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We lost another precious kitty....

In memory of Peyton
15-May-1992 to 29-Jul-08

Way back in 1992, we decided to make a trip down to the Gilroy Outlets, our very first time since moving to the Bay Area, for some shopping. Needless to say, that day, we never got to do any shoppping as we came across a family with a box of 8 week old kittens outside of one of the stores. They were looking for good homes for them and of course, I fell in love with them and persuaded Patrick to let us take one home with us. Good thing because the family planned to take the kittens to the local animal shelter if they didn't find homes for them. I settled on the runt of the litter, a tiny little black female kitten with bright golden eyes. She cuddled with me all the way home. We ended up naming her after the evil nanny character in the movie "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle"...anyone notice a movie theme there in naming our pets :)

Last Tuesday was a day that I was so very glad to be a WFH employee, otherwise I probably would have come home to a very terrible situation with our little one. I know in my heart that it would have been so much more devastating to come home to find her gone than to be able to make sure that she didn't suffer any needless pain and discomfort at the end.

Peyton had made it to her 16th birthday and we had prepared ourselves for the fact that we probably wouldn't have her through the end of the year. So we just kept monitoring her, making sure she was eating and drinking and at the first sign of any trouble, we had already decided that we would give her that final gift and let her go to join Lycos and Scarlett, her fur siblings.

In the morning, I noticed that she was lying on the living room floor very still like. When I picked her up, she went limp in my arms. When I put her back down on the floor, she tried to walk but only made it a few steps before she laid her little body down again. It was time, she was telling me so...

I called Patrick and told him it was time, she wasn't doing well at all. I called our vet and they immediately double booked us for an afternoon appointment. By the time the appointment rolled around, her breathing was very labored and she was extremely lethargic. Our vet allowed us to stay with her at the end and that was tough for us and for our vet because her blood pressure had dropped so low that her veins wouldn't stay open so it wasn't an easy euthanasia but DrB did what he could to keep her comfortable. We stayed with her for a little while after it was over and I whispered to her, go find Lycos and Scarlett, I am sure that they were waiting to greet her with open paws.

Just like with Lycos and Scarlett, we chose a private cremation. I've also had a memorial river rock made for her that we will put in our backyard with the ones we had made for Lycos and Scarlett. Her ashes came home today and I've put them in our home office behind her picture, next to her sister Scarlett.

Now with our two pups, the Tan home is down to only two kitties, Ashes and Arwen.

I miss our dear precious little Peyton but I know in my heart that she is in a better place and will be watching over our home as one of our guardian furangels. Some may not understand those kind of beliefs and may even think that I'm a bit crazy and that's okay. I take comfort from those beliefs...

( Aug 06 2008, 03:59:29 PM PDT ) Permalink

Did we train them to be SGR Fanatics? Sure hope so...

Two weeks ago, my Solaris RPE CritSit colleague, PeterB and I, spent a week in San Diego teaching another 18 Sun employees about Sun Global Resolution aka SGR.

During two sessions of 2 days each, we focused on Situation Appraisal and Problem Analysis, the two processes that would be most useful to them as Sun employees. We can only hope that they saw the value of SGR at the end of their two days of training and that they use it as one of their tools for working through the complex issues they may come across here at Sun.

I also hope that they end up being SGR Fanatics because we've lost so many good SGR evangelists at Sun to the point of only having one Program Manager worldwide in the SGR Program office. IMHO, the more folks at Sun who are trained in SGR and who use it actively, the better our chances of not having such valuable troubleshooting processess "wither and die on the vine".

So without further adieu, thanks to the following folks who gave PeterB and I two days of their time to learn about SGR (last names have been excluded to protect the innocent!):

Vijay
Mary
Daniel
Justin
Ben
Bill
Asim
Ken
Grant
Chris
Jake
Kelly
Mike
Karl
Ron
MF
David
Cornelia

( Jun 16 2008, 11:02:26 AM PDT ) Permalink

My thoughts on the economy and charitable giving...

