Project Can Do

Two weeks ago we went to Moline, via Rock Island, but that's another story. We visited the John Deere Pavilion to see Project Can Do. What an interesting and huge project. John Deere came up with the idea of building a combine out of stacked cans to promote the new S-Series combine. This is a life-size combine, built by volunteers completely of stacked cans of food. The combine was 16 feet tall, 80 feet long and 60 feet wide. There were more than 300,000 cans of food in the 170 ton sculpture. The food was bought by John Deere from Hy-Vee stores, and now all the food has been given to the River Bend Foodbank, which serves 12 counties in the Quad City area.

The combine looked like it was being driven into a corn field; with stalks of corn (made of cans, of course) going thru the 16 row head. On the floor were 3000 bags of popcorn, 5000 bags of beans and peas, 2000 bags of pinto beans and 800 bags of red kidney and black beans. Behind the combine were the tracks, made of the darker bean packages. There were lights on the combine made of yellow cans, the windows were silver cans (1500 cans LeSuere peas), black cans (9000 cans Chiliman Vegetarian) for the tires and of course the green combine (6000 cans of spinach) with the yellow details, simply awesome. What an amazing engineering display. If you are interested you can visit www.deere.com to see a picture.

Monday night was our Circle Christmas party at the 3-30 club where we enjoyed a prime rib/fried chicken dinner and later played Pictionary. Joy and I were on the committee (again) and I think everyone had a good time. The food was very good. Bill stayed home with his cold because I didn't want him getting close to Carma and having her get sick; she is taking chemo and surely wouldn't want his cold. So far I am staying well, spraying the Lysol right behind wherever he has been!