#HatofSummer 2024 Revealed

 Look. I'm sorry that the #HatofSummer has been official for weeks and I forgot to cross post this video from my other social media feeds over here.

Fifteen-years-ago me would be severely disappointed.

But current me is who he is. And that's just how it goes. I encourage you to get over your disappointment and surf back through the WWYG?! archives and feel better about when this was more vibrant and vital and we all had more pep in our step.

None of that, however, takes away from the very satisfying fact that #OfficialHat2024 is out there and the #HatofSummer project continues--even after all this time.

So not everything slowly withers on the vine.

As much as the hat's simple existence, I am happy with the new style and video elements I added this year. No, I didn't experiment as much as I thought I would. But it gives me confidence that I might make another step next Spring when #OfficialHat2025 approaches.

#HatofSummer (2024) Voting Update Number 3

When I started this project in 2012 I didn't know where it would go. And all these years later, it seems evident by the tone of this video that I still don't.

Such are the defining characteristics of the #HatofSummer.

 

#HatofSummer (2024) Voting Update Number 2

Memorial Day weekend is now only two weeks away, so the time you have left to vote for the #HatofSummer is slipping away!

Perhaps this is surprising to you? If so, that might be because I have not done a great job of reminding everyone about the voting progress this year. Regardless #OfficialHat2024 will be chosen very soon and then no more new hats for me until Labor Day weekend!

Voting is open and ready to accept your choices now!

 

#HatofSummer Voting Update #1

 Good day everyone! It has been a few weeks and I've let the #OfficialHat2024 voting proceed at its own, slow pace in the first few weeks.

There haven't been lots of votes yet. But we still have almost two full months for that to change.

I say that not to encourage you to sit on your voting hands and wait, but rather to remind you that you can use these upcoming weeks to vote to your heart's content. Many times! Multiple times! It is still very much anyhat's game to win or lose.

The Temperance Row hat has the bulk of the votes to this point. So, if you like that hat, then keep it going. But if you want to see another choice challenge for the crown (no crown options available), then go forth!

Click on this link to be taken to the Google Form for voting: https://forms.gle/qE3MDu2UM6sQLqx69

On that page, you will see the Rules video that I made this year and your four options.

If you would like to see the videos that have been made for the 2024 #HatofSummer campaign, you can visit this year's YouTube playlist. 

I will start making more video updates soon, I promise! 

Vote for the 2024 #HatofSummer

 You have seen all for hat choices for #OfficialHat2024. (But if you need a refresher on what the four hats are, check out the 2024 #HatofSummer playlist.)

So now you can get busy voting.

Please vote as many times as you want!

#HatofSummer Video #4: Anders Erickson

Today's post features the final option in the 2024 #HatofSummer contest.

The Anders Erickson hat is merch that I bought from this YouTube channel.

Anders makes very good weekly videos about making cocktails and often discusses the history and creators of the drinks featured in each video. As I say in the video, I'm learning more about making cocktails and have started experimenting with spirits and liqueurs and the like. Cocktails always intimidated me as the ingredients always seems confusing and foreign and odd. But, as with everything else in life, if you take your time and think about it, you can learn.

So, please drink responsibly.

But . . . vote irresponsibly!

All of the #OfficialHat2024 choices are now public and the voting sheet is live. Start clicking and voting with abandon! You can start casting votes for your favorite hat here.

I'll start posting update videos to give you progress on voting soon!

 

#HatofSummer Video #3: Temperance Row Brewing Co.

 Here is the third of four choices for the 2024 #HatofSummer.

It's another bit of swag from another local Westerville business--a hat for the Temperance Row Brewing Company, housed within Uptown Deli and Brew.

This is a favorite restaurant of ours. The food is simple, but tasty and I enjoy their locally brewed beers as well. And from a historical point of view, this restaurant is notable for being the first Westerville brewery since the temperance movement hit alcohol sales in the United States back in the early twentieth century.

As you may know, Westerville was a very important headquarters for the temperance movement before and during the Prohibition era in the United States. Westerville once called itself the Dry Capitol of the World. And it mailed information against the sale of alcohol across the globe from this (then) sleep town in central Ohio.

But those days are over. Prohibition ended in the 1930s, but Westerville remained dry until the 2000s. Now there is a museum for the movement in the local public library and information about the Anti-Saloon League. As well as a memorial statue on Main Street outside of City Hall. 

But we also have alcohol sales and many good restaurants and wine bars up and down that same Main Street. And if you look, you might see me on a summer weekend with a glass in hand, wearing the Temperance Row Brewing Co. hat--if it wins the most votes, that is.

Watch the video and cast your vote!

#HatofSummer Video #2: Whits Frozen Custard

I bought this hat a few weeks ago.

