as we’re moving into the new 2009 Season.

If you don’t know much about the River City Rollergirls, read on!

The River City Rollergirls are a non profit organization with over 60 members in the tri-city area. We support local and national charities such as, Ring Dog Rescue, Books on Wheels, Make a Wish Foundation, Stop Child Abuse Now, The Childrens Museum of Richmond, and The Richmond YWCA. We have also participated in fundraising and awareness events such as Livestrong Day, Race for the cure, Virginia Bully Walk, Punks for Presents, The Harvey Foundation, Art for Autism for the Faison school for Autism, many events at the Richmond Chapter of the SPCA animal shelter and more.  Each year we’re in operation, we add two new charities, so our outreach is constantly growing and changing.

In order to raise money for our charities and continue to operate as a league, we hold functions all year round. Roller Derby is one of the few all female full contact sports out there, and we’re doing our best to raise awareness and get people interested in this relatively new extreme sport.  We’ve been featured in national, regional and local publications. Just to give you an idea of the momentum behind Women’s Roller Derby, it should be mentioned that its a likely pick for the 2016 olympic games, a Feature Film staring Drew Barrymore and Ellen Paige is coming out in 2009, an animated series is slated to be released in 2010, and a video game for the Playstation 3 will be released in 2009.

The River City Rollergirls have no paid employees and use only volunteers. We are able to sustain ourselves as a non profit organization solely through tax deductible donations and support from the Richmond community. We promise that you won’t find any sport more action packed or a group more devoted to the community than the River City Rollergirls”.

Due to the economic crisis, Books on Wheels has moved tour dates and shortened the tour.
Sorry to those who we won’t be seeing this time around.
The new official, real deal tour dates are now:

April 5th: New Orleans, LA
April 6th: New Orleans, LA
April 7th: New Orleans, LA

Just three days but we are trying to do as much as possible in that time period.
If anyone has any information about locations we can set up or places that could
use some donated books, PLEASE contact us!!! Thanks!

Come join the Really Really Free Market in Monroe Park
Feb. 28th, 2009
12-5 pm
Bring items to give away, take items for yourself! This event is always fun!!
Free and Open to the public

For more information:
www. myspace. com/rvafreemarket
email: connellyrn@vcu.edu
approachingapocalypse@riseup.net
call: 804 300 0023 (Mo Karn)

Short Order
Elwood Thompson finally gathers enough cast-off materials to launch its café, a whole menu dedicated to whiskeys, and more.
by Deveron Timberlake

Ellwood’s Coffee gives more than lip service to the green and community-oriented missions of the grocery store across the parking lot.photo by Scott Elmquist

Conscious Corner

Look deeply into the new concrete countertops at Ellwood’s Coffee and you’ll see the future: bits of broken glass, construction detritus and the occasional Miller bottle cap, all fossilized into green.

Everything about the coffee house, opening this week across the parking lot from the natural-foods grocer, relates to environmentally aware building techniques, from the dual-flush toilets to compostable to-go cups, salvaged street signs made into outdoor tables, Lucky Strike factory panels hanging as wood soffits and walls covered in tinted American clay instead of paint.

This is the long-planned “corner of consciousness,” as nearly delirious ET staffers are calling their expansion, and there’s more to come. An outdoor mural by Richmond artist Ed Trask will cover the exterior walls of both grocery store and café, presenting a united façade at the mouth of Carytown.

The enlarged grocery store, planned for a spring unveiling, will give more square footage to dining tables and merchandise. First up, though, the coffeehouse — called the Community Place — will be open daily, serving sandwiches such as the ton of funghi and the tempeh Reuben, along with a sampling of chef Jannequin Bennett’s seasonal repertoire.

Local wines and beers will be poured, but the centerpiece of the operation is the $11,000 Clover coffee brewer, which makes “a clean and personal cup each time,” say the baristas, who’ve been training since July and who rate their Counter Culture Coffee organic, direct-trade beans the best available.

