We decided to head off to the Cincinnati Museum Center’s Shocktober exhibit on Saturday. In the past years the museum center has done Boofest, which was lots of fun. Boofest would typically be a series of stations, where museum employees / volunteers would be dressed up and give out candy. This was during kid hours – they also would do a frightening hours but we never went to that so I don’t know what it was like). Each station would also give out candy or other treats. One year one of them was giving out big containers of Huggies wipes so we went back a few extra times for bonus wipes :-).

In any case the exhibit was usually popular with lots of kids dressed up and such. We made sure to get to Shocktober nice and early. We usually try to hit the museum right when it opens at 10 on Saturdays to get in some good play time before it gets too crowded. So we got the kids dressed up (Amy as Snow White, Scott as a clown and Joel as a dinosaur) and off we went. And, if you haven’t figured it out from the title of this post, it was pretty crappy. There were various stages where you did various crafts and activities and collected postcards. The activities and crafts were all pretty dumb if you ask me, even for kids, though I did get quite a chuckle out of a kid volunteer trying to explain to Amy and Scott various Native American games. “Okay now I’m going to roll this hoop and you throw this stick through it” uhhhhhhhhhh, sure.

I was holding out hope that after collecting these postcards that there was going to be a place at the end where you could turn them in for some sort of treat (and thus was diligently collecting postcards for Joel), but at the end, it was just some guy congratulating Amy and Scott and giving them a certificate that said they were official Junior Western Museum Curators. Oh baby oh baby yeah. When we got home everything went into the trash. This was during the “friendly hours”. I can’t speak for the “frightening” hours, but since it costs $5.50 a person even for museum members ($10.50 for non-members) I don’t think I’ll be finding out any time soon…

In other news, I gave a talk in the Spanish branch today. Don Sullivan, who is on the High Council and also in our ward was speaking down there and I guess the HC speaker is also assigned to bring someone else with them to fill the time so he asked me last week. I told him that I would but that since he doesn’t speak Spanish (they have someone translate) that I could make fun of him in Spanish during my talk and he would never know :-). I do get an occasional opportunity at work to speak Spanish because sometimes people call in to our call centers or such not speaking English and I am called on to translate. The only problem is that on my mission I never learned words like “aseguranzas” or “beneficios medicos” or “Cuatro-cero-uno-ka”. So it was nice today to actually use words I have lots of practice with, like “Libro de Mormon” or “profeta”.