Cake and a Story

Cake and a Story.m4a

And welcome to the Hey Boomer Show, which is live every Monday on Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, and then available the very next day on all of your favorite podcast apps. My name is Wendy Green, and I am your host for Hey, Boomer. And hey, Boomer is a show for those of us who believe we are never too old to set another goal or dream a new dream. I am on a mission to support and inspire those of us in this next act of our lives. And together, we are learning and sharing stories, finding new beginnings and confronting endings and transitions. We are evolving, not retiring. We are the ones who are defining this next act of our lives. Today we are going to talk about cake and art and tradition and love and sharing, as well as reinventing yourself after a long career. But before we get started, I want you all to take a moment and think back to those smells of the wonderful foods that made some of your family traditions. Can you smell them? Is it making your mouth water a little bit to think about it? I would love it if you would share some of the family tradition foods that made up part of your childhood or that maybe you brought into the family once you had children. It would be fun to see what other people have in their traditions. For me. My grandmother used to make something called Mandelbrot. That is a Yiddish word for an almond cookie. It's really a twice baked cookie, and it's kind of like an Italian biscotti. So, with our guest today, Pipka, we have almonds in common there. Dab homemade bread. Yes. I love the smell of homemade bread. Thanksgiving is coming up. And that is also one of my favorite holidays for good smells. I always am asked to make the turkey and the sweet potato casserole. And I love the pecan pie and the family getting together and the laughter and some of.

The interesting.

Discussions that come up in families these days. But I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be a great Thanksgiving. We may actually have as many as 20 people here at my house, so be a little cozy. But let me tell you a little bit about my guest today. Her name is Pippa Wilden. And she can tell me if I said that right. Pepco has been an artist, a teacher, an entrepreneur for over 40 years. Art has always been her passion, whether she is designing, painting or baking. Her creativity has deep roots in her heritage. She was born in Czechoslovakia and has maternal relatives in Bavaria, Germany. As an artist. Pipkin designs and paints Santas or Father Christmas figures that represent Christmas traditions and customs in countries around the world. This was a fundamental part of her career as an artist and gave her the opportunity to travel to many countries at Christmas time to savor the atmosphere and the flavors that the countries had. Memories of her grandmother's torts daily afternoon coffee times and lots of whipped cream encouraged her to create that cozy, warm ambiance in her boutique gift shop. This led to serving coffee and homemade cake samples that her clients would enjoy while browsing. But soon, friends and customers were asking for the recipe of the almond cake, which was one of her grandmother's recipes. And so she started importing the cake pan, which I actually have one of those imported cake pans. Isn't that gorgeous? And she started to create a little cake recipe book, which is a handmade recipe book with 40 variations of the almond cake recipe. So let me bring on this amazing woman to share her with all of you. Hi, Pippa.

Hi, Wendy. It's good to be here. Thank you for that nice introduction.

Well, you are a special lady, so I am glad to have you here today.

Oh, well, you have wonderful guests, so I'm honored to be here. Thanks.

And you are in Sister Bay, Wisconsin, is that right? That's what you said.

Door County. It's called the Cape Cod of the Midwest. It's full of thousands of tourists all summer. And then we have nice, quiet winters with white snow. Doesn't get dirty because there aren't enough people to make it dirty.

Wow. Wow. You said you were right off Lake Michigan, right?

Yeah. My village is situated right on Lake Michigan and it's beautiful. And it's a community that is full of artists. There's just an energy here, like they often say in places like Sonoma and other parts of our country that is very, very wonderful for artists to create. And it's a close-knit community. We all help each other, and I live in paradise. Yay! Yay!

That's great for you. So, tell us about the early years PPA and what you learned growing up from your mother and your grandmother.

