Before the Fort Madison Holiday Lighted Parade

This Friday, November 28th is Fort Madison's annual lighted Holiday Parade and it is the largest lighted parade in Iowa. One of my very favorite events of the year, obviously many others enjoy it too, since it brings about 10,000 people to historic downtown Fort Madison.

I am always a tad fascinated by the pre-parade prep in and around town. The street cleaners were by this morning at about 5:30am. Right now, the tree service is in town, doing their annual tree pruning, they're doing a good job, the trees look nice. Rich, our chief parade organizer deserves lots of praise for pulling the parade together every year, it's a year long volunteer job. The downtown shops are decked out in all thier holiday finery. Parade floats are seen all over town for last minute light checks and repairs. Rich and crew will start lining them up on the parade route very early on Friday AM.

Pendemonium has a float and we put it in the parade two years ago. It is the old Sheaffer Pen Company float. Last year, we kept it out of the parade because it really needs some work. Argh, we didn't get the work done this summer and to add insult to the whole matter someone stole our generator for the float during an ice storm in town ... we were at the LA Pen Show. Quite aggravating, but hopefully it kept someone warm during the ice storm and power outage. So, no Pendemonium float this year and I know we have to work on this issue. I am putting the float for 2010 higher up on my priority list.

Here's a link to some photos Frank took in downtown Fort Madison during the 2006 holiday season. We hope you'll enjoy them. http://www.pendemonium.com/fmholidayseason06.htm

Getting Ready for Holiday Open House

The week of Thanksgiving is always especially chaotic around Pendemonium. It's a good chaos, but can make me a little weary at points. Every year, the weekend after Thanksgiving, we hold our annual Holiday Open House at our retail shop in Fort Madison. That means the days prior require the traditional Thanksgiving cleaning, re-arranging and festive decorating. We spend a good part of Thanksgiving Day putting on the finishing touches, this has turned into a tradition in itself. Oh yes, we still do the turkey and all the trimmings, we mesh that all together with the shop activities and amazingly it works out pretty well - we haven't burned anything yet! It helps that we live just a flight of stairs up from the shop. So, today is day one of serious preparation, we've all been scurrying around trying to decide which pens will get displayed, how we're going to display them and making sure they are all working and writing properly. I think we'll have some nice surprises for everyone who stops by for our Holiday Open House this weekend.

Info Central?

Seven some months later, here we are back again on the blog with our cyper-pen aka the keyboard and a bright white blank sheet of paper aka the monitor to compose a few thoughts on. Our wonderful Pendemonium webguru and I have had some blog talks in the past few months. Perhaps this little spot in cyberspace might be a good home for answers to all the questions we get about pens, inks, paper and could we please help identify Uncle Edson's fountain pen. My friend Dan refers to Pendemonium as Info Central, I try to convince him it is not. He insists. I end up trying to find the answers because if I don't he'll just ask again. It's OK, Dan is one of my favorite people.

Just today, I've had e-discussions going back and forth about a number of things. There's the woman who needs to know what kind of pen she has, but more importantly how to get the ink cartridge that is stuck in the barrel out so she can use the pen again. Little did I know it had been stuck in there for years! I did ID her pen, but I think she's still trying to get the cartridge out. We also had a nice gent inquire about his spinning pen cap which further led to discussion about the Sheaffer Pen Co's Service Center which happens to be in the same town we are in. When the good folks at Sheaffer get a little behind on email and phone messages, people seem to think I can help. I can only sympathize a little with folks on this since we are not Sheaffer and they have to answer their own questions! I do have my limits. We also had the man in Italy who broke his Parker 51 desk pen nib today, it once belonged to his grandfather and I'm racking my brain trying to remember who I should refer him to in Italy because family pens are important. I really do enjoying talking pens with people. I'll have to mull over a little further the blog-info central-helpful fountain pen hints scenario. I'm telling myself not to take so darned long to blog again, life seems to interfere with this blogging stuff. Thus far, no one knows I have this little blog except me and that is probably a good thing!