I was battling a jammed steel door on a sea container, leveraging the steel handle with a 6’ steel digging bar into the ground and all the strength I could muster.
Well the sneaky damn handle didn’t like me much, so it decided to drop as I was pulling full strength. Hit my self straight on top of the dome, saw stars, knocked myself to the ground and split my melon open.
Damn that hurt a little and definitely going to leave a mark. 😳🤯🤬
Took the train to San Francisco with my daughter and Wife to drop my daughter's passport at the Japanese Consulate so she can get her passport stamped with a visa. Had lunch at Katsu-Ya Japanese restaurant and drinks at Blue Bottle Coffee before walking back to the train station. Fun day
Join us on Zoom vHerf (Meeting # 2619860114 Password vHerf2020 )
WARNING: The above post may contain thoughts or ideas known to the State of Caliphornia to cause seething rage, confusion, distemper, nausea, perspiration, sphincter release, or cranial implosion to persons who implicitly trust only one news source, or find themselves at either the left or right political extreme. Proceed at your own risk.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
WARNING: The above post may contain thoughts or ideas known to the State of Caliphornia to cause seething rage, confusion, distemper, nausea, perspiration, sphincter release, or cranial implosion to persons who implicitly trust only one news source, or find themselves at either the left or right political extreme. Proceed at your own risk.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
I started playing with coffee roasting in Aug. '04. In a very short while, people wanted some and offered to pay for it. As a recently divorced and laid-off person (read poor), it seemed like a good idea to print up some business cards and build a small clientele. In Jan. '05, I started an associate degree in culinary arts (the Feds paid for the schooling and added 18 months of unemployment benefits, which, along w/ not wanting to go back to work, motivated me to pursue a degree in something.)
In the third semester, I had a class called Field Experience, where, instead of going to campus, I went to help in the kitchen at Mt. Mary, a women-only college about a mile away from home. One day, during a break, I was exploring the old building I was in, and came across a fella about my age, hanging around w/ a travel mug in his hand. I baited him with, "Hey buddy, what's in that mug?" and "Do you enjoy a great cup of coffee?" He answered yes, and more importantly, answered my next question correctly, "Do you own a grinder?". (If they don't own a grinder, I assume they're lying about their answer to question no. 2) So I left a business card with Larry, thinking I'll never hear from him again.
A few weeks later, I got a call from Larry, and he became what is now my longest-term customer and a very good friend. (We're going for a bite to eat, and then to a Leo Kottke concert Sunday night). Larry's wife was a high school teacher who told her principal about my coffee, and John then became a customer too - that was maybe 15 years ago. John's a few years older than me, and his wife, Lynn, is asking him to clean out their unnecessary stuff. Lynn has stage 4 cancer, and that might have something to do with wanting to clean house.
So today, when John stopped in for his usual 3lbs, he brought a stack of albums with him. He said they'd actually get some use if they were mine. 40 records, almost all are classical, and they're great recordings, all like new.
Held an intervention for @Hawks mustache. It garnered a lot of support.
Only one mustache can be seen clearly in this photograph. It doesn't belong to me. If any Fanny Duster is requiring an intervention it's the one with it's own personality.
🧐
Held an intervention for @Hawks mustache. It garnered a lot of support.
Only one mustache can be seen clearly in this photograph. It doesn't belong to me. If any Fanny Duster is requiring an intervention it's the one with it's own personality.
🧐
Yep clear as day. Recognized that swiffer right away as @Olekingcole
Too bad he couldn’t take that pic with a nice MacArthur Cobb
an article about our shop transitioning to allow us to have a life besides work::
The original Cape Cod bracelet is famously hard to get. Now it’s going online-only, ending a longtime tradition.
“The money, the exposure, the TikTok videos, I could care less about all of that,” said the owner of Eden Hand Arts, who dislikes the viral popularity of her family’s iconic bracelet.