Well, I'm glad you asked that question because the baking and my creating all stems from who I am. When you can tap into who you are, I think you always make something authentic. My parents went through World War Two. We came to America in the early fifties as displaced persons, and my father was a doctor. So, we settled in a little town in North Dakota that had 400 people and welcomed us with open arms. They needed a doctor because there were not many physicians in small towns like that at the time. Catholic Church sponsored us. And my father spoke seven languages and was able to speak to all the bohemian people for miles around. And they loved him. Wow. We continued our traditions. My first Christmas was they actually they gave us a house to live in, a beautiful old Victorian house with those pocket doors for the little extra room, you know. Yeah. And oh, Wendy, I can remember I was thinking about this bed the other night knowing I was going to talk to you, and they put a Christmas tree in there and in German Christmas customs, you don't really see the tree for months before Christmas. You see it on Christmas Eve when the parents open the doors and there's the tree with real candles and the smell of fresh pine and presents under the tree. I'll never forget that. And my mom and dad kissed in front of the fireplace. And it was just a magical, magical memory. And of course, my parents cooked local foods that they were familiar with. They were happy to be in America. In fact, they kissed the ground when they got here after going through a war. This was definitely Michigan. North Dakota was had streets of gold as.

Gold and.

Snow and gold and snow. Yeah. All of that just prompted me to really love my culture. But since I was a young girl, I really didn't understand it until we went back to visit the parents, the grandparents that had settled in Bavaria. The other grandparents from Czechoslovakia were under communist rule and they you couldn't get in there. They would maybe give one member of the family a visa to visit, but never the whole family, because they wanted to be sure that you came back to your family. Germany was the place where we visited often and where my Oma, my grandmother, taught me to bake this almond cake and where we had, you know, we have coffee tables because that's where you have coffee and cake. A special little table for the coffee and cake. And my grandmother would put a tablecloth on, bring out her best china, little cake forks, steaming pots of coffee and. Often she would bake, and if not, we would go to the local bakery and bakery and have the most wonderful, most wonderful cakes and torts. All of that became part of this memory that I wanted to share with my family and with customers when I had a shop feed. Feed the people.

Yeah. Yeah. And so you actually learned this almond cake recipe while you visited your grandmother in Bavaria. Is that right? Did she ever come to the US?

She came to the US while we were still in this little community in Michigan. And she also thought it was the most wonderful little village. And, you know, once you've been through a war, you appreciate things very, very, very much. And although I was too little to understand it, I think even as a child, you take on the energy and the fear and the concern from your parents on some level. And I'm very appreciative of where I live, what I have. And I, I like to bake and share it because I think it's all about giving back.

Yeah. And so you got into the art world first, though, and the cakes came later. Tell us about that.

Well, I was a single mom, divorced with two little children, and my mother happened to be in Germany visiting my grandmother. And she befriended an artist that lived down the street from my grandmother who was painting folk art called Born Mala Rye. It's a very simple painting style that you paint on wood and decorate furniture with, in Bavaria, and it means peasant painting. It's not as sophisticated as Rose Molly. I mean, they made roses by cutting out a potato in half and carving a little rose design in it and then dipping it in some paint and painting the furniture with a or potato stencil. And of course, like all arts, it became more sophisticated. But she sent me a box of paints and instruction. Books came to my house. I will never forget it. The mailman came to the door. There was this big box. I put it on the dining room table, opened it up. She even sent brushes and paint, and I sat down, and I decided to teach myself to paint and make this my career because I loved it. And then I then I kept going back to Germany to see the pieces in the museums and to really look at it with brand new eyes. And as a single mom, I decided I would just have a risk and take that as my career. I was an airline stewardess, but I was the first divorced woman with children that Northwest Airlines had hired, and they went on strike 11 months after I worked there. And so I couldn't collect any kind of support. And who knew when they were going to call everybody back in those days? So I just made this decision that, hey, I'll just open a shop and be a little painter. And what did I know? Nothing, except my passion was there.

So that's quite a risk as a single mom with two kids, right? Yeah. So. So you started out with the painting, what you call the primitive painting on furniture.

Right.

But you evolved Pipka, and you got into these old world Santas, and you were describing some of that process to me last week when we talked. Tell us more about that.

