December 19.

December 19
Muffin Day

Nothin’ says lovin’
Like somethin’ from the oven.

~ Pillsbury Dough Boy

Enjoy that muffin with a nice espresso for Espresso Day. Yum.

It is also Hard Candy Day.  If I ever find a hard candy that’s as good as chocolate I might be converted. But as of now the only candy I’m interested in is plain old hershey bars.

Jake Gyllenhaal (1980), Alyssa Milano (1972), Cicely Tyson (1933), Jennifer Beals (1963), Mike Lookinland (1960), and Tim Reid (1944) all celebrate birthdays today.

I found today’s Smiley on the table of snacks set out for us to enjoy the day I did my TED Talk. Sharing my project with 700+ people in the auditorium and 350,000 watching via simulcast was thrilling! They never asked if I’d spoken in public before. Since the answer was no, I wasn’t going to bring it up. Then novice that I was, I couldn’t get the clicker to work!

What a great day that was–even though it was wrought with difficulties. As I am standing in the wings and my name is being announced a Techie tells me they are having trouble getting my slides to load. What?! For the first 45 seconds, I fumbled and apologized and struggled as the slides sometimes appeared and sometimes did not. Once the issue was resolved and I got rolling, the crowd was so enthusiastic–maybe it was that universal love for the underdog, or maybe just because Smileys make people happy!  One very striking thing happened a few speakers after me. A big-wig from a very big dot com company (not going to mention his name) also had some tech difficulties. Where I had apologized, his response was to publicly shame the people behind the scenes, who even as he hollered, were doing their darnedest to fix the problem. He screamed, “Get your sh*t together.”  Wow. How unkind. I remember thinking, “If you’re mother were here, you’d be so grounded.”