As you may or may not know, in memory of my mother who lost her battle to lung cancer, in honor of my aunt who is now a cancer survivor and for my pups, one who lost his battle and one who is now a survivor, I participate in the local Livermore Relay for Life for the American Cancer Society.

My fundraising goal this year was $3K without Sun's matching funds. I can only guess that the downturn in the economy has folks tightening up their belts because as of now, I've just hit the $1K mark. By this time last year, I was already beyond the $2K mark.

While I understand having to tighten your belt, heck, I'm doing it at my house too, IMHO, charitable giving shouldn't be the first to be cut from your budgets. Cut out that grande latte you have on the way to work, ca-ching, money saved. Get your mani-pedis once a month instead of twice a month, ca-ching, more money saved. Downgrade your cable choices, ca-ching, you get my point. There are lots of things that folks can do to save their pennies without, and again, this is only my opinion, having to resort to pulling their support from the many charitable causes out there that need us.

That said, maybe you can only afford to make a small donation to benefit the American Cancer Society at this time, but I am a firm believer that no donation is too small. Won't you consider making a secure donation at my RFL website?.

Sun will match a donation as small as $5.00. I am ready to take care of all the paperwork in order to get your donation matched by Sun! Once you've made your donation, just drop me an email with your employee ID, mailstop, email address, dept number, date of hire and the amount of your donation.

Thank you for your support.

( May 16 2008, 11:29:58 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Kudos to Apple for their customer support...

I've been an official WFH employee at Sun since Dec07. I usually set up my "office" at home at my kitchen table with my comfy office chair and my Sun supplied Mac PowerBookG4 which has been trucking along since 2005

Last Friday I spent the day over in Mtn View with my colleague upgrading the OS on the laptop to Leopard. All was going well until....

We finished the install and successfully migrated the backup data from my portable HD (just to ensure we didn't lose any data in the upgrade). But what's this, we see that one of my memory slots that has a DIMM in it is showing a "failed" message. Uh-Oh! We install a new memory dimm as a test to see if we are dealing with a dimm failure or a memory slot failure. We reboot and the laptop temporarily recognizes the dimm and then, poof, it's gone again. Failure again! Dead(??) memory dimm (or at least we think it's dead)!! We put the old one back in, reboot the computer and while the system is slower, we see an error message indicating that we have to restart the computer. Double Uh-Oh! We try to restart and keep hitting that same error message. One time we even saw a grey bar going across the grey apple that shows up upon boot up.

It's sick, and wouldn't you know this, the AppleCare protection plan on in expired on 03-Mar-08. Upon recommendation from my manager (okay, he has some good ideas!), I took it into my nearest Apple store for a look over. Given the symptoms I was seeing, they think my logic board may be the problem. When I asked about how much it would cost to repair so I could give my manager the estimate, they said it wouldn't cost anything and they were willing to stretch out the AppleCare coverage.

YAAAAAYYYYYYYY!!!! Thanks Apple!!! They won't cover the memory if it ended up getting fried in this episode but heck, memory is much cheaper than a brand new Mac laptop!

( Apr 03 2008, 01:50:44 PM PDT ) Permalink

Is it my lot in life to have dogs that need some medical intervention?

When we brought Rosalynn home almost two years ago, I decided that I would put her into agility training since I didn't get around to it for our other pup, Lycos.

Back in mid Jan, we were at her agility lesson when she came off the A-Frame obstacle and started limping. I brought her home and decided then that if she was still limping the next day, I'd be taking her to the vet.

That was our first vet appointment....they couldn't pinpoint where the injury was so they sent us home with anti-inflammatories and recommended that I bring her back three days later if she still was limping.

On to the second vet appointment...this time they were able to localize it to her right front elbow, which is never an easy injury to treat in dogs. Sent home this time with crate confinement orders for the next 10 days. Now, if she was a really lazy dog, that probably wouldn't be an issue but we are dealing with a very young border collie pup who is rambunctious and always full of energy. I'm sure that this was driving her nuts!!