Well, it started when I met my husband, and he kidnapped me and brought me to Door County. So, I moved from the big city to beautiful little door county, another little village. And one winter day, when the snow was up to the windowsills in my studio, I decided to paint an old-world Santa for my mother for Christmas. And that was the beginning. I gave her that for Christmas. And then in my decorative painting industry, I started making patterns for that and people wanted to paint it and it just became very popular. And so I knew, well, there's something there. And I started exploring the customs and other countries and even other regions of Germany. I mean, every region has its own beer and its own food and its own tradition. And you could go from one town 15 miles away and they would serve different food or different beer or different wear, different costumes. And it just fascinated me. I started designing Santas and they were very popular. I thought maybe these could be made into cards or something, you know, because the public really likes them. The public in my decorative painting industry. And my lady that was working for me, Lois Samak sent, we used to get this Giftware magazine, and she sent some designs and a letter out to a couple of companies.

And she saw this little this little ad that said TLC Company. And we thought that title was so cute. So, we sent them some information. Well, all the big companies. I never heard from them. But this little TLC Company. It was at my door within two weeks and saw my hand-painted Santas. And they worked for McCall's pattern Company in Kansas. And McCall's had just opened up a division of arts and crafts and were publishing books. And so they gave them the go ahead, go ahead and make something out of this. And so we made the first shipment of resin figurines. And when the shipment was on the ship to come to America, this is a long story, but it's almost. McCall shut it down. They just said, no, we can't do this. So the two people that started the company, Michelle and Gary, decided to mortgage their house and buy the shipment and take a risk on these beautiful figurines. And the rest was history. 25 years later, we sold millions of dollars worth of old World Santas to people all over the country. And it was just a magical, wonderful, exciting experience. Wow.

That is quite a story. So you were a risk taker. They were risk takers. Do you mind if I share the screen for a moment to show people a couple of pictures of those Santas? Sure. Yeah, because they're pretty amazing. So let me go over here. I'll do that. All right, So here's center class. So he has the little guy that goes with him. I happen to know this story from when I used to do some work out of the Netherlands.

Oh.

So that was.

Pretty. I went to Amsterdam one year and one Christmas and was able to see all of that. I was able to travel to several countries at Christmastime and it just made it. You know, you can read a book, you can read a story on the Internet, but when you're there and you smell the smells and see the bakeries and see the people, it's a magic. It's just magic. Yeah.

Yeah. And then you have the posters and I mean, it's just amazing. So I'll stop sharing now. But I was just falling in love with these and I was looking at them.

Thank you.

Yeah. So. So now you had your shop?

I started my shop.

And in the shop you were selling your furniture and your Santas and your paintings, and you decided that you wanted it to be cozy. So you started serving cake and coffee?

Yes. My shop was a little a little house built in 1920, right off of Main Street where I live. And it just had this little peaked roof and rounded door. It was just beautiful and charming and all these little beautiful rooms inside. So every room I had gifts as well as my Santas and other things. But I just had the nicest people come in and I'm like, These people are so nice. I want to serve them a little treat. So I started making cake and just serving little slices or little samples and some wonderful coffee that's made with one of our door county coffee makers. And pretty soon they were asking for the recipe because it's just a simple cake. If you saw it, it just it looks like a pound cake and it's not a layer cake with frosting that looks wonderful. It's just a simple cake. But they tasted it, wanted to have the recipe, so I gave out the recipe. Then they wanted to have the pan that was made. And because it's a very unusual pan. So I started importing the pan from Germany.

And there it is.

And I made a cake since it's show and tell on Wendy's. Hey Boomer morning very. I added blueberries. That's what's in there. Oh, yum. Smells so good.

Smells so good and it tastes so good. Pippa sent me a sample. Yeah. Here's. Here's a picture of another cake. I mean, she 40 variations. She comes up with these, but. Go on. I'm sorry I interrupted your story.

Well, no, that was the part of just. Thank you. 40 variations. Well, that's the hardest part. When you make your first 100 cakes, you've got to start changing it up a little bit. So I thought, what would happen if I had blueberries or if I do this or if I do that? And pretty soon customers were giving me their own variations of what they did. And so it was inspiring because I made cake all the time. And you want to be inspired all the time and. I got all this feedback from the customers, so I knew what they liked and what they didn't like, and I was able to just put that all in my little cake little book, which I have one of those.

Yes. So that.

Book.

Pulled it up a little closer, if you will.

Yeah.

This is handmade.

Yeah, it's crazy. It made over 3500 of these Cakelet recipe books, but. It's just fun to make things with your hands, to bake things that you have made and share them. I mean, the early cakes, Wendy, were made by Egyptians. They were flat breads that they sweetened with a little honey and cooked on a stone.

