Rearranging Store
By Co-Owner: Bonnie Meier

We have decided to rearrange a lot of our display areas in the store. Most notably, we will move all the wooden shoes toward the back of the store. This will relieve much of the congestion at the checkout counter that we experienced during the Tulip Festival due to the shoes being displayed behind the cash register. This will free up the front counter as well as give those who wish to try on shoes more room to do so. I’m hoping to hire a man during the festival to specially help people with the shoes and to be able to answer questions because he is very interested in the process of making the shoes himself. He is also active in the parade so he is contemplating whether he will have time to do this, but I’m hoping he answers in the affirmative.

Street-scape Project Progressing
By Co-Owner: Bonnie Meier

For the past four weeks the big equipment has been rumbling past our front door. Surprisingly many people are still finding our little business and, so far, our sales are similar to last year at this time. I had visions of no sales for about six weeks while they were working on our road. We’ve heard by the grape vine that they may be laying cement next week. That depends quite a bit on the weather, but so far rain has only slowed them down a little. They have found several surprises under the ground. For one, they found out that one of our neighbors was receiving their water through lead pipes. Two neighbors needed complete new sewer pipes and one of them also found large window wells under their sidewalk that actually led directly into their building without a solid wall in between. Luckily we didn’t need a new sewer (a man took internal pictures of the pipes and said they were fine). We will still have our sidewalk torn out and replaced, but I suspect that will happen after the new road is laid. In the long run it will be very nice, but we have to put up with some inconvenience in the meantime. We have also been leaving our garage door open for people to come in to the store through the back. You can also park in the back. You can also come through my Sherwood Forest office door, but you will have steps both on the outside and the inside if you do that. It might be easiest if you simply come straight through the garage.

Letters from Ralph, Author's Corner
By Co-Owner: Bonnie Meier

Checkout our new web site at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/LeeandBonnieMeier where you can purchase either the hard copy book “Letters from Ralph” or the ebook. The hard copy is our second edition and, to our knowledge, has all mistakes corrected. We found a few in the first edition and had them corrected.

The website also has direct links to our blog, Sherwood Forest Grants, LLC and Jubon Juweelen. Sherwood Forest Grants, LLC is a company that I started about 17 years ago to write grants for schools, nonprofits, businesses, etc. We have brought in several million dollars over the course of the years and you can see more details about the company on our website. If you would be interested in Sherwood Forest helping you with a grant, there is a contact page on the website. When I answer the phone here I usually answer by saying “Jubon Sherwood”. That is a combination of the two businesses. Also, our name is often in the phone book under Sherwood Forest. We have the same phone number for both businesses. Although I’m spending more time in Jubon Juweelen now hen I am at Sherwood, it is still an active business.

Next Month's Newsletter will be Delayed
By Co-Owner: Juliana Korver

Our newsletter is traditionaly sent out on the 24th of each month. However, in July you will have to wait a few extra days before receiving this communication from us as our IT specialist and newsletter compiler will be out of the country competing in the WFDF World Overall Flying Disc Championships in Norrkoping, Sweden. For information about the competition go to http://www.2015woc.com.

Trivia Question
By Co-Owner: Bonnie Meier

Our trivia question this month is how many spools of Gutterman thread did we have in our inventory count? This means the large, medium and small spools plus our heavy duty, quilting and top stitching thread. If you have not been our store before I’ll describe our thread case to you. It is taller than I am and has ten rows across full of thread. I’m not going to tell you how many spools of each color we have because that would make it too easy for you to come close to the right number. First prize is a $20 gift certificate. If you have won one already this year, you’ll have to wait until one year has passed before you can win another one (the gift certificates are good for one year). Even if you don’t live close by you can still participate because we have a good web site to show you the type of things that we have www.jubonjuweelen.biz and we can take pictures and send them to you for specific things. We also offer UPS service so we can send them out easily.

Perusing our Guest Book
By Co-Owner: Bonnie Meier

We can tell that summer is almost here and people are travelling a little more. We have had lots of visitors from other states and countries this past month. I can’t always encourage them to sign the guest book, but I know that we had some interesting visitors this past month. Since our last newsletter we have had visitors from California, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Texas, Washington, D.C., Virginia and many places in Iowa. We have also had visitors from Veghel, Holland, another place in Holland and Edmonton, Canada. In fact the young men from Holland did buy one of the Dutch books I mentioned earlier. They said it was written by a man who was a neighbor.