At the end of Jan, we went on vacation to Las Vegas (our yearly trip!) and when we came back, she was still limping, even after the crate confinement. I made yet another vet appointment. This time, the vet wanted to have X-Rays done which we did. He found a bone chip in the elbow and what looked to be the beginning of arthritis in a 2 year old dog. He decided that it would be best to send them out to a radiologist for a complete review and then we'd see what we were dealing with. Back home, this time with 3X a day painkillers and more crate confinement.

The radiologist reviewed her X-Rays and determined that my girl had torn the tendon away from her elbow joint which led to the bone chip we saw in them. The two vets then decided we needed to have a surgical consult to see what our options were.

We had the surgical consult today and she's going to have to stay on crate confinement for quite a while. Our best option is elbow surgery to stabilize the elbow joint which should slow down the traumatic arthritis (inflammation) that is already showing in that joint after only one month. If we leave it, she will continue to limp, the arthritis will get only get worse faster to the point where she may go completely lame in that front paw and not ever put any weight on it. And the third option I don't even want to think about....

So now, not even two months after our other dog had surgery for cancer, we will get her in sometime next week for the surgery (it costs a pretty $$). After that, it will be complete crate confinement for 6-8 weeks. She won't even be able to sleep on her bed at night upstairs outside of the crate and I will have to walk up her up the stairs and outside for her potty breaks because all it needs is one wrong movement or jump or something to derail what the surgery was done to correct. Even with the surgery, that elbow won't be 100% perfect and it won't be the same as the left elbow but it will help in terms of the rest of her life with regards to slowing down the degeneration in that elbow and with pain management etc. Needless to say, agility is definitely out of her future now, she's going to have to be retired now.

Please keep my girl in your prayers....

( Feb 22 2008, 03:58:43 PM PST ) Permalink

Glory & Roz's Visit to Santa Paws

This year I was able to bring both Glory and Roz to get their picture taken with Santa Paws benefiting the local animal shelter.

Just like last year, Roz looks like she is trying to figure out if she should be biting Mom or this Santa character. But you gotta love Miss Glory sticking her tongue out at everyone....

Happy Holidays from the Tan Pups to everyone out there in Blog Land and beyond....

( Dec 17 2007, 10:59:02 AM PST ) Permalink

Glory girl is having surgery today...

For folks like me who have pets instead of children, when something comes up with them and you have to take them to the vet, it can be a very stressful occasion. I'd guess it is probably the same with folks who have kids but since I don't have any myself, I'm just guessing. This Saturday, we took Glory (my 10 year old Harrier) to the vet to have a recently discovered mass on her back right leg examined. The vet was definitely worried about it and suggested that we have it removed immediately. So my girl is there today, having that mass removed + a small cyst under her front left paw pit (which we know is benign already) + a small cyst that Dr. B found next to her canine tooth during that Saturday exam.

Please say a little prayer for my girl and ask that she comes through with flying colors and has as little pain as possible during her recovery period.

UPDATE: 12:30 pm PT. Dr. B just called me, Glory is under anasthesia now and is doing fine. He's working on her teeth now and then will start removal of the leg mass and the cyst under her front left paw pit. Her lung X-Rays were clean so that's a very good sign that the mass on her leg hasn't gone beyond that location. Of course we won't know if it's cancerous or not until the pathology report comes back sometime next week.

UPDATE: 5:30 pm PT. Glory is back home very, very groggy. Dr. B is much more optimistic about the mass on her back leg than he was this weekend when he first saw it. The mass was between two muscles on her back leg and was completely encapsulated, meaning that it hadn't fingered into the muscle tissue. We'll know more next week when we get the biopsy reports back. Thank you very much for all of your prayers and good thoughts for our girl....

UPDATE: My girl did have cancer but now she's a survivor! She made it with flying colors through the surgery and now it's like we have a brand new dog. She's lost the extra pounds she was carrying and often acts like she's about 5 years younger than her actual age!! ( Nov 19 2007, 11:33:55 AM PST ) Permalink

More Cheetah Details...