By Steph Machado Globe Staff,Updated June 13, 2025, 1 hour ago
The original Cape Cod bracelet with its screwball closure created by Eden Hand Arts in Dennis, Mass.COURTESY OF EDEN HAND ARTS
The original Cape Cod bracelet is famously hard to get. Now it’s going online-only, ending a longtime tradition.
“The money, the exposure, the TikTok videos, I could care less about all of that,” said the owner of Eden Hand Arts, who dislikes the viral popularity of her family’s iconic bracelet.
By Steph Machado Globe Staff,Updated June 13, 2025, 1 hour ago
The original Cape Cod bracelet with its screwball closure created by Eden Hand Arts in Dennis, Mass.
The original Cape Cod bracelet with its screwball closure created by Eden Hand Arts in Dennis, Mass.COURTESY OF EDEN HAND ARTS
For some, getting a reservation to go inside the shop that created the original Cape Cod bracelet rivaled scoring tickets to a Taylor Swift concert.
“It was like the hunger games,” said Kristin O’Toole, a teacher from Wilmington who has five bracelets purchased over many years of Cape trips. “It was survival of the fittest.”
Unlike most stores, you couldn’t just walk into Eden Hand Arts in Dennis to buy the iconic “screwball” Cape Cod bracelet — a sterling silver bangle with a silver or gold ball **** it together — and other jewelry. The tiny family-owned shop off of Route 6A required tickets to get inside — free, but hard to snag — a system put in place after the demand for the bracelet skyrocketed beyond the artists’ abilities to handmake them fast enough.
Neighbors and customers complained. Some people figured out how to get around the ticket system. And the store couldn’t keep up.
Get Rhode Map
So this summer, the iconic shop won’t open for jewelry sales on the Cape at all. Starting July 2, the hard-to-get bracelet and other jewelry will be available on Etsy, the first time it’s ever been sold online.
“It was really clear we couldn’t go on like this,” the owner, Rachel Carey-Harper, told the Globe. “We’re a tiny little business.”
The announcement by the shop last week, which cited “intense dislike” for the ticketing system, prompted a flurry of reaction online. Out-of-towners who have dreamed of owning an original screwball were thrilled at the prospect of buying one remotely.
But for longtime shoppers, the elusiveness was the point. Securing a ticket weeks in advance, going to Dennis, waiting in line, bringing enough cash, getting your wrist measured. It took effort. With no online catalog, Capegoers shopped each other’s wrists, writing down the names of pieces so they could ask for them at the shop or in the “onesie” line outside, where you could buy one specific piece of jewelry without even seeing it.
Copycats are widely available from other jewelers, but the mystique of securing an original was part of the adventure, longtime customers said. Many people never take them off.
“Everybody who has the real Eden bracelets, you feel like a special club,” O’Toole said. She brought her 8-year-old niece to get her first screwball bracelet last summer, after waking up at 5 a.m. to stalk the website for tickets in advance. She’s been going to the Cape for 15 summers, and her whole family makes a day out of her Eden trip, going to the lake across the street on the day of the reservation.
Eden urges customers not to purchase the many copycats, noting that their bracelets are made in one-eighth increments to ensure a custom fit. The screwball name is trademarked, but the family tried and failed to secure a patent to stop others from copying the design, Carey-Harper said. The authentic bracelets come with a small dangling tag with an apple symbol on it.
On the shop’s Facebook announcement about not reopening to in-person jewelry sales, hundreds of commenters left messages with memories of visiting Dennis to buy a bracelet with their mom, their daughter, their grandmother.
Advertisement
“Rather than fighting those visiting the Cape for tickets we will be fighting resellers worldwide,” one commenter said. Another celebrated, writing she’d been waiting “years” to buy a bracelet since she lives in Michigan.
It was never the owners’ intention to make the bracelet so exclusive.
