A Manbites board meeting, lunch in Hillsborough, and blackout night at Flex…

~Saturday~  I got up at 8:30 this morning, and I made up a dozen sausage “biscuits” before heading to Durham for our 10:30 Manbites Dog Theater board of directors meeting. Biscuits is in quotation marks, because the turkey sausage patties were actually on rolls, not biscuits.

I walked around Geer Street looking for the building we were meeting in, as there’s lobby activity going on at the theater this morning that precluded it from being our usual meeting venue. Ed’s email had said we’re meeting at the “Strawbridge” building, which evidently means something to the people familiar with the history of that area.

When I mentioned that at the meeting, after seeing Ed and Aden walking toward a building and following them, Ed said that the building used to be the old Strawbridge printing company back in the day. Today’s it says “The Troxler Building” in the glass above the doorway.

In addition to my breakafast snacks, Jeff had brought Dunkin Doughnuts coffee and donuts, all of which made for a yummy breakfast.

Aden—who is not on the board, but is working with us to convert what has been a very informal accounting system for the theater into something more formal, which will benefit us in several ways, including having a more accurate picture of the financial state of the enterprise, as well as being able to commission, and successfully complete, an audit in the future, which would help us with some grant applications—attended our meeting and he and Ed, together, introduced us to the new system.

Overall, it was a productive meeting, and as I write this, I’m reminded that I need to do the minutes of that meeting while they’re still fairly fresh in my mind. I mean I don’t have to, but it’s always easier when I do them sooner rather than later.


After the meeting, Robert and I took a ride out to Hillsborough to try a barbecue place we’d read about in The Independent back in June:

Hillsborough BBQ Company
Hillsborough BBQ Company

I had a chopped barbecue plate with “white slaw” and fries as my sides, which also came with a few hushpuppies. It was most delicious, but certainly not good enough to trek that far back to enjoy. If I were ever in Hillsborough Street at a meal time, however, I’d definitely go back.

With that said, the service was not that great. We waited too long after we were done eating to see if we wanted dessert and to cash out. It was very crowded in the place, though.


Joe and I weren’t going to go out on our night-before-having-to-be-at-the-airport at 5:30AM the next day, but as usually happens, we went from not going out to going out early and coming home early, and for the most part that’s what we did.

It was “blackout night” at Flex, which tonight meant lots of black lights on that should an infinite amount of lint on everybody’s clothes and made certain people’s hair unrecognizable. In a brief bout of cattiness, we tried to decide if those certain people whose hair was affected were people who colored their hair.

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