I'll be doing a "Cheetah Brown Bag" tomorrow at lunch (12 noon PT, Broadway CR, MPK17) for the Solaris RPE MPK folks about my photos from my Cheetah Adventure. For those folks who aren't in MPK or who won't be able to attend, I've added a PDF document to the Tan Website with more details about the pictures I just posted from Namibia and the CCF.

Feel free to read it at your own leisure...

Enjoy!

( Oct 25 2007, 12:51:49 PM PDT ) Permalink

Photos from my CHEETAH adventure....

I've finally whittled down over 400+ pictures to a set of 75 for the Tan website....if you are interested, here's the link. Enjoy! And feel free to ask me any questions about them or the CCF, just drop me a comment and I'll answer them as I feel I've become quite a CCF Evangelist since I made it back home.

( Oct 23 2007, 05:08:51 PM PDT ) Permalink

I'm back from my CHEETAH adventure...

I'm back from Namibia, Africa with all of my fingers and toes intact...if you are interested, read on for the highlights of my trip, otherwise, get back to work :)

It was a long two days to get from NYC to Namibia Africa but I stayed overnight in Windhoek at a wonderful hotel called the Hotel Heinitzburg. It's basically a castle which was commissioned back in 1914 overlooking the city of Windhoek. They treated me very nicely there which was important given that I'd be staying in a thatched hut like place when we got to the Cheetah Conservation Fund on Sunday the 9th of Sept with shared bathrooms that we had to walk to as needed. Talk about being scary at night and making you thankful that your bathroom at home is just down the hall!

Our first weekday was basically ORIENTATION day....learned the rules for working so closely with the cheetahs, learned what to watch out for in the field (namely, big nasty poisonous snakes!!) etc.

And from that day, we worked from 8 am to 5 pm on weekdays and 8 - 1 on Saturday (we visited Etosha National Wildlife Refuge and the local town on the Sundays we had off). We had to make our own breakfasts but they fed us very well for lunch (1 pm) and dinner (7 pm). Since the CCF runs on generator power, we would lose our lights around 10:45 pm every night and wouldn't get them back until about 7:15 in the morning. I ended up showering every night instead of in the mornings so that I'd go to bed fairly clean. And what I mean about this is that you really could never get fully clean due to the red dust and dirt of Namibia. Oh well, I knew going into it that it wouldn't be like a country club :)

We cleaned cheetah and dog pens (the CCF raises Anatolian Shepherd Guard Dogs, a turkish breed of guard dogs, that they give out for free to the local farmers to guard their herds in the hopes of keeping the farmers from killing cheetahs). We fed the 40+ captive cheetahs that the CCF houses on the ranch. These are all cheetahs that either lost their mothers before they learned to hunt on their own or were abandoned as cubs. We would help with crowd control when they would do the morning Cheetah Runs to exercise some of the cheetahs. They basically set up a system like they use with greyhounds...the cats chase a lure (which is just a torn up t-shirt with no scent or blood on it) around a set squared course. To see those cheetahs run was just breathtaking...and these ones weren't even going at their top speeds! For the cheetahs that were farther out on the ranch property, we'd also feed and exercise them but to exercise them, we'd drive a pickup truck and they would have to chase it before they got their big chunk of "meat" as their reward. There's nothing like having 7 or so cheetahs running in a pack behind you as you throw meat out of the back of a pickup truck to them.

Highlights of the trip:

Meeting Chewbaaka (the 12 year old CCF ambassador cheetah who was handraised by Dr. Laurie Marker, the CCF's Executive Director, from about 3 weeks old) and getting to pet him and have our picture taken with him.

Meeting "Little C" (a three month old cub whose mom and sibling was killed by dogs) and watching him play.

Meeting "Kanini" (who came to the CCF in Feb2006)....her name means "Little One" and in my opinion, she was one of the most beautiful cheetahs at the CCF.