I was in Delaware, attending Grace's latest concert band performance at Ohio Wesleyan. It was a rare opportunity to get the whole family together to see Grace's concert. Sarah and her boyfriend drove up from Columbus. Jay didn't have a Friday night conflict of some kind. And even though it was (maybe?) the worst snow storm of this winter, we all made it there and back home again.

After the concert was over, we drove in the snowfall and trudged through the sidewalks of downtown Delaware to have a quick late night dessert at the Delaware Whits. And there, beside the counter, was this hat.

It looks bright and nice and I decided then to buy it!

So, will it be this year's #HatofSummer?

 

#HatofSummer Video 1: Seersucker

Today, the Google Form opened to receive votes for the 2024 #HatofSummer.

So, I'm posting video number 1 here to start publicizing the choices for #OfficialHat2024.

And, to peek behind the curtain a bit, I have a bit of dilemma. You see, I make the videos and I don't open the voting until all of the videos are ready. But when I have all of the videos ready and I open up the official voting, I am reluctant to post all of the hat videos in a block. Because I want to tease out the time period of new videos to try and draw people in. (You see I still labor--after all these years of evidence to the contrary--under the delusion that I will ever be able to generate any sort of Internet interest in the things that I do.)

So, I have videos ready. And I want to time delay video presentation. BUT . . . the Google Form already tells you what the hat choices are--even if you don't have all of the videos to watch yet.

But does it matter?

Untimately, no. I doesn't matter.

So I guess what I will do is this--

I've posted video 1: Seersucker now. Here. And you can start voting now. Over on this linked Google Form. But you will also see the other choices, even if you don't have the full context. But I'll be releasing those videos in a sort of accelerated pace over the next few days. It won't matter or make any difference. But that is what I've chosen to do.

Happy voting!

 

#HatofSummer 2024 is Coming Soon!

Even though there is snow on the ground outside the window as I type this, Spring is soon to arrive. And that means that the videos for the 2024 Hat of Summer are in preparation now.

And so, I spent some time this weekend working on the ins and outs and I got this teaser trailer put together.

I hope that you like it.

And I really hope that you keep your eyes open for the other videos that are to come.

Next up will be a rules video, separate from the hat-specific videos. (It's odd that I haven't made a rules only video in the past, but I'm excited to put it together.)

The hat videos and the Google form for voting are soon to be made and will be live soon. As always, I thank you for your attention and your interest in this weird little annual project of mine.

Goodbye . . .

 . . . forever?

Accidentally, maybe. But also no. That title was only an eye-grabbing tease. Did I tease you?

Actually, this is just goodbye to #HatofSummer2023.

See below (please click as Jeb Bush might tweet).

(I apologize for sounding like Bilbo after the barrel ride to Lake Town.)

COV74D-19--#OfficialHat2020 Revealed

Placing this here for complete-ness and posterity. (You are welcome future historians.)

COV70D-19

Memorial Day weekend is right in front of us, so that means there are only days left to vote for this year's #HatofSummer.

Watch today's video that exists only to make you get off your couch and put your voting fingers to work.

As always, you can vote frequently--an obscene amount of voting is to be expected and should be required. If you feel that you have voted enough, I am here to tell you that you are incorrect. You should be voting while you eat dinner--unless you somehow need both hands to eat your dinner. (Maybe you are eating ribs or a hamburger or a sandwich. But even so, use voice recognition on your smartphone to tell the phone to set a reminder to vote as soon as both (or even one hand) is free from dinner consumption.

And then, once dinner has been digested . . . guess what? Vote some more.

Where should you be voting?

Go here and click, click, click away. You only have mere days left.

COV67D-19

True story . . . I knew that I hadn't posted about the #HatofSummer voting in a while. But I hadn't realized how much time remained before the voting officially closes for this year.

And, my friends, it is only a few more days to be honest! Because when I opened up the Google doc and checked the calendar, it dawned upon me that Memorial Day is NEXT MONDAY.

And that means you only have one more week to cast your vote that determines #OfficialHat2020.

I realize that this is not the most important thing occupying your mind these days. Heck, as you can clearly tell, it is not the most important thing occupying MY brain these days. But we cannot let these important rituals fall away during this time of crisis. If I cannot turn to you, my digital faithful, and ask you to spend your off-hours time mindlessly clicking away to determine my hot weather head gear . . . well, then what are we all fighting for in the first place? What joys and pleasures remain?

So, please . . . take some time today, tonight, tomorrow, and every day between now and next Monday clicking away. You can choose between the current leader--the often overlooked Ireland hat--or this year's upstart challenger--the Martin BBQ Joint hat.

Go here (https://forms.gle/1oJWSpMNh7V66MAY9) to keep on voting.

(Remember that this shows all of the votes that were collected by all of the hats initially on offer this year. Only the top two vote winners remain to be voted on. The Ireland hat has received 41% of the total votes cast throughout the campaign period. The Martins BBQ has is second with just over 29% of the other votes cast.)

