Our Corner of the Internet
The nicest part about sharing your entire life on a public forum is that at any given time, I can pull up my corner of the Internet and refresh my memory about life at PJP during a certain time frame. And because I’m someone who really needs a healthy dose of perspective to keep me grounded, I took a deep dive into the history of late Octobers to remind myself of how far we’ve come (because goodness knows, there’s always more we have to go…)
October 23, 2018: Seriously. This post woefully extolled the process of finding commercial lending for the expansion of our storefront. As it turned out, it isn’t terribly difficult when you find the right bank to believe in what you are doing. And hey, they didn’t even ask for the DNA of my oldest child AND they filmed a commercial in our Buttonwood location…I didn’t even bet on that part in the blog post.
October 23, 2017: 24/7: This post went up just before the launch of our failed Kickstarter campaign to purchase a pie truck. If you recall, our initial Kickstarter campaign to open PJP was successful way back in 2013, but this second attempt fell a few thousand short of our $15,000 goal. It is rare that PJP fails at something and I was marginally salty with myself for a while, but realized the pressure of looking at a pie truck in our parking lot OR baking all the tarts and driving the tarts around town on that truck might have broken me. On occasion, I need saving from my own self.
October 24, 2016: Someone Call Tori Spelling: Here, we start to work on goal setting for Thanksgiving (which, I eventually learn is a process that starts in September…not late October). We set a goal of 1,000 pies in one day…which in retrospect was pretty gutsy on our part. As I recall, we met the goal and then some. It wasn’t easy, but then again, it never is. Not even for Tori Spelling, who seems to be worse at planning stuff than we are.
October 22, 2015: SOS: Apparently, Jeanne was recovering from bursitis. And honestly, but for our digital history, I would have never remembered. Here I recount her reluctance to wear a sling, so at least we know some things in this world stay consistent. Otherwise, we send out a call for volunteer help at Thanksgiving - dishwashers, crowd control, pie boxers, and the like. Amazingly, people answered that call and we are still thankful for their time. We forget on occasion that small acts by various people make a tremendous difference in what our story ultimately looks like now.
October 22, 2014: Talk to Me: I cringe here because this is just a month before our epic disaster of a first Thanksgiving at PJP Buttonwood. We were young and fresh and full of hope and completely clueless about what lay in front of us. Frankly, the memory makes my Apple watch ding to remind me to take deep breaths. At any rate, we didn’t know any of that on October 22nd, so really we discuss that butter was $4.28 a pound at Hyvee and that Jeanne believed Twitter to be a pyramid scheme. Today butter is $3.99 a pound at Hyvee and Jeanne still believes Twitter to be a pyramid scheme. But we handle Thanksgiving better now.
October 22, 2013: Our Newest Addition: This post was published before we ever actually opened and we were deep in the “how the heck do we do any of this phase?”. In fact, our Kickstarter campaign hadn’t even fully funded just yet. But we were bold enough to develop a logo through work with LogoTournament. We still use that logo today, making it the best $250 we’ve spent in six years. That logo would eventually become our sign outside of PJP Buttonwood and now you can view it hanging on the wall at PJP Nifong.