Watching a litter of Anatolian puppies being born (but sadly, they lost the runt of the litter one night later).

Being able to watch as the CCF did a scientific workup on a HUGE (150 lbs +) male adult leopard they caught in one of their traps.

Going out in the field tracking animal prints...we found leopard, cheetah, porcuipine and baboon tracks.

Doing game counts...they use this data to estimate how the big cat population could be doing in the wild.

Visiting the Etosha National Wildlife Preserve and seeing elephants, giraffes, zebras, ostriches and jackals out in the wild at the local watering hole.

Shopping at the CCF Gift Shop for gifts to take home with me....

Low lights of the trip:

Getting sick for 3 1/2 days....Cipro was my friend :)

Finding out that there was a spitting cobra in a tree near my little thatched hut (and let's not forget about the 6 foot Black Mamba, the most deadly snake in Africa, that a CCF employee ran over on the ranch).

Having tree rats in the kitchen and peeping tom geckos and large spiders in the bathrooms.

Having my "Amarula" (a South African liquor made from the Marula tree, a favorite of African elephants) confiscated at the Paris airport!!

Having to sit in the plane at the Paris airport for three hours while they tracked down a part for the engine....

I'm still working on the pictures to get the right set (I took well over 400 pictures while I was there) for the Tan website. When I get them all set, I'll post here with the URL.

( Oct 01 2007, 11:28:31 AM PDT ) Permalink

It's ALIVE.......

If you read my last post, you could probably tell that I was this close to either letting my pup Rosalynn use my new IPhone as a chew toy or throwing it in the swimming pool.

Today, I went over to the Stoneridge Mall Apple store over in Pleasanton for a couple of their free IPhone workshops. For the first one, there were just two of us and both of us were sbcglobal email users...the stars must have been lined up for that one. We both went through the steps of setting up our sbcglobal email accounts with our Mac instructor (Anny). She got hers up and running, no problems and went on her merry way. I of course kept seeing the same problems over and over again...multiple copies of emails (at the time I had 18 emails in the INBOX but the phone said I had over 100!), unable to send emails, password problems associated with both the incoming and outgoing mail servers and of course, my favorite problem, being unable to access my account online while it was set up on the iphone.

Anny kept at it and voila, after changing some settings on my sbcglobal account online regarding spam, finding the right combination of incoming & outgoing mail settings and a hard reset of the IPhone for good measure, all is working and right in the world now.

So, for the benefit of any sbcglobal users out there who may have IPhones and are having trouble, try this. It worked for me, it may work for you. I can send emails, I can receive emails via the mail feature on the IPhone (I can't see my folders from the account but I'd rather be able to send & receive emails than worry about seeing folders!!!)

1) On your sbcglobal account online via your desktop/laptop, from your mail page, click on "Options"
2) Then click on "POP Access and Forwarding"
3) On the next page, make sure that you check "Web and POP Access"
4) Then check "I don't want to receive any messages that SpamGuard thinks are spam"
5) On your IPhone, use the following settings:
Incoming Mail Server pop.sbcglobal.yahoo.com (I was told by AT&T to use pop.att.yahoo.com)
Outgoing Mail Server stmp.sbcglobal.yahoo.com (again, I was told to use pop.att.yahoo.com)
Make sure you enter your username and password for both server settings, even though the outgoing one says "optional"
Once the account is verified, then go to ADVANCED and set Incoming SSL to "ON" and Outgoing SSL to "Off"

This, and I say this in the nicest possible way, lowly retail clerk was able to do for me what at least 10 Apple technicians couldn't (and probably about the same number of AT&T technicians). I made a point to track down Anny's manager and tell her that she had solved my problem. Cross your fingers that everything stays good in the world!

Three CHEERS to ANNY! THANKS AGAIN for your help!! I'm rethinking having to throw the phone into the pool or letting Rosalynn chew on it.

