April » 2009 » Pemba Serves

Wisconsin Driving

A few weeks back Katie and I took a short trip up to Taylors Falls to climb for a bit. The climbing itself was a ton of fun and we had a blast. I’d been wanting to boulder there for a while now and it was good to finally get up there.

On the drive up to Taylors Katie and I kept on noticing large animal statues on the side of the road. At each one, Katie would proceed to freak out a tiny bit, get really excited and insist that we stop on the way back to take a picture with said animal statue. After a little prodding I got into it and figured that we’d stop at three exits on the way back to take pictures with the animals. I figured it’d break up the drive a little bit but I had no clue how many we would actually find. I’m still in some amount of shock about it. Wisconsin is an interesting state, to say the least.

Katie and the Tin Man, just outside of Taylors Falls, at a Junk Yard, I think.

One of my personal favorites. The cul-de-sac with a stop sign. Love it!

Katie and the giant Cowboy Mouse near Tomah. Mind you that this “welcome” sign is well over an hour from ANY Wisconsin border.

And the backside, for anyone who was wondering…

For those of you that don’t know, the Cow Pie is a chocolate-y treat.

These next few are all from a furniture store in between Baraboo and the Dells. Yup, that’s a bear with a gun.

And a Moose……

Katie isn’t quite that small. I actually think this bed may be bigger than our current apartment. Scary.

Another Bear and another Moose just for good measure.

We found this little guy by accident when we got off the highway for a Dairy Queen. No wonder I don’t climb any harder than I do.

The Tilt-A-House nearby Portage. Many thanks to Katie for seeing this one at 70 MPH on the highway. Almost missed it!

How could you possibly guess what’s coming next?

Yup, a giant Elephant with eyeglasses….

At a Citgo, nonetheless.

And then we took a wrong turn and didn’t get back on the highway. What should we find?? A big ol’ cow at a cheese haus. Obviously.

Hard sit start on the udders to a brutal topout over the slopey bulge.

And there you have it. Mind you, this is WITHOUT stopping at another exit in Black River Falls that would have gotten us another 3-4 giant animals as well. I wrote down the wrong exit number. Oh well.

Photos: Midwest Mountaineering Spring 2009 Outdoor Expo

Photos: Bear Trax Trail Race

"I’m SO Excited!"

Misa is our child with the “instant-on” switch. She can be in a dead sleep – snoring louder than you can imagine any small five-year-old girl snoring – and she’ll suddenly pop open her eyes brightly and say,”Good morning, Daddy!” Honestly, it would be frightening if it weren’t so darn cute.

Most days, she wakes up in our bed. The other morning just after I awoke, I was watching her snore and she sat straight up and giggled: ”Good morning Daddy! I’m SO excited! Are you excited too?”

I rubbed the sleep from my puffy eyes and rolled my tongue over my teeth to fight back the morning-breath: “Um, yeah, I guess I’m excited. What are you excited about?”

She was bouncing on the bed by this point: ”I dunno! I forget! But, I’m so excited!“

If I could bottle this type of pure joy and sell it, I would be a very rich man.

In the past few weeks and months – hey, for well over a year – I’ve been talking to people who could sure use a bottle of the stuff that Misa exudes. They have puffy eyes and clenched jaws, and are just plain harried and worried, all the time. They talk about “getting back to basics,” and “scaling back.” These words are spoken in a resigned, diminished way. Sometimes, they are fearful, and even angry.

“The world is changing. Times are tough. I’m just waiting for things to get back to normal.”

If “normal” means “as they always were,” this is probably going to be a long wait. Personally, I don’t know for sure what the future holds, but I’m dead certain it won’t be anything like our recent past. The world is changing, times are tough.

Still, I wake up each day excited to get to work. I work with great people here at Pemba Serves, with our customers, and with our vendors, too. We all work in a great industry. The really exciting thing for me is because things are changing so quickly and so radically, every day we all get to come to work and wrestle with the question: “What if we were to write the book about the Outdoor Industry again: What would that look like?”

I’m not sure how it’s going to turn out – I imagine that it’ll be a page-turner – and I’m excited every day to get up and write the book. I’ve addressed earlier how important it is for us to sell our culture rather than just our stuff. But – Jebus! – we in the Outdoor Industry are in the business of selling FUN. If we can’t get excited about what we’re doing every day, then who the heck can?

One twitter experiment with measurable results.

There’s been some back and forth of late relating to Twitter being a good use of time and attention. While I understand the perspectives of both camps I often see myself wandering between the two. Some days I need long stretches of uninterrupted time to be productive. Other days I really enjoy the paths that twitter presents and I make connections that I might not have made otherwise

With that in mind we did an experiment these past few weeks. We dropped a rock in the Pemba Serves Twitter pond and watched the ripples. To do this we used a url shortener called tr.im to measure the traffic on a specific tweet.

If you follow Pemba Serves on twitter or facebook you may recall seeing a variation of this tweet over the past few weeks.

Here are the tr.im stats from March 24th through the end of the program yesterday.

These stats measure the number of users that kept the address http://tr.im/hKB2 intact that was initiated on @pembaserves and @pembanews.

So, what is Twitter good for? In this case it’s good for raising $788 to provide kids with transformational outdoor experiences that they might not have had otherwise. A contribution that would not have been possible without the social currency that Pemba Serves or our followers have generated through this new medium.

Thanks to everyone who re-tweeted and clicked.