I didn't.

Know that. And the Romans came and started making adding little dried fruit and yeast was invented. I think the Egyptians even invented yeast. Bread was the thing. To have. Cakes would be a flat bread with some honey on it. And people didn't have woodburning stoves in their homes in the early part of our civilization as we know it. And so there would be a, oh, maybe either a butcher or a baker in the villages, and they would have these big outdoor ovens and you could bring your bread or your cake to those places and they would bake them for you. And my grandmother in Czechoslovakia actually did that. She would get up at two in the morning, bake, get the bread ready, and then go trudge through whatever kind of weather it was and bring it to the butcher, actually, and have the cake made. And here we are now with all our modern conveniences. And my grandmother made little seven-layer dovish tarts, which are tiny layers of cake with chocolate frosting in between. And although I think it's a busy world, we don't have to make cakes like that anymore and we don't have to buy cake mixes. We can just make this cake like my almond cake for instance, which everything goes in one bowl. You whip it up. I mean, I made this this morning. It took me 5 minutes to put it in the oven and it freezes for four months. It's an easy cake that any mom or any working person can make for their family or to give us gifts. And it tastes good. It would be nothing if it didn't taste good, but it tastes really, really, really good.

And how fun to get as part of the gift. You bake the cake, but get them this, this. Special pan.

Special pan. And the nice thing is it comes out like in perfect slices, right? So, you know exactly where to slice it, unless you're unless you're greedy. And then you want a bigger piece.

And you slice to each slice of those little rivets.

Which I did, I'm sorry to say, but I did.

Because.

It was so good. And we have people saying, well, I want dessert, I want a piece of cake. The recipe is easy. You can actually find it on Pippa's website, right? Pipkas.com. At one point you finally decided you're selling the store and you're going more into the cake business, or did that just kind of happen?

Yeah, I think it just happened and you know that was really hard to make that decision after 45 years. I can imagine, because I love my building and I love the people that walk through my front door. It was such a safe place. I mean, we made such good friends with people, and it was a beautiful place, but it was time for a change. And so I thought, well, I am creative. I will have just no problem finding something to do. But then COVID hit. There we sat at home for a long time and. It just became a different time. We're all living in different times, and it wasn't as easy as I thought. Although I am retired, I am inspired and. I just finally decided once it let up, perhaps I can make these cakes at the farmers market and then some. A coffee shop down the street asked if I would make them for their restaurant. And there I made more than this cake. I made all kinds of things for their restaurant this summer. So, I was very, very, very, very busy. And. But it's still I'm not out of that process of trying to figure out what do I want to do with the rest of my life. I don't think after baking so much all summer, I don't think I want to bake for stores. I think I want to share on the Internet my recipes and do more art artwork. It's just it's I always said life is short, like the bowl I the shoes take the trip and eat the cake. What do we do when life is short? That's what we have to figure out.

Say that again. Life is short.

Like the by the shoes. Take the trip, eat the cake.

I love that. I'm going to put that up on my wall.

Oh, Harry Truman had a great one. He said, there's nothing better than cake than more cake.

Well, but when you started doing all this cake, then you got inspired to import the cake pan and you have the different what you call them.

Little recipe books.

And well, the recipe books and the and the extracts, the almond extracts, the vanilla extracts, the lemon extracts. Are those imported as well?

No, but we do have them bottled exclusively for my store and they're high, high-grade extracts. And that's why you can change an ordinary cake by adding different extracts. I mean, I have a lavender extract When I made the lavender cake when I still had my store, people were like lavender and a cake, but you would not believe how good that is. And you can sprinkle little lavender petals over the cake. I mean, we eat with our eyes before we put anything in our stomach. I really feel we should always make everything as beautiful as we can. And adding flowers or anything like that around the cake or on top of any cake just makes it so beautiful. But when you bake a lavender cake in your home, actually, if you're ever going to sell your house, bake a lavender cake when you have open house because it smells so good, the people will definitely buy your house.

Really? Okay, that's good to know.

