Walking Party

The Relay For Life was last night. Mo didn't want to get up at a quarter till one for the 'walking party,' but the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster covered for me so I could go walk the shift I'd signed up for.

We were out earlier, for the opening ceremonies, including a speech by DeeJo Miller. I mean, it's not like a new story to me, I've been following it for a couple of years. She blogs about it, and they used to live two doors down, so they're not exactly strangers. Not close friends, but I knew them well enough to say hello before all this. When we moved into this house nine years back, it was DeeJo who showed up on our porch with neighborhood kids in tow to welcome use with a batch of brownies. Yeah, I remember that.



Still, to hear her tell it, to imagine what it's like to try holding it together, or worse, what Hannah's had to go through. It would have taken a hard man to keep dry eyes.



The theme this year was Oscar night, or something like that. As usual, no one really knows what to do with that, but as usual the creative ones always come up with something that can stretch to fit. It's like parade floats, I suppose, a ton of arts and crafts work to go into something that is used once and often doesn't come off anywhere near as cool as it sounded months ago.



Fundraising-wise, this is the second year I hit up Cult members, and did a sort of mass email thing, too, using the ACS web site tools for that. It turned out to be an extraordinarily good idea, as I not only got a few Culties contributing, but one in particular decided he wanted to match all Cult donations to turn it up a notch.



He even matched the contribution of an ex-Cult member, who responded to my email, not to the thread at the Cult. For that matter, his match included his own original pledge, so it's hard not to be touched when someone is that enthusiastic about helping a good cause. What makes it even better, my employer matched all that. If you could keep that kind of multiplier going, well, you'd have a Ponzi scheme eventually. But a really altruistic, well intentioned Ponzi scheme.



I'm deeply grateful to everyone who contributed. Not to get political, but as DeeJo pointed out that the Federal government spends more money in Iraq in nine months than they have in thirty years on cancer research, and that's messed up. I mean, it's messed up in probably a different way than Deejo meant. I would probably see it her way if I was in her shoes. But for a guy like me who believes in voluntary charity rather than taxes and subsidies, you have to actually have willing contributors for the whole 'voluntary' thing to work.