Goodbye 2008 - Hello 2009

Happy New Year everyone!

Seems like I just blinked my eyes and yet another year slipped into the archives of my memory banks. And what a year it was ( Yikes! :-0 ) filled with meltdowns, collapses and bailouts. The word that most describes 2008 to me, though, is "unprecedented". At least that’s the word the political and media arenas have latched on to. I heard a CNN anchor say "unprecedented unemployment numbers" followed by "not since the seventies". It would be nice if reporters would have to know the meaning of the words they choose to use. Allow me to suggest to you that there is nothing unprecedented here. It has all happened before in one form or another, to one degree or another, at one time or another, by one people or another.

Notwithstanding all those dire ‘unprecedented’ predictions, we have before us a nice, bright, shinny, pristine new year. And January is the time to reflect on what has been and plan for what will be. May you find a way to let the hope of what could happen overpower the fear of what might happen and inspire your will to drive what does happen in 2009! ( Have you ever noticed how hope and fear tend to go together? )

Here is my sophisticated two part 2009 plan for addressing the possibility of these impending dire times.

1- Keep plugging away.
2- Go camping!

Part one of this plan is perhaps more involved than might seem at first glance. It will involve new videos, new products, regular newsletters ( this is where hope over powers fear ), free ideas, revitalized and new blogs, the introduction of "some assembly required" products, a new book and the return of kits. I am telling you, with any luck at all, we are going to get our camp kitchens organized beyond our wildest dreams. Why? So we can implement part 2 of the plan.

Go camping! No matter how much of our money the politicians give away or how ‘gloom and doomy’ the predictions of the experts and reporters become, this part of the plan will work perfectly. This is where we welcome meltdowns because it means the cheese has adorn the green chili on our lunch time burger. And the consequences of our collapses means we just didn’t stake the tent well enough to handle the wind gusts. And bailouts are a blessing because that means somebody just caught a monster trout and our boat took on some water in all the excitement.

No matter how good or bad a given year might be, you don’t get a second chance to live it over. Your kids will never be the age they are right now again and neither will you. Let’s get out there and archive those 2009 camping memories. The real beauty of part two of our plan is it doesn’t require the completion of part one. You can do it anytime.

Go camping!

Ken