Simply Incredible

If anyone has ever doubted the good in people (I admit I have my moments, often), please consider walking for a cause like Breast Cancer. The crazy amount of emotion I have experienced the last few days alone is almost too much to handle. On Friday, I finally decided to email my co-workers to tell them about the Walk and ask for support. Initially I was nervous about this because I didn't know if there was a company policy which wouldn't allow it (my husband's company is really uptight about this. I won't mention any names. Grr...) I was proved terrible wrong when, after sending the email I got a response that morning from our CEO saying that any donations made by employees would be matched up to $1,000! My thoughts went like this... "Wait, what? What? WHAT? Oh my gosh, oh my gosh... *I was then without thoughts for about a minute, then* WOW!" I immediately thanked him and emailed my group to tell them the news! So far employees have contributed $250 to my Walk page, and it's still coming in! :-) (The words "yippee" and "skippy" come to mind!)

As I said before, Saturday was the Expo in Boston. We got up early and met a large group for a Training Walk before the Expo. We dressed warm, but it was still quite miserable. We walked about 5 miles around the Charles River (Boston and Cambridge sides) in the rain/snow/sleet/ice and wind. I took a lot of comfort knowing that, even though it could rain, the likelihood that it will be SNOWING the weekend of the Walk (May 17-18th) is pretty low. (However, there is a chance, since this is New England and it has snowed on Mother's Day before... remind me why I haven't moved to Florida again please. Oh yeah, hurricanes, that must be it, and maybe alligators.) Steps recorded for Saturday = 19,050, a new personal record!!!

On Sunday we went back to Shaw's in North Reading for another bake sale (as a team, since all 5 of us were there! Amanda and Dan had the pleasure of meeting the infamous Kevin Bacon.) We got a bunch of donations but two people really made me want to bawl. One was a young boy, about 10 years old, who had brought in over 6,000 pennies (wow!) to cash in from his piggy bank. We watched as it was all counted with the machine and in the end he had just over $60! When he came back from the cashier with his cash he came over to our table and gave us $1. I mean really, how sweet is that? A little while later a woman came up and put $5 in the jar and said, quite simply, "this is for my Mom." *tear* (Not regular tears, not "oh, this is sad" tears, but rather huge gushing tears that wet your cheeks and make you unable to breath...)

Our team received some incredibly sad news from home yesterday. A friend's Mom was diagnosed with Breast Cancer on Friday and will undergo a mastectomy on the 31st. Apparently it's slow moving so the doctor's are confident. This woman also recently lost her husband and has been having a hard time in general, and now this. Please keep her, her family, and everyone else having to go through the same in your thoughts. (I am confident I am going to run out of tears soon.)





TEAM PHOTO! (Left to right: Me, Jason, Amanda, Dan, Nicole)




Dan (our team's graphic designer!) is working on replacing the ugly yellow background with a color that doesn't remind me of puke. ;-)