Renowned chickenblogger ScottChicken, who was the source of the longevity quiz I posted a couple weeks back, is actually an old friend of mine from college.
For the last few years, I've been sponsoring him every year in mountain bike ride that the National Multiple Sclerosis Society puts on. He's been doing them for over a decade; I can't remember whether I've been sponsoring him for that long but definitely the last few years. I'm terrible at fundraising myself - heck, I was too shy & embarrassed to sell Girl Scout Cookies & those pretty much sell themselves - but I do give to various things over the course of an average year. I've been pretty lucky, passing some of that luck along in cash form is, I figure, the least I can do.
Anyways, Scott started doing these mostly because it was fun - but over the years, he started hearing about people he knew being diagnosed with MS, and it gradually became a little more serious (and he doesn't tend to do serious that easily, as you'll notice if you look at his blog, so that's serious).
This year, the email he sent announcing it had the subject "This Time, It's Personal".
Turns out his big sister Carol was diagnosed with MS this year.
I doubled my usual donation - and when he asked me if I could mention it on Frogma I did a forehead-smack/"D'oh!" combo. Of course. How dense of me not to think of it myself.
Anyhow, if you are interested in reading the whole story & maybe helping him out with a pledge, his personal page on the MS society website can be found here - here's his description of what's there -
It's got the full story of my sister's diagnosis, my riding for Squiggy, and a nice picture of me with a little beauty mark of mud. I look like a bearded Cindy Crawford if I do say so myself...
um...Cindy Crawford? Um. Yeah. OK, Scott...whatever you say... ;)
Anyways, he does tell the whole story better than I do. It being his and all that's only right.
And that's it for tonight - except that I absolutely have to say thank you for some very nice comments about yesterday's post. I know I'm not alone in that stuff but it's nice to read it right there. I wish I had time to answer them individually but I really do need to turn in now & if I get going on that I will be up all night. That's such a strange topic for me to blog about...sort of like going "Oh, here, I think I will juggle some broken glass right here in public just to see what happens".
And now I must turn in - trying to turn myself into a morning person so that I can paddle my kayak from Chelsea to Yonkers at 4 am on Thursday (that's just how it has to happen mostly based on tides, with a nod to morning ferry rush hour, and also the thought of still getting to work on time - generally when you have a specific destination on the Hudson on a specific day, it's totally up to the river what time you are going to do it, and in this case the Hudson says "Ahem...4 am, missy" and there's no talking back) and also be bright-eyed and bushytailed and all that stuff for 8 am sessions at the symposium this weekend.
Whee! I'm psyched.
This will probably be my last post before that...oh, man, though, watch out when I get back, I am going to be bubbling over with thoughts on teaching & general excitement...either that or complete self-loathing if things DON'T go that well. Either way, it probably won't be boring - at least to fellow paddlers!
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