#ThrowbackThursday

The nice part of documenting your entire life in an almost nightly blog for the past 36 months is that when we need a little perspective, we can just click on the archived posts and take a quick look at exactly what we were doing on this day in 2013, 2014, and 2015.  (Spoiler alert...we were talking about Thanksgiving.) Way back in 2013, we were gearing up for our first big Thanksgiving and we were baking at the Elks Lodge while our storefront was under construction.  I still don't know a lot about the Elks, but I'm forever grateful for the space they opened to us that year so that we could sell pies.  Honestly, I'm more thankful that we found 300 people willing to take a chance on PJP V. 2.0 at the Elks Lodge on a cash only basis.  Who could have guessed that #thousandthanksgiving would be the hashtag for Thanksgiving just three years later?

Fast forward to 2014 and we were celebrating the release of our Feast Magazine cover.  In case you need to refresh your recollection, here you go...

That cover shot is ahhhhmaaaazing, still even now.  Our employee Mitch and his girlfriend Lindsey had the cover of the magazine framed and so you've likely seen it hanging at PJP Buttonwood next to our front counter.  (Mitch and Lindsey signed the back of the frame so that one day when we become a multi-national corporation, this magazine can hang in the entry way of our headquarters.  I've got it pretty well planned out.)  This cover made us feel like some legit pie-baking professionals.  (And then just two weeks later, Thanksgiving 2k14 came along and made us humble again.  Let us never speak of it again.)

And just a year ago today, we unlocked the door to the Spare Space next door to PJP Buttonwood and walked through it for the first time.  We also hoped that day that the space never rented so that we could have it every Thanksgiving, or at least until we could afford to knock down the wall between the two units.  I distinctively remember Jeanne and I baking late into the night and discussing a Kickstarter campaign to fund the cost of knocking down a good portion of the wall between the two spaces, promising one whack with a sledge hammer per $5 donated.  That's the sort of stuff that makes sense when you don't sleep for 30 hours, though I'm still not convinced it is the worst idea we've ever had.

So that's #ThrowbackThursday.  Cheers to us looking back next year and marveling that we were only doing 1,000 pies in one small space...because #worldpiedomination.