Chaos Attraction

Heart Day Rainout

2014-02-07, 8:04 p.m.

So today was officially "wear red heart shirts and get your picture taken for the Guinness Book of World Records Day" (more about this here, if you care). You may note from the article that they wanted 12,000 people to come out wearing red shirts and pose in a heart to get their picture taken. My office, being all gung ho and shit, actually got to officially close for a couple of hours to go to this, and sprung for the shirts. So for us it was pretty mandatory.

However. This thing was scheduled in February. And even in California, even in OMG DROUGHT YEAR, it's still winter in February. Which of course meant that it was going to be a giant rainfest, because how dare you schedule a giant outdoor event in February even in California, where the previous month was having nearly every day be 65-70 degrees. You know what? I don't care if it's National Heart Month and Valentine's Day and what the hell ever in February. It's still winter and it's completely impractical to schedule something like that THEN. Because that's just asking Murphy to make it be rainy and 40 degrees outside. Really, they should have tried to do this in oh, May or something like that. Perhaps Picnic Day when you have hordes of people wandering around anyway. Everyone kept hoping it'd be canceled for weather, but noooooo, it was not.

Here's how it went: the total people showing up? 2500. SO THAT WENT WELL. I figured they weren't going to break the record just because of the weather alone, but even I wouldn't have figured it would be that low. Meanwhile, the poor schmucks who did show up were all covering their red shirts with coats and umbrellas and standing around. They tried to have the Band-Uh run around and they (not the band, an actual recording) played "Gangnam Style" and things to try to pump people up, but I just don't think that was happening. One of my coworkers tried and got filmed by the chief of police (who was also standing around pretty bored). Not in a bad way, I should probably say! Nobody was terribly psyched to run around screaming and yelling for heart health, though.

Meanwhile, my coworkers kept being befelled by injuries. One of them has a bad hip already and then the one that drove us here suddenly got whopping charley horses in both legs to the point of being unable to drive from standing around cold for an hour. I ended up getting hit on the head and walking into a truck pull while trying to dodge cars in the parking lot, but that's all on me. Everyone is bitching about how they're going to catch a cold immediately. (I pointed out that I once had to stand around in worse rain for four hours while my cousin ran a triathlon and still didn't get sick from being cold and wet, but then again, I'm usually the only one who never catches anyone else's anything.) So next week oughta be worse than usual here.

On the other hand, I did start my knitting for the Ravellenic Games while standing around bored--I am so glad I brought something to do. I started a legwarmer while I was out there and got a few inches done. So there's that. (And somehow the bad weather seems to be making things quieter at actual work itself, so yay on that.) I am going to try to make a vest AND legwarmers at the same time...which I admit is kind of dumb and insane since I can really only do one of those within a 2 week-ish/Olympic time frame. But what the hell.

It's supposed to be particularly nasty going home tonight. I actually brought my car to work and broke in my free parking pass because I am going to a TEDX Salon tonight and that gets out past the bus leaving.


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