August Happiness Challenge -- Day 13

Thursday's Happy Cone goes to free food. Decades ago, when I was just beginning my advertising career at Sears, Roebuck and Co., we writers had an in-joke. I don't recall much about how it got started, but when things got tough we'd say to one another, "There are no free lunches at Sears."

Well today, many years and 8 jobs later, I work at place that offers free lunch quite often. There's always bread, peanut butter and jelly in the refrigerator. There's always fruit in the wire basket. And once a month there's a 4:00 party with food and beer and wine (which counts as lunch if you can wait till 4:00).

Thursday's free lunch was provided by a local hero, Mike Ditka. "Da Coach." And it was fabulous. There was salad and steamed vegetables and rotini with tomato sauce and chicken and salmon and cookies and brownies and two kinds of beer. Ditka himself brought it over and very graciously posed for photos for about an hour.

His restaurant was doing a promotion with Chicago-based Groupon and they wanted to film Da Coach interacting with the fans. Our agency wanted to do something enhance morale and since this evening was the first Bears pre-season game, this free lunch seemed like a mutually beneficial situation.

I'm not really a Bear fan (and to be honest, I've always suspected Mike Ditka to be hygienically challenged), so I didn't want to take a true football fan's place in the photo line. But the the food was pretty good (except the chicken was a little veiny) and very free. And it was so nice to be surrounded by excited and happy coworkers wearing their Bears t-shirts and jerseys in anticipation of their audience with Da Coach.

What's that you say? What's the August Happiness Challenge?

Each day in August you are to post about something that makes *you* happy. Pretty simple. And, it doesn't even have to be every day if you don't want it to be. It's a great way to remind ourselves that there are positive things going on in our lives, our communities, and the world.

If you want to play along, just come back here (meaning to this blog, not this individual post) each day in August, looking for the happy chocolate cone. Every day I will try to have a post with the headline: August Happiness Challenge: Day [X]. Leave a comment and then post your own daily happiness, with August Happiness Challenge in the title to make it easy to find.