A new place to fill your arteries with cholesterol and be happy doing it may not seem like huge news to folks inside Tucson city limits, but it’s pretty big up in the OV, where the four restaurants serving breakfast are either always crowded (Jerry Bob’s and Village Bakehouse) or overpriced and difficult to reach.

Sahuaro Cafe opened Saturday in the strip mall at the corner of Rancho Vistoso Boulevard and Tangerine Road to little fanfare and with no advertisement, save some plastic flags draped over its front door. (I’d provide a link to the restaurant’s website, but they don’t have one yet.) Nonetheless, about 100 people turned up for breakfast on the opening day, said owner Karl Bohlin.

So, one has to wonder just how crazy someone is to open a business in this economy. Turns out, not that crazy at all.

“Everywhere I went in Oro Valley, people said there was no place to eat,” said Bohlin, 41. “This is a great location, and I wanted to provide a service that was needed.”

Bohlin moved to Tucson six years ago from Alaska, where he’d owned a gym and a tanning salon. (Yes, a tanning salon. In Alaska. Did great business, he said.) The sale of those businesses provided seed money for the new restaurant, and apartments he still owns in Alaska pay living expenses for his wife, 18-year-old daughter and himself while they get the cafe off the ground.

“I wouldn’t recommend opening a business in this economy to someone going on a wing and a prayer,” Bohlin said. “It’s inconceivable banks would loan to someone wanting to open a small business right now. I could do this because I had the cash.”

Bohlin said he also took advantage of the fact that strip mall owners are “desperate” to get tenets in their empty units, so they are willing to negotiate on the standard 5-year-lease fees. You take your breaks where you can get them, I suppose.

After deciding they would open a restaurant, Bohlin and his wife, Cheri, went to every breakfast place available north of Roger and crossed an east-west belt from La Encantada over I-10 into Marana. They collected take-home menus, tried as much food as is humanly possible, and worked at creating a menu that would have a few signature dishes mixed in with traditional offerings at reasonable prices.

I haven’t eaten there, so I can’t say if the food is good, but the Mexican-something-or-other Bohlin was noshing on when I interrupted his breakfast today looked really tasty. His chef left a job at a local resort to throw his saute pans and waffle irons in with Bohlin, which seems like a good sign as well.

The menu features standard breakfast fare with the addition of a few “south of the border” offerings and is served from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. A lunch menu of burgers, sandwiches, wraps, salads and a few Mexican favorites takes over at 11 is is offered until closing at 2:30 p.m. Breakfast prices range from $3.99 for a short stack of pancakes to $9.99 for eggs Benedict. Lunch will set you back an average of $7, although big spenders can drop $10.99 for a Pacific Rim Spiced Salmon Salad.

I don’t know how Bohlin will do with lunch, but I do think he’s got a good chance at succeeding with breakfast because there simply aren’t enough options for folks in Oro Valley. It doesn’t hurt that he’s anchored by the busiest Safeway in the town, and that there’s plenty of parking available. Then again, there have been a number of small businesses that have bitten the dust in that strip mall in the past five years – a video store, an ice cream parlor, a two dinner spots. Bohlin remains undeterred and optimistic.

“I believe if you pick the right business in the right location, you can make it work,” he said. “That’s why this will be successful. We had 100 people our opening day, with no advertising. Most people who came seemed really pleased, and I think it will spread by word of mouth.”

OK, I can’t yet post videos at this site, but soon, dear readers, soon! The redesign of TucsonCitizen.com will be near the end of next month, and video-posting training is part of the deal. But this video is too precious to wait until then. “Jessica’s Daily Affirmation” is a video that will make the most crotchety among us smile (although her baby sister/brother didn’t seem to thrilled). And it is a great, great example of the power of what we in the education biz call “positive framing.” I’ve got this bookmarked to watch each day because I need the reminder that, yes, I do like everything and I can do anything better than anyone!

Quite by accident, I stumbled across an education site unlike all the other education sites. The Daily Riff (motto: Be Smarter, About Education), launched a couple of years ago (yes, I AM behind the curve!) and was founded by education geek C.J. Westerberg. From their Welcome page is an accurate description of how they operate:

As provocateur, muse, catalyst and game changer, The Daily Riff will “sniff and sift” through our edu-culture, “curating” news and opinion in quick, digest-sized take-aways for you to use and share.  We’re doing the grunt work for you – eliminating the long, dry and irrelevant to present the “best stuff” every day.

What I like about the site, besides its pretty cool design, is that the writers question some of the most widely held beliefs about education by producing/providing news stories that show the other side. For instance, this piece about why we may not want to be like China when it comes to our educational system. Or, this post about why testing fails to reveal what we think it does.

I could spend a few hours reading the Riff, but sadly, I don’t have a few hours because I’m doing homework on lesson planning for my fall student teaching assignment. I will be meeting multiple times with my mentor teacher this summer to learn the school’s lesson-planning method and “knocking out” (my mentor’s words) things like a two-week, 10-lesson integrated unit. The estimation is that I will work about 20 hours per week this summer getting ready for the internship – just like a real teacher spends about 20 hours per week each summer getting ready for his/her year. Before I started working on my teacher certification, I, like most people, thought teachers got the summers off – and figured that was part of the reason their pay was so low.

Now that I’m in the thick of it, I’m learning teachers really don’t get much time off at all and, when you do the math, their pay is really way worse than commonly thought. So, file the fact that I can’t dive as fully into the Riff as I want under the heading: Why Teachers Really Don’t Get Summers Off – and you go dive into it. And feel free to send the link to Legislators who think they know everything about education.

Other Friday thoughts: Here’s a good piece (also against the grain) from Education Week about how teacher layoff numbers may be less black and white than media reports make them, and includes this:

“… between the 1999-2000 and the 2007-08 school years, the teacher force has increased at more than double the rate of K-12 student enrollments.”

And if you were one of the thousands of parents who attended a college graduation this past week, you might want to read this from the New Yorker. It’s a humorous look about how to care and feed for the perhaps not-so-adult person who just got a degree and moved back into your house. It is probably good reading for parents in this recession, since more grads will have to move home due to lack of employment.

And on the God side we have Other6.com, a Twitter-like “social community” begun by the Jesuits (who else?) From the site’s “how to use” page:

Other6 is an online community of people answering two simple yet profound questions: Where have you found God today? and Where do you need to find God today? At different times in our lives – and even at different times in a given day – each of us feels tugged toward one of these questions. Other6 is your home for sharing with others – in 140-character messages – where God has been revealed to you and where you hope that God will be revealed to you.

Folks familiar with Twitter will recognize the 140 character message limit. Folks familiar with the Jebbies will recognize that this is sort of the 21st century, Internet savvy version of the Examen, an ancient daily practice Jesuits use to look back on their day. Seems like a cool idea, especially for people who are interested in God but not religion or formal practice, but I don’t know how folks are finding out about it. I saw the ad for it in America, but if that is the only place Other6 is getting press, they are preaching to the choir.

Also from the God side, we have this thought for your weekend, from a little girl named Jane, quoted in the book Children’s Letters to God:

In Sunday School they told us what you do. Who does it when you are on vacation?