Though Beer Advocate maddeningly doesn’t put their yearly beer bar rankings online, this comment from “brickstoredave” (aka co-owner Dave Blanchard) leads me to believe that after the remarkable achievement of ranking #3 in the U.S. last year, the Brick Store Pub has climbed a spot to #2 among the country’s best beer bars.

Pretty amazing.  Congrats guys!

Aren’t we lucky?

In light of the rotten economy, many of us doubled-down our usual efforts to do a majority of our 2008 holiday shopping/eating in Decatur.  Specifically on this site, I tried harder than ever to keep everyone up-to-date on the latest events/sales/restaurant openings in hopes that better local communication would draw a few more dollars away from the big-box and into our smaller shops.  Knowledge is power and all that…

So  how did the 2008 holiday season shake out Decatur business owners?  Did we exceed or miss expectations?

No need to post your business name if you don’t want to and feel free to be as vague and anonymous as you would like. But after all the efforts many of us made these past couple months to “live, eat and shop Decatur”, we’d love to hear a follow up!

Thanks in advance!

Seems like Daily Candy has made a New Year’s resolution to feature more Decatur blogs in 2009.

After posting a New Year’s playlist by the AsianCajuns this past week, today they feature Decatur resident Pam Galenkamp’s blog “Cooking For Monkeys“, which documents the insanely creative school lunches Pam creates for her son (a.k.a “Monkey”) on a regular basis.

Check out all of her edible art here.

Thanks to her husband Dan for forwarding!

Andisheh provides us with this slightly disturbing pic of a pile of soon-to-be recycled Decatur Christmas trees.  Being multi-talented, he also provided the post title.

We didn’t get ours down in time to make Decatur’s recycling deadline.  Guess we’ll have to drop it off at Home Depot?

As noted in this week’s commission agenda (and supplementary materials), Toni Tolbert Dixon is being recommend for the open position of Decatur Fire Chief beginning July 1st, 2009.

Her most recent resume can be found on pages 16-21 of the supplementary materials and Peggy Merriss’ letter of recommendation can be found on page 15.

Decatur’s first female fire chief!  Very cool!

I’m thinking this could be a Georgia first too.  This National Report Card of Women in Firefighting (pdf) states that there are only 31 female fire chiefs in the country as of 2008.  Also, “Among the 350,000 paid firefighters in the nation today, the 2000 Census reports that women number slightly more than 11,000 or 3.7%.  This figure places firefighting in the lowest 11 percent of all occupations in terms of women employees.”