How I spent White Cane Day

Greetings. Well, its finally here: White Cane Day. I don’t have a recap this time like I did last year. I’m sure that the marchers gathered at the Capitol this morning shortly before 9 and marched down Congress and over to City Hall; I’m confident that everyone gathered at City Hall to listen to some short speeches and the proclamation by the Mayor; and I’m sure that after this, everyone walked over to Republic Square Park for plenty of food, fun, and celebration with the different activities, music, and great food providers. However, I don’t have any information because I wasn’t there. I unfortunately obtained some of the allergies/cold sympthems that have been going around. The first signs were when I got congested and my ears started stopping up last Thursday. Its only gotten progressively worse since then, with stuffiness, sneezing, and at times not feeling all that great. I decided to skip the event last night and have been taking it easy today. If anything, I’ve gained another day of rest without the worry of missing classes since the events were today. I’ll hopefully make it tomorrow. Though it will be hard to listen to the stories of what went on today, knowing that I was home sick, I’m sure that the students' stories will be great.

However, here’s a story that I found through the Blind News archives on White Cane Day in Sri Lanka called
White Cane: Identification for the Blind
Which gives a worldly perspective on White Cane Day.

Incidentally, I've been keeping track of the numbers on the White Cane Day site, and earlier today, we passed the 1,000 mark! Who would have thought that the site would get that many hits. On Tuesday of last week, we had 230 hits in one day, which was quite remarkable. I put several expectations on the numbers, telling people that we might hit 400, then 500, then 600. However, when we hit 700, I stopped trying to put a limit on things. We might get more hits tomorrow and for a few days this week, but this is probably the mountain top for this year. Still, 1,000 hits in a little over 2 months; wow. It probably took my personal site about 8 or 9 months before it hit 1,000 and White Cane Day did it in two!

Toward the end of last week, I was asked to put information about the Houston, Texas, celebration of White Cane Day on the site, which I did. I added to that over the weekend so that now there’s a good amount on there regarding the Houston events. The thought crossed my mind earlier today that this WCD site could turn into a gathering place for WCD celebrations and observances around the state or country. That would be cool and something I would not have expected. Then again, I also didn’t expect the numbers to top 1,000. I’m willing to post information about events in other cities, if people only send it to me and I can add the HTML tags to make it “web worthy.”

Someone brought up the idea to me to add an option next year for people to buy the
T-shirts online, like through Paypal or something. That sounds interesting and cool, if I can set it up. Since I basically know HTML, I’d welcome any ideas from folks on how to do this, or what might be involved. I’ve looked at code on other pages that have Paypal buttons, and it doesn’t look that hard, but there’s probably more to it than just putting up the code and making the form. Anyway, that’s for down the road.

Happy White Cane Day to all!