Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

You finally took down that 2009 calendar, and don't have anything to replace it with? Or you haven't even taken down 2009 yet?

Well, you can still get your 2010 Columbia Closings Wall Calendar or your 2010 Pawleys Island Wall Calendar.

After all, it'll be 2010 all year, and 2009's not coming back!

OK, I've looked over each post I made during 2009, and these are the top 20 posts that either

a) I liked

b) Seemed significant to the area

c) Seemed to get a lot of feedback

The rule is that the post had to have been made this year, the subject of the post may have been gone for years or decades. These are in no particular order other than roughly the order the posts were made in.

1) Birds On A Wire

2) Sounds Familiar, Rosewood

3) Circuit City, Two Notch & Harbison

4) Guignard Bricks

5) Southern Gentleman's Strip Club

6) The Bounty, Sumter Highway

7) Waldenbooks, Dutch Square

8) The Market Restaurant

9) Luigi's Italian Kitchen

10) The Original Italian Pie, Forest Drive

11) The Village Bistro

12) Kmart, Dutch Square

13) The Myrtle Beach Pavilion

14) Hiller Hardware, Harden Street

15) Hurricane Hugo

16) Richland Mall Theater

17) Wade Hampton Hotel

18) Tasty Bake Shop

19) Bush River Mall

20) Le Petit Chateau

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Posting will be light to nonexistant for a bit.

If you order by midnight Sunday, you can still get your 2010 Columbia Closings Wall Calendar by Christmas with permium shipping. Of course if you just need it by the New Year, you still have plenty of time with regular shipping.

I'm also pleased to say that I've gotten my copy of the 2010 Pawleys Island Wall Calendar too, and I think it turned out pretty well.

You're going to need a calendar anyway, why not one of these?

That's right. You know those 2010 Columbia Closings wall calendars I've been hawking the last few weeks? Well, none left the printing center last week.

Of course, you can fix that by ordering yours today!

(Oldtimers will recognize where I lifted the 'none left' gag from..)

Here's a rather interesting picture I took the other night. The moon was almost full, and I took the camera out with a tripod to get some moonlight shots. With a long enough exposure, they look very much like daylit shots except for the visible stars and the way electric lights show up.

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

Posting is going to be light to non-existent going through the Thanksgiving weekend.

Here's a little helpful food hint I picked up a couple of years ago.

Pomegranates are great, but possibly the messiest fruit I've ever dealt with. The juice spurts everywhere and stains, plus it's a pain to get the arils out from the white stuff.

It helps a good bit to fill a big pot of cold water and break open the pomegranate pieces under water. You can then thumb the arils out from the wite stuff, and, the arils will (largely) sink while the white stuff will float and can be skimmed off.

Of course I still have juice stains all over my shirt..

More shameless commerce!

My copy of the 2010 Columbia Closings Wall Calendar arrived today, and I have to say I'm pretty pleased with it. There's always a danger that something that looks good on a computer monitor isn't going to look as good printed out, but I'm happy with the transfers here.

For those of you wondering where all the shots come from, here's a bit of a table of contents:

The Cover

Janurary

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October / November

December

OK, you may have noticed I didn't post yesterday or today. That's largely because I was working on this: The Columbia Closings 2010 Wall Calendar.

This bit of shameless commerce (and just in time for the holidays!) is twelve months of Columbia Closings pictures, plus a thirteenth shot for the cover (at no extra charge:-). The images were all taken as part of the web site process, but not all of them actually made it into posts. All are full bleeds except the Eggroll Station shot, a film image for which I do not yet have a scan in high enough resolution. In doing a selection of this sort given that only 13 slots are available, I obviously could have made some different choices (for instance not indulging myself with two months of neon), but on the whole I believe it's a good collection.

I have not seen the physical results myself yet (though I have mine on order), but Cafe Press is a widely respected business, and I fully expect it to be fine.

So, once again The 2010 Columbia Closings Wall Calendar: Buy five copies for your mother!

In case you haven't already noticed it in this week's Free Times, here's some places which have managed to go large chunks of a century without getting listed here:

Columbia’s Oldest Restaurants

and

More Longtime Local Restaurants"