Recently, the Powerhouse Dynamics team donated a morning to Mass Audubon Drumlin Farm, a local wildlife sanctuary and educational non-profit that also functions as a working farm. Mass Audubon is one of our customers: they use SiteSage to monitor energy consumption and renewable energy generation at a number of their properties across Massachusetts.
Each year around Halloween, Drumlin Farm hosts its Tales of the Night event for families, featuring a haunted hayride and a jack-o’-lantern display. The Powerhouse Dynamics team volunteered to carve as many of those jack-o’-lanterns as we could in 3 hours. With over 150 pumpkins to be carved when we arrived, it was a daunting task, but one that we (along with teams from Intel and Bristol-Myers Squibb) were up for. Fortified with homemade pumpkin cream cheese muffins, we got to work on the messy business of designing and carving… fast.
Creativity abounds at Powerhouse Dynamics, so there was a wide variety of jack-o’-lantern subject matter, from a hand-drawn tree to clowns, pirates, minions, Imperial Storm Troopers, cats, birds, words, and garden-variety scary and silly faces. And amazingly, over the course of 3 hours, not only did we generate enough pumpkin remains to fill the compost heap, but we also carved all 150 pumpkins!
Of course, no activity is complete without prizes, so we awarded a number of prizes to our team members at our pizza lunch afterward, including the first-timer award (a member of our management team, who shall remain nameless, had never before carved a jack-o’-lantern!), the most artistic award, the most copyrighted subject matter award, the best engineered pumpkin award, and the goofiest pumpkin award, as well as a special award for best prepped.
And here’s the best part: this photo of a child gazing in wonder at all of the pumpkins we’d carved:
Happy Halloween! And if you’d like to carve pumpkins with us next year, click here to learn about job openings!