( Aug 22 2007, 05:25:44 PM PDT ) Permalink

New IPhone....ARRRGGGHHH!!!

On Saturday, I was sitting home watching television when all of a sudden the hubby comes up and says to me, "let's go to the Apple Store and get you an IPhone."

While I've been wanting one since day one, I was ready to wait until after I got back from my Namibia trip, closer to my anniversary. But who am I to look a gift horse, or in this case, a gift hubby in the mouth...

So on Sunday, I traipse down to my local Apple store, after contacting both Verizon and AT&T about early termination fees and if I'd be able to use the phone on my trip, and purchase my very own 8 GB IPhone.

That first night I couldn't do much with it as I needed to set it up and charge it etc and since I was porting my number from my Verizon account, I could make calls but couldn't receive calls until the porting was complete. I have a wireless home network and we couldn't for the life of us get the phone to access it instead of my neighbor's unsecured network. That was day 1.

Day 2 rolls around....I finally get the wifi connected, I also get my Motorola H700 bluetooth headset working with some help from Motorola tech support. With the help of my Sun colleague, I'm able to get my Sun email account up and running. Now to the fun part...I have an sbcglobal.net email account. SBCGLOBAL is owned by AT&T and I usually access it via a browser by going to the Yahoo page. First I tried setting up my sbcglobal account via the preset Y! Mail but that doesn't work since it ends up having an email address with the @yahoo extension. I search the internet and find a hack to that and try again. Now I can read my email and see all of the folders I have on the account (just like I do when I'm accessing the mail via a browser). I'm thinking, cool, I did it....but no!! I compose a short test email and try sending it to my sun email address. The IPhone says that it sent the email as but nothing shows up in the sent box and it never got to my Sun email address (nor back to my sbcglobal account when I cc'd it on a second test). Next I try to set up my sbcglobal account as a POP account using the incoming / outgoing mail server settings. I'm temporarily successful...I can send emails from that account but then I hit another issue...all of my emails are duplicated. I worked on trying to get that account to work yesterday for hours with both AT&T (who didn't really help) and with Apple Tech support (who did a much better job in trying to help) and I'm no further than I was yesterday morning in terms of setting up my sbcglobal email account so I can actually send emails.

And let's not forget the nightmare I could run into in Namibia...I've been seeing on the internet horror stories of folks coming back from international trips and having HUGE bills from AT&T. I signed up for AT&T's World Traveler to save money on my international minutes in France / South Africa and Namibia. But I guess that won't help with the data part. So, as I see from the postings on the internet, I have two options...remove the SIM card and use wifi only (but then I can't use the phone for calls) or try to get in touch with the RIGHT AT&T International Dept rep who can disable EDGE (what the iPhone uses when you are out and about and not tied to a wifi network for data service) properly during my trip (some AT&T reps say it can't be done while others say it can).

Bottom line, once I get the kinks out, I'm sure that this will my best phone ever but until then, it's really driving me crazy!!

WORKAROUND! Not the prettiest one but it will work for now....

While on the phone with yet another Apple Product Specialist, I signed up for a FREE YAHOO account and after several password attempts (make sure you use all lowercase letters, no numbers, no special characters...I know it isn't the securest way of creating a password but this hopefully is only temporary!), I finally got the IPhone to validate and recognize it. Then he helped me set up a POP mail account on my Mac Mailer for my sbcglobal.net. Then we created a rule in the Mac Mailer where mails sent to my sbcglobal account would be forwarded to my new free YAHOO account. When I sent a test email from my Sun email account to my sbcglobal account, while it wasn't exactly instantaneous, it did finally get to my Yahoo account and I was able to view it on the IPhone. The last test is sending emails from my YAHOO account. If that doesn't work, I guess I can go back to reading my sbcglobal emails via Safari on the phone.

( Aug 21 2007, 10:54:18 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

ACS Livermore Relay for Life 2007....A HUGE SUCCESS!!