That's good to know. It's true. I mean, they always say bake an apple pie, but lavender is just wonderful. And we have orange extract in the summer. You might want to just make lemon extract with lemon zest and then a fresh lemon glaze on the cake. The next cake I'm going to make is like a thought experiment with that, which would be my almond cake. But then you put when it's done, baked and baking and cool, you put a very thin glaze of a raspberry jam on it. And when that says you cover the whole thing with a chocolate ganache.

Okay, sign me up for that one.

Yeah. It's crunch time, too. This is hard to talk about. It's good we're all here. We could share my blueberry cake.

Well, we'll be there shortly, so leave the door open. You said, though, you know, this transition is hard. Like walking away from the shop after all those years and you still have a lot of your artwork. And so what do you do with that? And you don't want to bake for me. So. So where are you with all of that process?

Well, I have a really nice website, so I'm trying to reach out more to my audience. And this last year, when I was baking for everybody and everything, I didn't have as much time to do that. But the lady that started the company that made my asanas is partnering with me. She's very organized, very experienced, very ambitious. And we are just we are going to really work at reaching out with. With product that's based on my designs with more recipes, just anything that could probably inspire or enhance somebody's lifestyle. And I think that's the way I'm going to connect. I mean, I don't have the front door anymore that they walk through. I hope that people will walk through this door, through the Internet. And Wendy, it's a learning curve. I mean, I know I mean, I'm not computer literate. This is all, you know, a lot of frustration, A lot of. A lot of learning every day, learning how to solve problems. I've got a million ideas for marketing and sharing but learning how to solve problems on the Internet is a whole different thing. But it's a challenge and I like it. I mean, I hope it'll keep my brain active as I get older and bring people to my site and we can all connect.

I may have to invite you to join my accountability group that I'm in. I'm on a total learning curve all the time too. And I was looking at your website saying, Oh, I have to get Pippa to show me how to set up an online store and do.

All that stuff. We need to talk.

I know, I know. So. So tell me, Pippa, at this stage in your life, what are you feeling the most grateful for?

Well, I'm grateful that at this stage of my life and I'm into my late seventies, that I am strong, that I'm healthy, that I wake up every morning, that I. I am a widow, but I have this little dog that I decided I needed a little dog so I wouldn't be lonely. And I'm in love with my little dog. Angel is her name. Oh, and I'm grateful for I'm grateful for this challenge. Really. You know, I kind of learned and what I'm really thinking about now, Wendy, is that I don't have to keep doing the same things I'm doing. I'm really could do anything. And I don't have all the money in the world to say I could go everywhere. But there is a possibility once we put our minds to it and think about it and make some mood boards or journal, these dreams that we have can become realities. And instead of retired, we can be inspired because we get to do whatever we want at this age.

We do, don't we?

Yeah, we really do. If we can find somebody to help us, if we can't do it alone. So. I'm hopeful for that.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's so important to stay inspired and like you said it, the transition can be the challenge. Right. What's next? Who am I? Who am I going to be? All of that is. But it's also we can redefine that as an opportunity.

Yes.

To figure out. You know who we really want to be in this next act. Yeah, I think that's beautiful.

Well, I think it's beautiful the way you said it, it is an opportunity. If we look at it as an opportunity instead of. Well, because let's face it, as you get older, in my age, it's a little more difficult to do some things. I mean, I'm not 40 and I can't work 90 hours a day. I can work 10 hours a day and I might be tired the next day, but it is different. But if we just accept that and look at it as an opportunity, our mindset changes everything, doesn't it?

It does. It does. And I'm not going to say to people that it's easy to shift your mindset. Sometimes it takes friends like Pippa, someone to talk to that is already in that inspired stage and surround yourself with people like that that are your champions, don't you think?

Oh, I think surrounding yourself with champion people is the most important thing you can do when you're in a challenge or when you're in a lifestyle change. Because honestly, I mean, I shouldn't say this, but I do believe it's gotten to be a pretty negative world out there, and we need to be very picky about who we let into our lives and into our minds and into our hearts. And if we have those good people that connect with us and that want the best for us as we want the best for them, then. Then that challenge becomes a lot easier.