Once a hidden gem spread by word-of-mouth, the shop was overrun after “The Bachelorette” contestant Chris Lambton gave one of the Eden bracelets to bachelorette Ali Fedotowsky as a gift on the hit ABC franchise in 2010.
“I pleaded with him not to give it,” said Carey-Harper, whose family knew the Lambtons from Dennis. “But he didn’t listen.”
"Eden Hand Arts in Dennis, Mass., won’t sell jewelry in-person at its store this year, but will offer pottery and other art.
Plenty of small businesses would be thrilled by the national exposure. But Carey-Harper said she almost closed the shop, one of several times it almost shuttered since it opened in the early 1960s. The store has never advertised, and Carey-Harper rarely does interviews, aiming to avoid publicity.
Eden Hand Arts in Dennis, Mass., won’t sell jewelry in-person at its store this year, but will offer pottery and other art.
Eden Hand Arts in Dennis, Mass., won’t sell jewelry in-person at its store this year, but will offer pottery and other art.COURTESY OF EDEN HAND ARTS
She wishes it was not so popular, and cringes at the overconsumption of it all.
“The money, the exposure, the TikTok videos, I could care less about all of that,” Carey-Harper said. “Obviously you want to make enough to pay the bills, but beyond that, how much do you need?”
Carey-Harper estimates the demand compared to the supply is “a thousand to one.” Since every bracelet is handmade by her husband and other jewelers, they would never be able to keep up — “unless we turn it into a factory, which is not who we are.”
She also didn’t want to address demand by jacking up the price of a $250 bracelet to $2,000. “I want it to be accessible,” she said. “I don’t want our art to be elitist.”
It’s a “misconception” to call Eden Hand Arts a jewelry store at all, Carey-Harper argues. The shop was started by her mother Eve Carey, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, who specialized in Majolica earthenware pottery. She and her husband John, the designer of the screwball bracelet, bought the Dennis studio surrounded by a garden of apple trees in 1962 and named it Eden, a play on Eve’s name. She died in 2005, and John in 2012.
A brochure from 1964 details the offerings from Eve and John Carey of Eden Hand Arts in Dennis, Mass.COURTESY OF EDEN HAND ARTS
A 1964 brochure references the couples’ pottery, bird paintings, glass and wire sculptures, as well as jewelry. “Note that it doesn’t mention the Cape Cod Screwball bracelet,” Carey-Harper said.
Now, she hopes the “garden,” as she calls it, will return to its roots. The store is currently closed, but will reopen in July just to sell pottery and other art, not jewelry. Repairs and exchanges for jewelry purchased in 2024 or earlier will also take place there, but not for jewelry purchased in the new online shop.
Moving to online sales is a huge leap for Eden. Eve Carey didn’t even use a calculator, never mind a computer, preferring to do the shop’s bookkeeping by hand. The store has never accepted credit cards.
Carey-Harper said she chose Etsy because an employee already knew how to run an Etsy shop. The jewelry pieces will still be handmade, so the quantity will be limited.
The prices are not yet set, but she acknowledged she will need to increase them because of Etsy’s cut, and also because of the rising cost of gold and silver. Also on her to-do list: recording a video instructing customers how to properly measure their wrists.
“Life is about change,” Carey-Harper, who is 74, said in response to disappointed customers. “Change challenges us to find the joy of new adventures. And that’s what this is about. It’s a new adventure.”
O’Toole says the online shop “takes away the real appeal” of buying the jewelry. “Not everybody had a real Eden bracelet, because you had to go through all this hassle and be down the Cape.”
But despite the end to her summer tradition, she said: “I probably will buy one online. I don’t think I’ll be able to keep myself away.”
Steph Machado can be reached at steph.machado@globe.com. Follow her @StephMachado.
Comments
Damn near knocked myself unconscious today.
I was battling a jammed steel door on a sea container, leveraging the steel handle with a 6’ steel digging bar into the ground and all the strength I could muster.
