1. Avon 39 update. You guys ROCK! A and I have both hit our fundraising goals for the Avon 39 walk, thanks to the generosity of our friends and families. There’s still time to donate, if you are so inclined, and every dollar we raise helps fund medical care for low income women, treatment for patients, and research to stop breast cancer. Our team page is here, but you’ll need to go to either my page or Adam’s to donate (no more team donations this close to the walk).

2. Farmer’s Market fundraising. A and I signed up to do a fundraising table at the Benicia Farmer’s Market for the month leading up to the Avon Walk. I did the first week, two weeks ago, and had a really incredible time. About ten women came up to me during the afternoon to tell me that they were survivors or were currently undergoing treatment. We chatted for a bit, about why I was walking (to support a very dear friend), and about how different treatment is now, and about the importance of love and prayer and hope. Many of them wrote their names on our support board. I also had two older men come up to me, one of whom lost his mother in the 1950’s, when he was sixteen.  He told me there wasn’t anything they could do for her but cut away the disease and give her morphine for the pain. I think perhaps he had not thought about her for a long time. His hand shook as he wrote her name and he pinned it to the “memory” section, but he thanked me as he walked away.

A took the first shift at this week’s market, and his experience could not have been more different. For two and a half hours, nobody was willing to make eye contact with him, let alone talk to him – not even a woman with a chemo port.

It was a stark reminder that sexism works both ways. That we are just as harsh, if not harsher, to the man who steps out of his gender role. That we have a long, long way to go.

3. The gift that keeps on giving. The Mabacle is mostly in pieces in the Silence of the Lambs room downstairs, although the body is still on the street. A’s selling off anything not absolutely necessary to making the car go – seats, a/c system, door trim, headlights – with the goal of making her into a little race car.  So far, I think he’s found about $8 in change under the seats and floor mats alone, and gotten another $300 or so from parting it out on Craigslist. If it pays for its own roll cage and the other safety equipment, we might have to stop calling it the Mabacle.

4. Happily ever after.  My cousin S got married last weekend, up in Hood River, Oregon. It was breathtakingly gorgeous, the kind of scenery that I would almost-but-not-quite move away from the Bay for. I always forget just how many cousins there are on my mom’s side, and, as always with these kinds of things, I met a few new cousins I haven’t seen before but would like to get to know better.  The highlight of the weekend (aside from Z’s first trip down the aisle as a flower girl) was my cousin J’s toast to her sister. As much as I love my brother’s, I still wish a little bit that I’d had a big sister as bold and brave and mischievous as my cousins!

5. On writing with family. Back in January, I told myself that writing is writing is writing, and it didn’t matter if I blogged or noveled or short storied, with the thought that words would beget more words. In one sense this is true. The more I write, the easier and more quickly the words come when I sit down. In another sense, this is a lie. I have a finite space for writing – between 6 and 7 am most days. It is the only time that I have when I am not “on duty” as a mom or an employee or a wife – and even that space is intruded into when there are early morning phone calls or when Z refuses to stay in bed. So if you’re reading and enjoying these, let me know by leaving a comment or a share or a like.