There’s nothing like Friday…
Some Fridays, when Janice is in a particularly chipper mood, she is known to do the “LEKI dance.”
But as they say, “it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.” Or in today’s case, my birthday plant. You see, we were enjoying the helicopter toys Mr. Canoelover gave us, when I sent one a little too hard, a little to close to my poor Aloe vera, slicing off at least four of its leaves. We keep finding pieces scattered around the office… Lesson learned.
Posted in Pete
Outdoors, you learn things sometimes. Even if you can’t put these lessons into words, they stick with you. Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned by being outdoors, in no particular order, without a lot of detail:
“If a bear walks into your tent, punch it in the nose.” – Okay, I didn’t actually punch the bear. I hit it with my shoe. (Yep, on the nose…It’s a long story.) The bottom line is that if the thing you fear most comes suddenly and uncomfortably close to you, just do what comes naturally, next. It will probably turn out okay.
“If you are struck at by a rattlesnake, be sure to check whether or not you were bitten.” – This seems self-evident, but it warrants emphasis. I was struck at by a rattler, and – somehow convinced that my non-existent, cat-like reflexes had saved me – I didn’t check for a bite. (Weird, huh?) Fortunately, that snakebite was dry. It could’ve been bad.
“Just suck it up and do the dirty work.” – I’ve mucked out flooded corrals, climbed into pit latrines with waders on, and been up to my elbows (and deeper) in offal of all sorts. Sometimes you’ve just got to do it. It never stinks as badly as you thought it would, and – anyway – you get used to it. You’ll clean up okay, even if you have to wait awhile.
“Don’t be afraid to ask for a cuddle, and a foot massage.” – Hypothermic and nearing frostbite, I finally admitted to my climbing partner that I might be in trouble. He dug us in, threw me into the hole, and climbed in next to me. He then warmed my bare feet against his belly. Okay, it was a little awkward, but this might be the only reason why today I still have ten toes like everybody else. Ask for help when you need it.
“Sometimes horrible things happen, so live through them, thankfully.” – There’s such a sudden shift between a great day climbing, and the worst (or last) day you’ve ever had. Gravity, water, momentum, and weather are intrinsically violent forces of nature. I’ve fallen into crevasses, been caught in avalanches, and was somehow leaning one way when leaning another way might’ve ended badly. (Read: “Cut in half by a giant rock.”) Frankly, I’m here now because I have been lucky. I’m thankful for this. Every day, count the blessing of being alive. It could be different.
“Don’t sleep in your car in a vacant lot in the red-light district, you might get mugged by prostitutes.” Oh, dang, would you look at that we’re out of time! Sorry, but this story will have to wait for another day…
Comments Off
Posted in Pemba Serves
We get letters, and some are better than others. This one made our day. It comes to us from Lindy Speizer-Smith, who recently left LEKI to spend more time with her family.
We’re gonna miss her.
Comments Off
Posted in Pemba Serves
(originally posted at the Urban Wilderness Institute) Could it be that the root causes of our environmental crises are linked to the biggest things we build – cities? So argues Richard Register, founder of SF Bay Area’s Urban Ecology, author of Ecocities: Building Cities in Balance with Nature, and activist urban planner, writing in a recent Foreign Policy in Focus brief. Our automobile dependence has many direct ecological and social costs, but the most insidious consequence is how cars have reshaped our cities over the last 100 years. Register writes: “Many of us caught in this infrastructure find it extremely difficult to get around in anything but the car. The distances are just too great for bicycles, the densities just too low to allow efficient, affordable transit.” The challenges are significant, but Register has reason for optimism:
We can change our cities. In fact, our cities have already changed. Portland has frequent transit that’s free in the downtown area, and has designated a “urban growth boundary” to limit the expansion of the city’s urban area and preserve nearby farmland and other open spaces and a thriving and very dense new residential and “mixed-use” center in the Pearl District. The rooftops in Tel Aviv, Israel and dozens of Chinese cities sparkle with solar hot-water panels. Copenhagen’s pedestrian street, the Støget, has been growing steadily since 1962 and now stretches more than two miles.
But we can do more, much more, to redesign our cities for pedestrians and bicyclists, taking up very small areas of land in more compact development. Taller buildings with rooftop gardens and solar greenhouses can be linked by pedestrian connections between rooftops and terraces above ground level, making city centers intimately accessible to people on foot. As we add population and ecological architecture in pedestrian/transit centers, we can gradually eliminate the unsustainable suburbs.
We’ll need to start rebuilding our cities to incorporate Register’s ecocity concepts – pedestrian/transit-oriented infrastructure, replacing sprawl development with nature/agriculture, and integrating renewable energy systems – if we are to meet the triple threat of climate change, biodiversity loss, and dwindling (cheap) fossil fuels. Rethinking our cities as places that both humans and non-human nature can call home is a place to start; cities that are friendly for pedestrians and cyclists are likely to welcome trees, restored streams, and urban wildlife as well.
Read the whole article at Foreign Policy in Focus, and learn more about the ecocity at Ecocity Builders.
Comments Off
Posted in Pete
My friend Todd valued one resource above all all others. Well, make that two resources: About equally he valued “Firepower,” and Time. Firepower is something that somebody has as a talent or gift, and while you can develop Firepower mostly you need to be born with it. Time, on the other hand, is something that we all have and most of us waste.
Not so, Todd – he lay awake at night thinking about wasted time. They say that the poet Keats was passionate and prolific about writing because he knew that he would never have enough time in his life to get it all done. I think that perhaps Todd knew the same thing about himself, and this is what drove him to be such a prolific climber.
These days, as business people in the outdoor industry (or anywhere), there are many demands on our time and attention. I don’t intend to list them here. (That would be a waste of time, after all.) What seems obvious though is that we all need to do more things working together as groups. We can save time, dollars, and resources if we do.
The question is: How can we work together more? There are already too many tradeshows, and yet more are being added all the time. Why is this? Well, obviously nobody has quite hit the model, yet. No single tradeshow addresses every need, and – perhaps – no one tradeshow ever will. As one person put it on Twitter: “Too many tradeshows – regional and national – apparently the solution is to add another?”
Yeah, maybe that is the solution.
Last summer, we here at Pemba Serves were part of an initiative to start a new regional tradeshow here in Madison. One of the ways that we presented it is that by having a strong, dynamic regional show we all – reps, retailers, and vendors – saved time and dollars. We did some analysis of this to state our case. Basically, we compared the cost in dollars, gas, and time of ten reps visiting ten stores versus twenty people all coming together at the same time and place to get work done. We discovered some interesting things:
[Note that all of these figures are for one-way travel, only. In other words, the real expense of two-way travel is roughly double what's quoted, above.]
For those who are curious, you can check all of the analysis yourself. (There’s a lot more that can be done with this spreadsheet, for sure, and feel free to do so.) From a cost/benefit, ROI basis, there’s no question that group events such as tradeshows (Training Events, Consumer Shows, and so forth) save dollars, gas, and – in particular – time for reps, retailers, and vendors.
Shows are where the magic happens, for sure.
Fortunately, time is something that we can all manage better. If time and attention are our most important resources, let’s manage our businesses accordingly. So, see you at the shows!
Comments Off
Posted in Pemba Serves
The video needs to load for a couple minutes before it will play, but it is obviously worth the wait. Props, Nike.
I’m pretty sure we are ripping off this idea for the upcoming Montrail sales meeting..
Comments Off
Posted in Pete
