Happy Sweetest Day!

Happy Sweetest Day to all you benighted folks on the east coast who don’t celebrate this particular artificially created marketing holiday. Supposedly, back in the 20’s, candy companies got together and declared the third Saturday in October to be Sweetest Day. Fortunately, the card companies also benefit. It’s a big deal around the southern Great Lakes region. I had never heard of it until I came out to Ohio in 1968.

We finally staged our “Exciting Careers in the 21st Century” event on Friday and Saturday this week. Friday was a smashing success with probably 500 to 600 high school students and their teachers attending. We had 61 exhibitors who came to talk about careers in technology: employers, non-profits and CSU faculty members came out to talk about their fields. We had door prizes for the kids all during the day, eventually awarding 14 iPods to some lucky students.

One of the most popular spots was our Wii bowling competition. We set up three of the virtual reality game boxes and ran a tournament. The prizes were some cheesy trophies, but the kids didn’t care—they were still excited to win.

We were very pleased, since we had never held this sort of event before and weren’t sure what to expect. All the kids were polite, respectful and asked good questions of our exhibitors. The grownups were extremely impressed and I’m sure heartened by what they saw in our future tech careerists.

Saturday was pretty dead, though. We know not to try it again on a weekend. In theory, motivated parents were supposed to bring their equally motivated children down for the day. There were several hundred students on campus for an admissions Visit Day, but after admissions was done with them, they were too tired to return to our extravangza.

This week Max and I went for a walk with Kodiak for a few blocks after work. Max insisted on holding the leash all by himself and he does very well. He remarked that if Kodiak were a younger dog, he would be pulling him around. As it is, Kodiak is pretty sedate. Max stuffed a plastic bag in his pocket because he knows I have one in mine to clean up after the dog. He wound up filling his with pine cones instead. We played a trick on Nana, telling her it was a present from Kodiak. We visited for a while with some people down the street who have an elaborate Halloween display in front of their house. The owner turned on one of the displays that has hands moving as if out of the ground. Max watched it intently for a minute and declared, “There are robotic pumps in there that make the hands move.” He wasn’t particularly creeped out by the moving hands, just curious about how they worked.

It might sound like a cliché, but my heart is never so light as when I am outside alone with Max, with no one to tell us what we can and can’t do. Sure I watch out to keep him safe, but he’s a good boy and listens when you tell him where he can and cannot go. We can laugh and roll around in the grass and look for shapes in the clouds. At least for now. Later things will change, but for now, we’re perfectly content.