Well the sneaky damn handle didn’t like me much, so it decided to drop as I was pulling full strength. Hit my self straight on top of the dome, saw stars, knocked myself to the ground and split my melon open.
Damn that hurt a little and definitely going to leave a mark. 😳🤯🤬
A good cigar and whiskey solve most problems.
Hope you are OK.
Edward, I’m good thank you. Head hurts. Pride hurts worse. 😔 I called it a day and smoking a cigar and drinking a modelo. Problem solved.
A good cigar and whiskey solve most problems.
Should have had a football helmet on
I don't have problems, just more work to do.
More like the special people’s helmets ⛑️
A good cigar and whiskey solve most problems.
Bike down hard.
A good cigar and whiskey solve most problems.
W, I think I’d call it a day and try again tomorrow.
Just noticed the cigar band was applied off center. Kinda like me.
A good cigar and whiskey solve most problems.
Hope you are O.K . Sucks about the bike
The band is perfectly centered. It's your head that is crooked.
Took the train to San Francisco with my daughter and Wife to drop my daughter's passport at the Japanese Consulate so she can get her passport stamped with a visa. Had lunch at Katsu-Ya Japanese restaurant and drinks at Blue Bottle Coffee before walking back to the train station. Fun day
Don't you know that all head injuries call for an immediate nap?
Trapped in the People's Communist Republic of Massachusetts.
Yuck.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
My little sister and brother-in-law
Got my father present early so I can wear one saturday.
Held an intervention for @Hawks mustache. It garnered a lot of support.
I don't have problems, just more work to do.
GF found a new cat
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
2 years later, terrorizing the neighborhood
I started playing with coffee roasting in Aug. '04. In a very short while, people wanted some and offered to pay for it. As a recently divorced and laid-off person (read poor), it seemed like a good idea to print up some business cards and build a small clientele. In Jan. '05, I started an associate degree in culinary arts (the Feds paid for the schooling and added 18 months of unemployment benefits, which, along w/ not wanting to go back to work, motivated me to pursue a degree in something.)
In the third semester, I had a class called Field Experience, where, instead of going to campus, I went to help in the kitchen at Mt. Mary, a women-only college about a mile away from home. One day, during a break, I was exploring the old building I was in, and came across a fella about my age, hanging around w/ a travel mug in his hand. I baited him with, "Hey buddy, what's in that mug?" and "Do you enjoy a great cup of coffee?" He answered yes, and more importantly, answered my next question correctly, "Do you own a grinder?". (If they don't own a grinder, I assume they're lying about their answer to question no. 2) So I left a business card with Larry, thinking I'll never hear from him again.
A few weeks later, I got a call from Larry, and he became what is now my longest-term customer and a very good friend. (We're going for a bite to eat, and then to a Leo Kottke concert Sunday night). Larry's wife was a high school teacher who told her principal about my coffee, and John then became a customer too - that was maybe 15 years ago. John's a few years older than me, and his wife, Lynn, is asking him to clean out their unnecessary stuff. Lynn has stage 4 cancer, and that might have something to do with wanting to clean house.
So today, when John stopped in for his usual 3lbs, he brought a stack of albums with him. He said they'd actually get some use if they were mine. 40 records, almost all are classical, and they're great recordings, all like new.
Ya just never know what a day will hold!
Only one mustache can be seen clearly in this photograph. It doesn't belong to me. If any Fanny Duster is requiring an intervention it's the one with it's own personality.
🧐
Nolite Oblivisci Peniculus Dentes
Yep clear as day. Recognized that swiffer right away as @Olekingcole
Too bad he couldn’t take that pic with a nice MacArthur Cobb
A good cigar and whiskey solve most problems.
an article about our shop transitioning to allow us to have a life besides work::
The original Cape Cod bracelet is famously hard to get. Now it’s going online-only, ending a longtime tradition.
“The money, the exposure, the TikTok videos, I could care less about all of that,” said the owner of Eden Hand Arts, who dislikes the viral popularity of her family’s iconic bracelet.
