Meet Allie Bopp. She’s a graphic designer behind some of A Little Beacon Blog’s designs, and sometimes is Event Space Manager when our office in the Telephone Building is rented for a pop-up shop.

I first discovered Allie Bopp in a Beacon bus stop on Main Street. A new babysitter had canceled on me - a second time in a row! - and I was down in the dumps about it because I was supposed to teach a class for Tin Shingle and couldn’t make it. So my kids and I took a walk, and they had always wanted to sit in the bus stop just to sit. So we sat. Taped to the glass, behind my head, was a flyer with the cutest designs. It was black with rainbow fireworks or stars all over, advertising for a babysitter. I took the number and called. Was I crazy? Calling a random phone number from a bus stop? Turned out, it was Allie Bopp, from Wappingers (she’s a Beaconite now). You can see her work at her website, and she also does work for me at my design shop, Katie James, Inc.

Allie is amazing and in addition to staffing A Little Beacon Blog’s table while I marched in the Spirit of Beacon Day Parade with South Avenue Elementary, she rocked ALBB’s table by setting it up with our new totes (!!!) and meeting the wonderfully different people who wander up to the table to ask questions and sign up for the newsletter.

Pictured above is her boyfriend, posing as a signer-upper. (I’m told he really did sign up!) The best question we got of the day was: “Are you going to keep covering the storms?” When we did the story on the macrobursts, it made quite an impression on someone who really wanted more information on the local weather and its aftermath. That meant a lot! We are going to try. When there are big repercussions from big weather events, we do try to produce an article for it to help get information out.

During the research for that article, we became aware of some great sources for confirmations of weather events, so we’ll pursue those when something happens. Great sources found at the time included Hudson Valley Weather’s Facebook and Central Hudson’s Twitter. You can always email pictures of damage or something incredible to Editorial@alittlebeaconblog.com.

The mums at our table were from Key Food next door, purchased that morning for about $5 each! A passerby told us that we could plant them in the ground and they’d come back for years if we cut them back at the end of each fall. Will try!