Ice cream social

I spent Friday afternoon serving root beet floats to elementary school kids.

The company I work for, Xilinx, allocates money for its offices to spend on the local community: art, science, miscellaneous, and I forget the other categories. My office has adopted a local school, Dawson Elementary (home of the Dolphins!), and sponsors events and donated computers and the like. Thursday, the office admin asked me if I wanted to spend Friday afternoon working in a fluorescent-lit cubicle reinstalling Windows or to frolic in the vicinity of excited grade-school kids not in class and give them ice cream to support their annual sock hop. I think I thought it over for an entire second. Maybe two- one to process and one to decide.

For about an hour and a half I and a coworker's wife scooped ice cream and handed the cups off to get imitation Coke and/or root beer poured by my other coworkers. We had a little assembly line that would make Henry Ford proud. I also had a festive green plastic lei for some reason. (Lei = Sock hop? I don't pretend to understand.) Instead of a root beer float I had an Amp (Mountain Dew's energy drink) float to keep me going. After the haze of ice cream, my body craved vitamins and healthful food, so I met a friend for lunch and ordered a spinach salad and an empanada.

In an interesting stream of existential connectivity, after open gaming at Great Hall I ate at iHop with Marc to do some post-gaming geeking. Our waitress had a kid at Dawson elementary and I had evidently given her a root beer float and we got excellent service and hooked up.