By Steph Machado Globe Staff,Updated June 13, 2025, 1 hour ago
The original Cape Cod bracelet with its screwball closure created by Eden Hand Arts in Dennis, Mass.COURTESY OF EDEN HAND ARTS
The original Cape Cod bracelet is famously hard to get. Now it’s going online-only, ending a longtime tradition.
“The money, the exposure, the TikTok videos, I could care less about all of that,” said the owner of Eden Hand Arts, who dislikes the viral popularity of her family’s iconic bracelet.
By Steph Machado Globe Staff,Updated June 13, 2025, 1 hour ago
The original Cape Cod bracelet with its screwball closure created by Eden Hand Arts in Dennis, Mass.
The original Cape Cod bracelet with its screwball closure created by Eden Hand Arts in Dennis, Mass.COURTESY OF EDEN HAND ARTS
For some, getting a reservation to go inside the shop that created the original Cape Cod bracelet rivaled scoring tickets to a Taylor Swift concert.
“It was like the hunger games,” said Kristin O’Toole, a teacher from Wilmington who has five bracelets purchased over many years of Cape trips. “It was survival of the fittest.”
Unlike most stores, you couldn’t just walk into Eden Hand Arts in Dennis to buy the iconic “screwball” Cape Cod bracelet — a sterling silver bangle with a silver or gold ball **** it together — and other jewelry. The tiny family-owned shop off of Route 6A required tickets to get inside — free, but hard to snag — a system put in place after the demand for the bracelet skyrocketed beyond the artists’ abilities to handmake them fast enough.
Neighbors and customers complained. Some people figured out how to get around the ticket system. And the store couldn’t keep up.
Get Rhode Map
So this summer, the iconic shop won’t open for jewelry sales on the Cape at all. Starting July 2, the hard-to-get bracelet and other jewelry will be available on Etsy, the first time it’s ever been sold online.
“It was really clear we couldn’t go on like this,” the owner, Rachel Carey-Harper, told the Globe. “We’re a tiny little business.”
The announcement by the shop last week, which cited “intense dislike” for the ticketing system, prompted a flurry of reaction online. Out-of-towners who have dreamed of owning an original screwball were thrilled at the prospect of buying one remotely.
But for longtime shoppers, the elusiveness was the point. Securing a ticket weeks in advance, going to Dennis, waiting in line, bringing enough cash, getting your wrist measured. It took effort. With no online catalog, Capegoers shopped each other’s wrists, writing down the names of pieces so they could ask for them at the shop or in the “onesie” line outside, where you could buy one specific piece of jewelry without even seeing it.
Copycats are widely available from other jewelers, but the mystique of securing an original was part of the adventure, longtime customers said. Many people never take them off.
“Everybody who has the real Eden bracelets, you feel like a special club,” O’Toole said. She brought her 8-year-old niece to get her first screwball bracelet last summer, after waking up at 5 a.m. to stalk the website for tickets in advance. She’s been going to the Cape for 15 summers, and her whole family makes a day out of her Eden trip, going to the lake across the street on the day of the reservation.
Eden urges customers not to purchase the many copycats, noting that their bracelets are made in one-eighth increments to ensure a custom fit. The screwball name is trademarked, but the family tried and failed to secure a patent to stop others from copying the design, Carey-Harper said. The authentic bracelets come with a small dangling tag with an apple symbol on it.
On the shop’s Facebook announcement about not reopening to in-person jewelry sales, hundreds of commenters left messages with memories of visiting Dennis to buy a bracelet with their mom, their daughter, their grandmother.
Advertisement
“Rather than fighting those visiting the Cape for tickets we will be fighting resellers worldwide,” one commenter said. Another celebrated, writing she’d been waiting “years” to buy a bracelet since she lives in Michigan.
It was never the owners’ intention to make the bracelet so exclusive.