Yeah, it really does. And I think I mean, you know, we keep learning these lessons. I mean, I learned a lesson this weekend that you have to find the right people to give you those affirmations, you know, because sometimes you're looking for that from somebody that's not really able to do it. And so let that one go.

And find the ones that are. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. When you've been in business like I was for over 40 years, people came into my business and, and, and love that. I was able to teach them how to paint. They respected me. They. They just felt honored to come into my store and to my home. But when you don't have that anymore, suddenly you're just. You're just like everybody else out there. And you don't automatically get that respect or that appreciation. You have to earn it, or you have to find people that understand who you are and will give you that. So, in other words, you have to be picky who you're with.

Yeah, but like you said, that was part of your challenge also, because everybody knew you and everybody respected you and everybody would come into the shop because that was the safe place to be. And so not having that, I imagine you did experience a big sense of loss from that, especially going right into COVID.

Yes. Yes, it's a big sense of loss. Yeah. Here we are. I get to talk to you and you're so positive and we have some mutual friends that we love on shows like this. We do. And how lucky we are that we can have something like this to go to. I mean, your show is wonderful, encouraging women of all ages to look forward to the rest of their life and not think that it's the end of it because it really isn't.

Yeah, well, you inspire me. I love that comment. Retired and inspired. I love that. Is your farmer's market going to stay open all winter?

No. The farmer's market is open in the summer, and most of the businesses up here are more like summer businesses. But when I did retire, I joined the Sister Bay Historical Society, which has all these wonderful old buildings and a wonderful old house on its premises. And we started a Chris Kendall market. So last year I spent six months of my life working on that. This year we kind of have the formula down and we are starting our next Chris Kindle mark and a couple of weeks. I haven't had time to be tired or challenged or anything because I'm too busy. But we had last year we had like 5000 people came in the first day and this is in a sleepy town. We've created a business for restaurants that used to close. Now they're opening for those three weekends. We've created rooms for people to rent in all these hotels that used to be empty. Suddenly people are coming to our little community because of this incredible market. So, we're doing something we love. And how I love Christmas and so does so does everybody I know. And we're helping our local businesses so.

And so what are the dates of that?

It's the weekend after Thanksgiving for three days and then the following two weekends. Last year we had blizzard snows, and it was like, Wendy, it was a Hallmark movie. It was so beautiful. Everybody came. The kids made snowmen and threw snowballs. People drank blue wine. We've got food, we've got artists, we've got all these vendors and these wonderful little buildings. And it was just pure magic.

Wow. Wow. Well, have your coats ready in case your Southern visitors come up.

Lot of them do, actually, to be honest with you, the families up here from Texas or other places, and they come for the holidays and they love it. Oh, it sounds fabulous.

It sounds like a magical land. Like a magical fairyland.

Yeah, it is.

Yeah. So, are you are you baking for that or are you going to have your Santas or your artwork?

I've finished baking 100 cakes and I sell the pan and we're making little, ah, cake lit books right now. And I do have some beautiful ornaments that are very cake oriented, little, little wonderful glass ornaments and wood ornaments. So, you can decorate a cookie tree or a cake tree for your kitchen. And yeah, it's just going to be great.

And the cakelet book, I noticed on your website, it said only two left. So you are making more.

Yes.

Like I purposely didn't order one because I was like, I got to leave them for the other people because I'm going to be promoting this.

But we have to make like 50. So, we are we are going to be little elves during the night, believe me. Bananas.

Heidi says, it seems like you see the good in all things. And that is so beautiful.

so nice.

I know. I just love talking to you. Yeah. So where are your children now?

Well, I have a son that's in Milwaukee, and I have a granddaughter that's there. She's been helping me bake cakes and she's been about five years old. And she's now and then My daughter lives in Florida and Daytona Beach. Oh, that's fun. I can visit one or the other, and they're both wonderful places. Since I live in a small community, it's really fun to go to a bigger city or to the ocean and the beach and whatever the case may be.

And are they showing interest in the art? And like you said, your granddaughter is baking with you.

My granddaughter is very creative, and my son is in the creative business with computers and designing websites and that kind of thing. Interviewing coaches and other inspiring people. So often when I have a problem, I call him and he's my personal coach. My daughter works for a pickleball Court in Florida, which is one of the biggest courts in the country. And she's just loving her job, loving talk about being around positive people, she said. 80-year-old people are playing pickleball every day and they love it and they're healthy. And so I'm getting a lot of inspiration from both of my children.

