It’s been a great summer. Lots of work; lots of time off and a great opportunity to plan ahead a bit for the upcoming crazy season of September through the rest of the year.

Gone (and buried, hopefully) are the days of running back to your desk after a trade show with a hand full of business cards and sitting down to make semi-cold calls and then entering basic data into either ACT or Goldmine. Both good basic sales automation tools- back in the day-when the alternative was an over-stuffed Rolodex spilling out hundreds of cards in all shapes and colors with coded notes scribbled everywhere that sometimes only the CIA could interpret.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting at the breakfast counter at the Rye General Store, where I bike most mornings when I’m at the beach, and I looked up from my Globe to see Dottie sitting at the opposite end of the counter. Dottie and I grew up together at the beach pretty much from our earliest childhood years through high school since our parents had cottages right next to one another. After we both bumbled through the normal awkwardness of not having seen one another for 35 plus years, we quickly connected on spouses, jobs, kids and kids’ kids, and then got down to the interesting stuff of what had happened to the pods of kids that we grew up and surfed with.

Price Waterhouse Coopers Press Release: August 5, 2010 – The latest edition of the PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Manufacturing Barometer reports that optimism about the U.S. economy is down slightly from last quarter, but still shows strength with almost half (45 percent) of U.S. industrial manufacturers optimistic about the next 12 months, according to the Q2 2010 report. Hiring plans made a significant jump in Q2 2010. Over the next 12 months, 47 percent of panelists plan to add employees to their workforces, up 20 points from last quarter.