"No More Starving Artists"

I love my job at Ancestry.

We have something really cool happening at work. It's our most recent charity project. We're doing a canned food drive. But we're not doing the lame kind of canned food drive, where there are a couple boxes and a few people bring things in because they feel like they should.

We're having a competition. But we're not having a competition to see who can collect the most, either.

No way, our company is far more creative than that.

Our company has been divided into six teams, and each team has a leader. The company is giving each team a certain amount of money, which they are to spend on canned foods... to build GIANT SCULPTURES! How fantastic is that?

We can use tape and stuff that's easy to take apart, but the scupltures have to be free-standing. No framework or anything like that. No perishable foods are allowed. No damaging the cans or their labels. They have to fit within a 10' by 10' square, and cannot be taller than five feet. For ideas, they suggested we visit http://www.canstruction.org .

Each sculpture needs a title, a description, and a list of all of the foods that are included, and how many cans.

They especially encourage us to use peanut butter, canned tuna, powdered milk, canned beans and chili, canned stews and soups, 100% fruit juice, and canned fruits and vegetables. The food bank wants those things the most.

I'm way excited to see how the sculptures turn out.

Things I Learned at Work, Sort of.

[I wrote this early Friday morning and kept adding to it, and then forgot to post it. Oops.]

Some new, interesting things that I learned at work this morning by reading ancestry magazine:

- Watermelon is indigenous to Africa and came over to America in the late 1600s when settlers started bringing slaves over. Peanuts, sesame seeds, and yams came from Africa, too.

- Graham crackers were created by a Presbyterian minister named Sylvester Graham, in 1830, to help people fight lustful feelings. "As part of his health regimen, Graham advocates daily cold baths, lots of exercise, chastity, temperance, and hard mattresses." (pg. 25)

- Arsenic and strychnine were used in 1894 for weight loss.

- They've done DNA testing on cats, and basically all domestic cats go back to five mother cats, which were Near Eastern wildcats from "the deserts of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia" about 10,000 years ago. It's the same time and place that wheat and barley were domesticated, and they think maybe those five mamma cats kept rodents from the grain and were welcomed (with their kittens) by humans. They guess that the cats liked the arrangement and adapted, domesticating themselves. (pg. 20)

- Turkey is the only commercially available meat native to America. (pg. 34)