We're never too old, are we?

No, I guess we are not.

As long as we try and stay healthy. So, if you could give some advice, words of wisdom, you know, ideas that you would share with the group at this point to be retired and inspired, what would you what would you say?

Well, it helps to have a positive attitude, but don't expect it to be easy because you can be positive. But it's not easy. But if you put yourself out there, ideals will come. And if you live in a small community like I do, there's ideas on the internet. There is so much that you can take a language on the Internet, You can connect with other people, with other Zoom classes. I mean, I don't think there's enough hours in the day, but really, I agree. Yeah, yeah. But you have to motivate yourself sometime and that can be difficult, especially if there's a good TV show on and on your lap. And it'd be much more fun to sit here for a couple of hours than say, my life is going to be like.

Yeah.

But I'm a firm believer as an artist and doing mood boards where you can cut out pictures and magazines without any thought of what you're doing. Just take what you love and paste it on a big piece of paper and. You'll see something there that maybe has been hidden, that has been in your subconscious, that really means something to you. And it's very exciting to have that. And it might be that by next year you'll see that a lot of the things you've put on there have come true. That's true. Like a little kid, it really works.

I agree with you on that. I've done that. I have one up on my wall now, in fact.

Wonderful.

Yeah, I love that. Well, Pepkor, this has been amazing. I think Deb and I need to plan a trip up to the market. What do you say, Deb?

Juliette, I know you can stay with me.

And then we'll drag you down here.

So, you can see the south. Let's trade locations. There we go.

I know. Wouldn't that be fun? Well, let me share with people. Deb goes, Yeah, that.

Would be so fun.

Let me share with people how they can find you. So Pipka's website is http://www.Pipkas.com. Where is the name Pipka from?

It's a Czechoslovakia nickname. My mother had me in a Catholic hospital during the war and the nun brought me to her after I was born and said, Here's your little Pipka and it means little yellow chicken. I know you made me tell this to the world. I can't believe it, but there it is.

It's an adorable nickname, though I would say Little Yellow, darling.

Well, maybe not yellow.

Just a little sweet darling.

There you go. Yeah.

And you can also email her at eat cake at Pippa's dot com. Thank you so much for what you shared. I mean, we could talk for days.

You have such.

Such beautiful energy, but you don't have time to talk for days. You've got this Kris Kringle market to do. Oh, Heidi wants to come, too. Come on, Heidi. You come with Us.

So let me tell you about who's coming on next week. It's a totally different topic. I mean, this one has been so fun. Next week, we'll be shifting to talk about something that's not spoken about much, but that impacts the older adult population significantly, according to the W.H.O. Suicide attempts are more frequent among adolescents and young adults, but older men and women show the highest rate of suicide in almost every country.

My gosh.

My guest next week is Dennis Guillen, and he lost two brothers to suicide 11 years apart, which put him on a mission to turn this tragedy into something where we start to talk about mental health and try and prevent these kinds of things from happening so that he also has a way of bringing humor into the subject. So, it's not going to be just all heavy and, you know, but it is an important subject for us to talk about. Let me ask you, please, everybody who's listening to share, Hey, Boomer, with people and ask them to subscribe to the newsletter, they can do that from https://bit.ly/HeyBoomer-subscribe. And you'll get two emails a week at the most. One is with my blog and just what I'm thinking about. And then the other one is on Monday with links to the show. And if you want to talk about what's next to be inspired and retired, you can sign up for a 20-minute complimentary consultation with me. You can schedule it on calendly.com/heyboomer/20min and you'll find times there. We can talk about what's next for you.

All right. Well, I like to leave you with the belief that we are We can all live with passion, live with relevance and live with courage. And we are never too old to set another goal or dream a new dream. Thank you again, Pippa, for being our guest today. I just loved it and hope to see you soon in person.

Thank you, Wendy. It was a wonderful day. I love what you're doing. You've got a very inspiring show. Thank you.

Thank you so much. We'll talk soon.

Okay.

Goodbye.

Bye.