Inside the building, which once housed the High’s Ice Cream and sandwich shop and more recently the Blue Fox Café, furnishings are comfortably noncorporate. A big table by the bookshelves can house meet ups and community groups. Live music and open mic nights are in the works, and there’s “free-range Internet,” as they call it. There are teas by Herban Avenues and Rishi, even reference books and classics in a take-one, leave-one arrangement helped along by donations from Chop Suey Books. Kids can play with all-natural toys in the corner.

“This fulfills our mission,” store CEO Ryan Youngman says, “which is sustainability in a business that has a soul — it completes us.” For now, at least. Ellwood’s continues its expansion into Northern Virginia, and the future here could also hold a housewares division. Looks like caffeine will be a necessity.

Ellwood’s Coffee is open daily, 6 a.m.-10 p.m. 10 S. Thompson St. 612-1827. www.ellwoodthompsons.com.

Here is the link to the article!

By Michael Rogers

Opinion Editor I’m afraid I haven’t been completely honest with myself during the last year and a half of college. There are times in life — you might have experienced them — when you realize you’ve made tons of small decisions and finally reached a TAM point … That Ain’t Me. I know myself too well to actually believe that my passions are dead and my dreams small. To think I had finally arrived at a point of comfort with the world around me … TAM. I recently realized that when I’m here at school, I spread myself so thin that sometimes I’m not actually anywhere — moving too fast and caring too little for what’s going on around me. Most of my relationships are like faces when the train goes by and you can just barely make out the blur before it’s gone.

I realized that sometimes I spend more time on Facebook than with real people, more time screaming over the music than relaxing in the quiet, laughing when I really want to walk out of the room. There are days when I snap out of the funk and realize I’ve lost myself. Last Saturday was one of those days, and I just decided I was done.

Done running all over the place.

Done giving of myself for the sake of the now.

Eckart Tolle be damned, I’ve decided to plan for the future and I don’t see myself doing for the next 20 years what I have been doing for the last one.

No pretensions. No BS. Just me telling you what I love about the world or maybe where people could stand to improve a little. Every week I’m going to tell you why I’ve personally made the decision to live another day of my life and, more importantly, why it’s going to be a good one.

For now, I’ll leave you with a story about an old school bus and why it made my day last semester.

If you ever saw the “Books on Wheels” bus you’d never forget it. One day when I was escaping the suburbs, I saw it in a parking lot on Cary St. and wondered to myself, “Who would think to start an organization that combines free bike repair with free books?”

Fortunately, I’m the over-friendly type, and I stopped to meet the owners of the bus, Ward Tefft and Shelley Briggs. While I spoke with the owners and loaded boxes of books, cars came and dropped off everything from “Green Eggs and Ham” to old romance novels. I knew I had found what I didn’t know I was looking for.

During a more recent conversation with Shelley, she told me about the beginnings of the Books on Wheels.

“We didn’t come up with a plan or a name before we had bought the bus. I highly recommend anyone approaching anything the same way,” she said.

Pragmatic college students might call this sort of life decision dangerous or a waste of time, but for Shelley and Ward, the Books on Wheels bus is just what they do — something they’ve made a commitment to.

As for my initial question about the combination of books and bikes, Shelley made the remark, “We consider them both to be liberating tools as far as education and transportation are concerned.”

Why didn’t I think of that?

I can’t tell you how much I want to be these people. I was never cut out for this fancy college thing, but I feel like I’ve been able to fake it pretty well so far. I still think D-hall is the most awkward space on campus and the nightlife here is great, but unfortunately similar.

But what I have begun to learn is that I am better off for being here. The campus mentality is “get in the box,” but I’ve never really liked the box and I had to learn that for myself. If I settle for the box now, there is no way I’ll ever do something like meet a woman with tattoos and start something like Books on Wheels as a middle-aged man (Shelly, don’t be creeped out by me).

So learn a lesson from two people doing something less-than-ordinary and imagine yourself headed in that direction as you live your life … or you can just settle down in the box and stop asking questions. It’s way more comfortable, but not nearly as rewarding.

Contact opinion editor Michael Rogers at michael.rogers@richmond.edu