Once a hidden gem spread by word-of-mouth, the shop was overrun after “The Bachelorette” contestant Chris Lambton gave one of the Eden bracelets to bachelorette Ali Fedotowsky as a gift on the hit ABC franchise in 2010.
“I pleaded with him not to give it,” said Carey-Harper, whose family knew the Lambtons from Dennis. “But he didn’t listen.”
"Eden Hand Arts in Dennis, Mass., won’t sell jewelry in-person at its store this year, but will offer pottery and other art.
Plenty of small businesses would be thrilled by the national exposure. But Carey-Harper said she almost closed the shop, one of several times it almost shuttered since it opened in the early 1960s. The store has never advertised, and Carey-Harper rarely does interviews, aiming to avoid publicity.
Eden Hand Arts in Dennis, Mass., won’t sell jewelry in-person at its store this year, but will offer pottery and other art.
Eden Hand Arts in Dennis, Mass., won’t sell jewelry in-person at its store this year, but will offer pottery and other art.COURTESY OF EDEN HAND ARTS
She wishes it was not so popular, and cringes at the overconsumption of it all.
“The money, the exposure, the TikTok videos, I could care less about all of that,” Carey-Harper said. “Obviously you want to make enough to pay the bills, but beyond that, how much do you need?”
Carey-Harper estimates the demand compared to the supply is “a thousand to one.” Since every bracelet is handmade by her husband and other jewelers, they would never be able to keep up — “unless we turn it into a factory, which is not who we are.”
She also didn’t want to address demand by jacking up the price of a $250 bracelet to $2,000. “I want it to be accessible,” she said. “I don’t want our art to be elitist.”
the rest of the article:
It’s a “misconception” to call Eden Hand Arts a jewelry store at all, Carey-Harper argues. The shop was started by her mother Eve Carey, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, who specialized in Majolica earthenware pottery. She and her husband John, the designer of the screwball bracelet, bought the Dennis studio surrounded by a garden of apple trees in 1962 and named it Eden, a play on Eve’s name. She died in 2005, and John in 2012.
A brochure from 1964 details the offerings from Eve and John Carey of Eden Hand Arts in Dennis, Mass.COURTESY OF EDEN HAND ARTS
A 1964 brochure references the couples’ pottery, bird paintings, glass and wire sculptures, as well as jewelry. “Note that it doesn’t mention the Cape Cod Screwball bracelet,” Carey-Harper said.
Now, she hopes the “garden,” as she calls it, will return to its roots. The store is currently closed, but will reopen in July just to sell pottery and other art, not jewelry. Repairs and exchanges for jewelry purchased in 2024 or earlier will also take place there, but not for jewelry purchased in the new online shop.
Moving to online sales is a huge leap for Eden. Eve Carey didn’t even use a calculator, never mind a computer, preferring to do the shop’s bookkeeping by hand. The store has never accepted credit cards.
Carey-Harper said she chose Etsy because an employee already knew how to run an Etsy shop. The jewelry pieces will still be handmade, so the quantity will be limited.
The prices are not yet set, but she acknowledged she will need to increase them because of Etsy’s cut, and also because of the rising cost of gold and silver. Also on her to-do list: recording a video instructing customers how to properly measure their wrists.
“Life is about change,” Carey-Harper, who is 74, said in response to disappointed customers. “Change challenges us to find the joy of new adventures. And that’s what this is about. It’s a new adventure.”
O’Toole says the online shop “takes away the real appeal” of buying the jewelry. “Not everybody had a real Eden bracelet, because you had to go through all this hassle and be down the Cape.”
But despite the end to her summer tradition, she said: “I probably will buy one online. I don’t think I’ll be able to keep myself away.”
Steph Machado can be reached at steph.machado@globe.com. Follow her @StephMachado.
It seems fitting to quote a quote.
Excellent article. A good glimpse into the life of one beloved mouse at ccom.
Trapped in the People's Communist Republic of Massachusetts.