What do a bunch of Dawgs (University of Washington Alumni), Kids and United Way have in common? A great day of volunteerism and education.

Been sick this past week, but wanted to make sure I shared my thoughts on last week's United Way Day of Caring event at the Washington Association for the Education of Young Children (WAEYC - pronounced why - ack).

David, Jin-Su, Laura & James it was great meeting and volunteering with you all.

We did a variety of office tasks for WAYEC including event phoning and promotion, get out the vote calls and conducted a great Strategic Marketing meeting to help WAEYC promote and increase their membership.

WAEYC been helping teachers and kids for some 30 years!

It was an awesome office of people passionate about kids -- they really have some great programs to help educators.

Kudos to James for getting us all together to help the kids :)

For information on the good works WAEYC does visit - http://www.waeyc.org/

I read in USA Today (http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2007/09/happy-25th-birt.html) that it's the emoticon's 25th. birthday.

Apparently a professor Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon said he was the first to use ":-)" and ":-(" on a list of jokes he found funny and ones he did not.

It made me think about the way I communicate over email, blogs, IM and text. Written language whether we like it or not is always in flux as we use it -- I'm sure the Emily posts of ettiquette would frown upon the IMHO or TTLs.

For me, I love these little emoticon and shorthand gems:

:-# (whoops, shouldn'ta said that) and
:-P (sticking the tongue out -- not serious)

What's your fave emoticon?

So ESS is in a period of overall transition. We sent off our Development Manager, Peter Knudson off to his Hawaii with an Aloha fiesta.

And yes, they got the one of the office dawgs to wear a sombrero. Yup, Yofi, the Chihuahua did his best "yo quiero Taco Bell" impression on Friday w/ three of his ESS amigos.

Peter it was great working with you!

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For me, transition continues as I make sure my team gets their performance evals., and teammates, like our tech writer Debra get cross trained.

I hope my fellow downtown Bellevue, WA workers got to enjoy this beautiful blast of Autumn sun today.

For those of you who missed the Latigo Lace concert -- it was a blast. They played some great covers by Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and even that catchy/ktischy country pop song "Before He Cheats" by Carrie Underwood.

The best was watching this little kid rock out on his plastic guitar -- a real Rock Star in the making.

So my fellow cubical workers -- I hope you don't miss too many fun moments like this amidst deadlines. Get out and enjoy the Autumn.

How do you try to break up your work day?