COV50D-19

Congratulations that you have made it into May! And with the coming of May--even during a time of bizarre coronavirus concerns, all thoughts naturally turn towards the #HatofSummer. Every year since human memory we have banded together to choose a single hat. A hat that is a celebration of sun, fun, and good times. These are the things that we all want. This is what we need. And I am here to help you get to that happy place.

There are only a few weeks remaining in the #OfficialHat2020 voting. Memorial Day is finally on the sort-of-distant horizon. But when it arrives, a final hat will be chosen. And now, starting today, there are only two hats that remain. The newly-established primaries are done. The top two have been chosen.

It was a close call between choice 2 and choice 3. The Martins BBQ Joint received a total of 354 votes (29.4%) while the NHS Yes! was only 13 votes behind with 341 votes (28.3%). I'm sad to see that the NHS Yes hat didn't clear that bar this year, but I'm sure it will return in future years.

 

As I said, the votes continue. Please click here to visit the Google Form page to cast your choice between the two remaining hat choices.

COV49D-19

I took two days off. And I can’t think of anything good to say. I want to keep blogging, but if there is nothing to say then why bother?

. . . 

The voice to text was not working either. So everything is against me. I came outside to sit on the front porch and get some fresh air. And it’s chilly and it’s not sunny and I’m tired of everything. Can you relate?

Hannah is working on schoolwork all the time--as often as I can force her to. (She’s got a project due tomorrow that I’ve been hounding her to complete for two weeks.) Sarah is working on her finals. Her semester ends next week. She’s tired and stressed out and can’t sleep. Grace is always up in a room working. Lynda is up in her room working. I’m downstairs at the table working. Life is just an endless series of home days, home days, home days. 

Will it ever warm up outside? 

Will THIS ever end? 

There’s got to be something to look forward to, 

But what?!

***

Today is the last day of the primary round of the #OfficialHat2020 voting. Starting tomorrow, there will only be two remaining #HatofSummer choices.

I encourage you to spend some time tonight voting.

COV46D-19

Good God. It's been almost fifty days.

. . .

. . .

sigh

. . .

Alright.

First things first tonight. As you may know we've been fostering a mother cat and her four kittens during this shelter-at-home time. I've posted videos about them as they have grown. And I'm doing it again today. Not because I need filler content, but because I need you to see how cute these cats are so that you will fall in love with them.

 

I need you to fall in love with these kittens (and someone needs to take the Momma cat as well) because they are getting old enough to live on their own. And I CANNOT be a household with five cats in it. So people who love pets and want pets and cannot stand the cuteness of these pets need to let me know. (And obviously, this only truly counts for local Columbus-area people. I can't be driving several states to deliver a cat. I can't even be bothered to drive to the Wendys two miles from my house, no matter how badly I want to eat a Frosty. So, yeah . . . locals only please.)

***

In other, equally important news, the primary cut off point for the #HatofSummer approaches at the end of this month (that is this Thursday, so that is only a few days away). This means that starting on Friday, May 1--THIS FRIDAY--the potential choices for #OfficialHat2020 is permanently cut to only TWO CHOICES.

So, if you have opinions, you NEED to act.

Here are the results as of Monday evening:

Go here to keep casting your votes: https://forms.gle/RA7N1xnqUpE1Ri8VA

COV40D-19

RANDOM QUARANTINE THOUGHTS ON A TUESDAY

1. . . .

2. I swear I had some thoughts yesterday when my brain served up this "idea". But facing the blank screen, nothing is rising up to the front of my memory. (Can something rise to the front, though? Shouldn't it either be move to the front or rise to the top? And why do I insist on using movement metaphors for the imperfect firing of my neurons?

3. There . . . maybe that will shake something loose?

*** Many, many work-related hours later ***

4. Turns out . . . that didn't really being anything particularly exciting to mind. Which is just as well because I had lots of other things to occupy my mind today with work.

5. One thing that I am thinking about right now as I type this is the ongoing struggle (relative term) to maintain digital schooling for these last weeks of the 2020 academic year. Yesterday, Gov. DeWine announced that schools would not reconvene before the scheduled end of the year. Classes and assignments and education will only proceed through the digital channels that we have started using during the first 38 days of this state quarantine.

6. Grace--God bless her, is doing her own thing and is handling her school independently as she always has. Sarah is in a different category, being a college student and in charge of her own process--unless she wants help? But Hannah is still getting the ropes of Middle School in her routine and needs some more targeted oversight. (But here is where I must say that Hannah--for all the supposed negativity that you might detect from me--is largely doing extremely well in school and when you press her on it, you can tell that she truly cares.) But for all of that, she is still young and if given the choice will choose NOT to set aside hours of her at-home time to attend school in a manner that can appear more theoretical than actual.