Well, starting from 7:30 am PT on Saturday, 23-Jun-07 all the way to 9:30 am PT or so on Sunday, 24-Jun-07, I spent my weekend at the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life in my hometown of Livermore, California.

When the event started at 9 am PT on Saturday, we were at about $206K. Our goal from the American Cancer Society was $235K this year. By the time the Luminaria ceremony started that evening around 9 pm PT, we we were a little over $234K. By the time we had our closing ceremony on Sunday morning, we had raised over $250K. Can't wait to see what our final total is after we stop accepting donations for this year's Relay on 31-Aug-07.

I was the third highest fundraiser for Livermore's Relay with $2800. And this amount doesn't include the almost $700 in matching funds that was donated to the cause by Sun Folks (thanks Sun Folks for your support, you know who you are!!). My hubby who is a Certified Massage Therapist had a massage tent up during the event raised almost $1000 the day of the event. All in all a very successful event here in Livermore....

P.S. We found out that SHARKS, of the hockey variety, PURR!!! My hubby gave SJ Sharky, the mascot for the San Jose Sharks Professional Hockey Team a massage and he purred! Too cute!

( Jun 25 2007, 06:06:49 PM PDT ) Permalink

Time for my shameless plea too! For the American Cancer Society....

In 17 days, for the 4th year in a row, in memory of my mother who lost her battle with lung cancer 11 years ago and for my pup, Lycos.com who we lost to canine heart cancer last year, I'll be participating in the upcoming American Cancer Society's Relay for Life in Livermore, California.

While my colleagues in Solaris RPE have probably seen enough of my shameless pleas by now, I thought there might be others out there in Sun land who might like to contribute to such a worthy cause because unfortunately, cancer is a disease that doesn't care who it strikes...it strikes mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, grandparents. And for those who lose the battle, there are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles and grandparents who are left behind with their grief.

This year, my goal is to raise $2500 without matching funds! And so far, I've raised a little over $1800 but there's always more to be done, more money to raise in the time I have left before the event.

All of my collected donations are due to the ACS by Thursday, 06/21/07 so please donate online soon! I'll be standing ready to follow up with you via email once I see a donation and take care of all the paperwork in order to get your donation matched by Sun! For matching, you only need to make a minimum $5.00 donation...and while some would consider $5.00 a trivial amount, I truly believe that no amount is too small in the fight against cancer.

Thank you very much for your support.

( Jun 05 2007, 09:31:41 AM PDT ) Permalink

Buy jewelry, save a life!

I love jewelry, especially the really sparkly diamond kind. But there are couple of pieces that I wear every day which aren't my most expensive pieces yet they symbolize two causes very near and dear to me.

On my left wrist, I wear two colored rubber bracelets...one is purple and is for the American Cancer Society; the other is yellow and is for the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Having lost my mom to lung cancer eleven years ago, this is a cause that I support wholeheartedly and do what I can to raise money every year so that other daughters out there don't have to experience that loss. Check out my Relay for Life page...any donations would be most appreciated (and can be matched by Sun too!)

On my right wrist, I wear a simple sterling silver bracelet, the Until There's A Cure Bracelet for AIDS. While I've never personally met someone with AIDS or HIV, I have several very close gay friends and the hubby works for Ramsell, a company that is focused on the fight against HIV and AIDS.

The Flowers Heritage Foundation, the nonprofit side of my hubby's employer, has just joined forces with the “Until There’s a Cure” partnership program which will allocate 25% of their AIDS Bracelet sales to FHF. All you need to do is just write Flowers Heritage Foundation in the box on the order form entitled “For donations”.

The Flowers Heritage Foundation has established the Bridge the Gap program to help fund the medication needs of every wait-listed AIDS patient in the United States. To date, they have successfully funded 22 patients for one year. However, there are more than 520 eligible people who are still on waiting lists. This is why they need our support.

Purchasing an AIDS bracelet will now help them and of course, show your support for those afflicted with this terrible disease.

( May 03 2007, 01:39:47 PM PDT ) Permalink