This story was featured in the 2016 Oceanside Living Magazine: Arts, Culture, Food and Drink.  You can view the full magazine here.

Photos and text by: Kierstin Hill 

The Sunset Market happens every Thursday evening from 5:00 – 9:00 pm on the corner of Tremont and Pier View Way.  There are many unique people and even more unique stories behind the booth at the Market.  A few stories are highlighted below: 

by Danielle Hass

The Stats:

• The average office employee spends 1.5 hours a day (6 weeks per year) looking for things they own but can’t find. — organized world 
• The average executive wastes six weeks annually searching for important documents lost among the clutter. — Wall Street Journal 
• The average retrieval time for a piece of paper is ten minutes; 3 percent of all papers are misfiled. This study put the cost to a corporation of recovering a lost file at $120. 
• The typical executive wastes 150 hours a year (almost an entire month), searching for lost information. For someone earning $50,000 a year, this loss is equivalent to $3,842 annually.  Forbes ASAP 

 
You may not have taken 90 minutes to find a specific pen today; but, if you give these statistics some thought, you might be surprised to find how closely they reflect your own work life.  Little minutes add up— 6 minutes trying to find the car keys, 3 minutes to find spare staples, 10 minutes searching for a document, your cell-phone, a phone number, you get the idea.  And as the minutes add up, so do the dollars lost.

by Kristi Hawthorne, Oceanside Living Magazine

The “Antoinette W” is a familiar site in the Oceanside Harbor and its iconic turquoise and blue colors set it apart from the other boats. Built in 1978, in San Pedro, it was named after the original owner’s grandmother. Asked about changing the name of the “Antoinette W”, owner James Gardner said he only briefly contemplated it but never did because it’s considered bad luck.

Gardner, a commercial fisherman, bought the boat, built as an albacore trawler, in 1985. He soon after converted it to haul live bait. In 1990 Gardner signed on as the lessee of the Oceanside Bait Company at the Harbor and brought the Antoinette to Oceanside. Along with a crew of three, he fishes up and down the coast between La Jolla and Dana Point. He supplies the bait to the bait company, which in turns provides live bait to Helgren’s Sportfishing and the general public.

by: Kierstin and Katrina Hill
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My sister and I ate our way through a world-tour in Oceanside!  We went into each restaurant with an open mind and asked what the most traditional or most popular dish was – and just blindly ordered the server’s recommendation!  We definitely ate some menu items that we never would have considered in the past – i.e. the tail of an ox (spoiler alert – it was ah-mazing!).  We focused on nine different restaurants east of the I-5 with various cultural cuisines and ate extremely delicious food along the way.  

by Kristi Hawthorne, Oceanside Living Magazine 2016

Trees are an important part of any city, enhancing it with beauty and adding color, providing needed shade, as well as providing a habitat for wildlife. In 1884, Oceanside’s Founder Andrew Jackson Myers, began planting “wattle and blue gum trees on the avenues in Oceanside”. These trees are more commonly known as acacia and eucalyptus. Other early popular tree varieties included cypress and pine, which after a few years became “a nuisance, damaging sewers, sidewalks and the streets.”

Palm trees lined Hill Street (now Coast Highway) as early as the 1890s and as Oceanside developed, its citizens continued to plant trees along its streets and avenues. In 1896 the newspaper reported that 155 palms were planted along with 200 pepper trees, 175 cypress, 275 pines and 420 sugar gums.

by Quantal Langford

Imagine a boxing ring. On one side you have a seasoned boxer, with his gloves up, ready for the fight in hand. On the other side a basketball player with no gloves, no experience and no chance. As a brand, knowing the arena you compete in is crucial in defining how you want your brand to be perceived to your core market.

Defining your arena isn’t hard. Just keep it clear and simple. Whether rebranding yourself or starting from scratch, this is one of the areas you don’t have to invest too much time in. For example my studio, Langfordesign, competes in the arena of “graphic design”. Even though my services also include brand development and consultation. This is how my audience perceives Langfordesign. Now once they connect with me through initial impressions, then I can offer my other services to them.

by Kristi Hawthorne, from Oceanside Living Magazine

Oceanside has its own share of myths or urban legends that get passed around and soon become truth in the minds of many. Some of these are funny, minute details of Oceanside that never happened or in fact happened but are exaggerated. We take a look at just a few of those, along with some that might have happened.

The Oceanside Pier was once a mile long. Exaggerated. None of Oceanside’s six piers have ever been a mile long. Many locals will recall that the “old pier” (the previous pier) was either “a mile long” or “longer than the present pier”. A mile is 5,280 feet long. The old pier was 1,941 feet long and today’s pier (built in 1987) is 1,942 feet long.

by Kristi Hawthorne, from Oceanside Living Magazine

As Oceanside has developed over the years, we have acquired an eclectic array of structures which have been built over different time periods and that represent a variety of architecture styles. However, with time and neglect, once impressive buildings can lose their luster or when left vacant turn to eyesores. The general consensus may lean toward demolition but when a building can be repurposed, our downtown can maintain its history and character.

​If you are completely an online business, the answer can be simple and obvious, but for most small businesses that tend to try and mix the two - not so simple and not so obvious.
 
To help you understand were your business is with respect to this question, start by answering these questions:

• If you website was down for a day, week or month, how would this affect your business?
• When was the last time you checked your website?
• How long could your website be down without it affecting your business?

 
Review your answers to these questions and then come back and try to answer main question in the title.
 
So… Is your website a part of your business? 

Last Wednesday, the Oceanside Chamber held its Annual Awards and Recognition Luncheon at the El Camino Country Club. The Chamber, which is celebrating its 120th anniversary this year, recognized dozens of local businesses for their longtime support of the Chamber, including 75 year member, Weseloh Chevrolet.

Several businesses and community partners were also recognized with awards in ten different categories of excellence. Here's a quick look at our award winners:

Small Business of the Year: Ashley's Party Rental
Philanthropic Business of the Year: North County Lifeline
Green Partner of the Year: Green Oceanside
Patriotic Business of the Year: Pioneer Services
Arts & Culture Partner of the Year: KOCT
Innovator of the Year: Tri-City Medical Center
Community Partner of the Year: Genentech
Large Business of the Year: Gilead
Oceanside Chamber Citizen of the Year: Chuck Atkinson
Community Event of the Year: Kinane Events-Turkey Trot