FightALD! Blog

Well, so much for some R & R while I was home. Yesterday was the only full day I took off besides Mother’s Day. I mapped out the entire rest of my trip and I think I did a pretty good job. I based it on my original goal of hitting Children’s Hospitals and tried to be as efficient as I could so as not to retrace my steps. Here is the original map with Children’s Hospitals marked. It’s kind of hard to see the little dots, but they’re there. 215 of them.

Now here is a map with the actual route and stops I’ve made thus far and will be making over the next 4 weeks or so.  The picture had to be taken on my phone because my digital camera isn’t working this morning. Just one more thing to deal with.  I don’t know if you can still see the dots, but there are a lot more of them. 162 stops for the next leg of my trip to be exact.

It was so good to get home and see my family. We spent mother’s day with our good friends drinking champagne and dining on lobster, yummy! I got right to work the following day printing brochures, mapping the route and locating the hospitals and pediatric clinics in each destination. That took days to complete. I also worked on golf tournament details, had a board meeting, went around to businesses and collected gift certificates for the auction and raffle and signed up hole sponsors. In the midst of all this my husband talked me into buying a new and improved paper folder since that is the main source for the information that I am getting out and the one I have is not very efficient and has to be monitored all the time. I ordered one that can fold 500 at a time and has an auto shut off and stacks them for me so I can work on other things while it does it’s job. It was shipping from Cerritos, California and should have been here in two days. That would have been Friday May 22nd. Based on my time frame for completing my tasks before getting back on the road I called a friend of mine, Shack, in Phoenix to help me set up a fundraiser upon my return. We scheduled it for May 28th at the Papago Brewery in Scottsdale. What I hadn’t anticipated was that UPS would route the paper folder through New Jersey. How they managed to mis-scan it I don’t know, but today is May 1 and I still haven’t received it. My other paper folder is in the RV.

PAPAGO BREWERY EVENT

Since we had already arranged for the fundraiser I had to fly back to Phoenix to be there for that. I barely had time to pick up the RV and organize myself before heading over to set up for the event, but it was a lot of fun and very successful. The owners were very generous with the donations from the beer sales and the customers eagerly bought raffle tickets for a chance to win a bottle of Sawyer’s Triple. These are a few of the lucky winners and Shack on the left, Stone AZ Rep Ed to the right of me and one of the owners of Papago Brewery, Ron, on the far right. We raised $1400 which helped pay for the repairs on the RV that were done in Phoenix. I had to replace the brakes, the two front tires, oil and air filters, muffler, radiator thermostat gasket again, and various other small details. It is running the best is has now and I hope I won’t be sitting in any more garages for a long time.

I will need to restock my supplies in the RV and I didn’t want to drive it all the way back and forth to San Diego, so I rented a car and got back on Saturday evening. I was absolutely exhausted yesterday but am feeling pretty refreshed this morning. I have a very busy day today and then will drive back to Phoenix tomorrow morning and begin the next leg on Wednesday. I hope to make up some time over the next week so that I can stick to my original schedule. My husband tells me not to stress because I make the schedule, but I do have commitments here that I have to schedule around. I have to be back here for the golf tournament and I will have a lot to do the week prior in preparation for that. Then I have to schedule my next leg so that I can be back here for the Stone Anniversary gig that I and my volunteers work each year on August 22nd.

The next fundraiser while I’m on the road will be in Boulder, Colorado and I will post those details when I get them. I also am working on my new website DRINK BEER 4 CHARITY and hope to have that live by the end of the day. You can access it through .org, .com and .net. I wanted to have the monopoly on the name so bought all three domains. After all, that is how a lot of the money to support Fight ALD is raised. Ciao for now!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.