So, all of that word salad means that I had some school-related realizations today due to the fact that interim grade reports started coming in on the Powerschool app while I sat and worked throughout the day. And I realized that while I have found a good footing with Hannah on her core classwork in the last few weeks--Language Arts, Social Studies, Math, Science--the elective/special classes have been overlooked by me. For instance, how do you evaluate Physical Education in this online setting? I can get Hannah active and prevent her from being sedentary every day. But what are the criteria? Is there any assignments from the school? I haven't seen them, so that likely means Hannah doesn't have them in the forefront of her mind. The same goes for her "Career Literacy" class. What are the expectations for the rest of this year? Darned if I know.

Band is less confusing than these other two, because her teacher has been sending emails regularly with assignment prompts. And because Hannah takes a private weekly lesson I feel good about her continued learning in that vein. 

But . . . well, we've got almost another scheduled month of this to go before the year officially ends. I am confident that Hannah won't lose ground in any meaningful academic sense. But it is a reminder to me that I need to stay vigilant on the bureaucracy and the management side of the modern educational system to ensure that her paper trail matches up with the expectations.

7. Whatever else, I'll be happy to see this year of schooling officially done in four-ish weeks.

8. 

 

9. Go cast your continuing votes here: https://forms.gle/1jXdy1MxghTbCaEJ7 We officially narrow the field down to only TWO CHOICES in about 10 days.

COV36D-19

I hope that you successfully made it through another week of whatever it is that you are dealing with. 

Maybe today feels like every other day. 

Or maybe you are SO happy to be seeing a weekend?

However you are right now, I hope it is happy. And if so, I hope that you can hold onto that happiness through the next few days and heck, as long as possible. Why put limits on things?

But, oddly enough, I just realized . . . the point of this post is to introduce a limit of sorts. Something not tried before. Something new.

And yes, it's a #HatofSummer thing.

(If somehow, you are stumbling along to this blog for the very first time and you have no idea what the #HatofSummer is, I recommend that you do a few things. First, click the #HatofSummer label cloud over to the right of your screen--unless you're reading on Mobile--which . . . who are we kidding, you probably are. In that case, um . . . I don't know. Do you have a Twitter account? If so, you could search #HatofSummer and you'd likely pull up several tweets with my big fat face on them. Click through those and see what you can learn. Or, just follow the links below the video--after please watching the video, okay? I did spend about ten TOTAL minutes on it. But then follow the links below to the playlists to go back through the past. And if you do I'm confident you'll figure it all out.)

Okay--hopefully they are off getting oriented to everything. Now, for the Old Faithfuls out there, get ready for something that you might like or maybe you won't. But it's different.

Watch and act! GO VOTE!

Vote for your #HatofSummer choice here: Link to the Google Voting page

Hats of Summer 2020 playlist: Link to the 2020 #HatofSummer video playlist

Official Hats of Summer (full) playlist: Link to the full list of all #HatofSummer videos

COV34D-19

I didn't post yesterday because I just didn't have much of interest to write about. (Some may say That's never stopped you before! And I try to ignore those people.) I did briefly consider on Monday night writing yesterday a fictionalized short story of sorts. Most likely it wouldn't have been long enough to even be considered a short story. So it might have been for the best that I never tried it. The idea was a way of expressing some Monday thoughts I had about the cats we are fostering. And I'm not clever enough to pull that off without being annoying and obvious.

(Boy, my writing lately has been full of vague passive aggression hasn't it? I guess I've either got to learn to be more direct or to get over things more quickly.)

As for today? Laptop computer work for several hours ahead of me (as I jot down these thoughts in the morning while drinking coffee and preparing to dive it). Then helping with dinner/cleanup. And then facing the evening hours. We'll probably watch some LOST--or at least some of us will. Last night Grace, Hannah, and I watched "Everybody Hates Hugo." as well as ". . . And Found."

***

In other news, I quickly checked the mid-week results of the #HatofSummer voting and it looks like we are finding some early favorites.

The Martin's BBQ hat is getting some family love. But there is still lots of weeks ahead. So you can cast multiple votes for your favorite any time, all the time. Follow this link to make your voice heard.

***

Finally, a random thought as I sit here later in the day to close out this post and move on to a different phase of the day. What do I dislike the most about life? Probably the need to be partially responsible for the food-related needs of others. If I could just come and go as I needed to and get the food I wanted when I wanted, that would be optimal. But I joined myself with others and the two of us are now responsible for even more people. And so, the daily struggle for food and nourishment looms. Sometimes I wish we just had basic things like the protein cakes in Snowpiercer or stuff like that. But no! Once again capitalism confused and complicates everything. We are prosperous and so variety is built-in and expected!

It's tiresome.

What bothers you most on a reoccurring basis?