innovation

So every year 30,000 people ride their bicycles across Iowa. This year the temperature never dropped below 90 degrees (even at night) and the humidity didn't dip below 60%. As much fun as this may sound... it's more funnerest than you can imagine :) and the people you meet on an adventure like this are even more impressive...

Can you guess what this thing does?

It's a homemade pancake cooker. This contraption was the brainchild of some firemen in a town with a population of less than 1,000. (Yes I said firemen, because they were all men, I'm not being sexist) I was mesmerized by this wonderful piece of ingenuity and resourcefulness. It's a large wheel barrow type base on the bottom. The turntable sits under the large metal wheel and it's timed just perfectly. One firefighter would squirt the pancake dough out of the bottle and a 1/3 of the way later it would come to the next firefighter who would flip it, and then when it reached the third firefighter he would flip it onto your plate. Even the dispenser for the dough was a large bucket they had drilled a hole into the bottom of and then made a spicket to fill the bottles. I was so impressed with their invention, obviously taking pictures like a fool, they didn't really think much of it :)

When I got home and showed a friend these photos she said their firefighters in their town of 100,000... catered their "fundraising" pancake dinner. Lame huh. Talk about making something from nothing. Just another reminder of how dependent we've all become on having other people create things for us, do things for us. I guess Nike really was on to something :)