Some fun photos

You Must Come to Our Bunco for Breast Cancer Survivors Event

My Mom is AMAZING! I know that most of us think our Mom’s are amazing, and most of us are right. But I really admire my Mom (see her blog here) for all that she does for others.

For one, she is a Breast Cancer Survivor. She went through the whole process, surgery, chemo, and radiation. She even showed me her tattoo recently on a shopping trip, a tattoo she got to help pinpoint where the radiation would go every day.

For a few years now my sweet husband and I have been helping Mom to raise some funds for her favorite charity, Casting for Recovery (for more information go here). It’s her favorite charity as she was lucky enough to be a participant in 2006, and since then has worked hard as a volunteer for CFR. In fact, she just got back from helping on the 2010 retreat.

To help raise funds we took a game that we’ve played, Bunco, and made it a big event. With tons of prizes, raffles, and good food, we were able to grow the event bigger each year. This year, it is going to be held at the Mesa Hilton (Arizona) which will offer an even bigger venue for our developing event so we are getting really excited about all the new people we will have there.

We would LOVE for you to come! Here’s the info and the registration:
BUNCO for Breast Cancer Survivors
Sunday, August 8th, 2010, 1-5pm
Mesa Hilton, Pavon Room
1011 W. Holmes Ave.
Mesa, AZ 85210

For more info, please contact Donna Fischer at:
Dfischersurvivor@gmail.com or
(480)580-0766

BFBCS Registration Form 2010 -

Always Go To The Funeral

I like to listen to talk radio. I have a radio show here that I listen to in the morning and then the rest of the day I tune in now and then to NPR (National Public Radio). It reminds me a lot of my Aunt and Uncle who also listen to the news on the radio in the car. It would drive me batty as a teenager having to listen to the news, but now I rather like it. I hate watching the news on t.v., I would much rather listen or read about it than watch it unfold in High Def.

One day while listening to NPR on the drive home, I heard this segment and it really touched my heart. So many times, we would rather not go to the funeral, it’s certainly never a fun thing to do. But, it is the RIGHT thing to do. I also like Sullivan’s line about going to the un-attended birthday party or paying a visit to someone in the hospital. It’s so easy to say that you got busy doing this or that, or that something came up, when in reality, you just didn’t want to go.

Your attendance at these awkward events, though, may mean the world to that person. In the end it doesn’t take much time or effort to do the right thing and ‘pay it forward’ a bit in the kharma department.

One of my greatest fears is that when I am dead and gone, that I won’t be missed, that my passing will be nothing more to others than an inconvenience, that my existence didn’t make enough of a mark on this world or the people that I knew and loved. I worry that there will be nobody at my funeral to say goodbye or to remember me. So, I always go to the funeral.

Please read the article below and ponder how just your presence at a funeral could truly mean the world to someone else.

Always Go to the Funeral
by Deirdre Sullivan
August 8, 2005

I believe in always going to the funeral. My father taught me that.

The first time he said it directly to me, I was 16 and trying to get out of going to calling hours for Miss Emerson, my old fifth grade math teacher. I did not want to go. My father was unequivocal. "Dee," he said, "you're going. Always go to the funeral. Do it for the family."

So my dad waited outside while I went in. It was worse than I thought it would be: I was the only kid there. When the condolence line deposited me in front of Miss Emerson's shell-shocked parents, I stammered out, "Sorry about all this," and stalked away. But, for that deeply weird expression of sympathy delivered 20 years ago, Miss Emerson's mother still remembers my name and always says hello with tearing eyes.

That was the first time I went un-chaperoned, but my parents had been taking us kids to funerals and calling hours as a matter of course for years. By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals. I remember two things from the funeral circuit: bottomless dishes of free mints and my father saying on the ride home, "You can't come in without going out, kids. Always go to the funeral."

Sounds simple — when someone dies, get in your car and go to calling hours or the funeral. That, I can do. But I think a personal philosophy of going to funerals means more than that.
"Always go to the funeral" means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex's uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.

In going to funerals, I've come to believe that while I wait to make a grand heroic gesture, I should just stick to the small inconveniences that let me share in life's inevitable, occasional calamity.

On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a Wednesday, middle of the workweek. I had been numb for days when, for some reason, during the funeral, I turned and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most human, powerful and humbling thing I've ever seen was a church at 3:00 on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believe in going to the funeral.

Read the full story and others here.

Silhouettes

Total quick and dirty post, but I really wanted to show off what I made tonight! This has been on my future projects list for a long, long time. In fact, I've had the frames sitting on my desk for about a year and a half! I think the silhouettes turned out beautifully.

Stupid Judge!

This is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard of…

I am flabbergasted that a federal judge would even try to overturn the six month stop placed on deep water drilling.

We don’t yet know what exactly happened to cause the catastrophic explosion and ‘spill’ in the golf, but some still want to go ahead and drill? Are you crazy? How about we find out not only what happened, first, but also how to fix it if in fact it does happen again. This is literally some of the most illogical thinking I have ever heard of.

Now is the time to move forward and away from our reluctance to embrace a life not dependent on oil. Oil is no longer the answer. Are we going to deplete every last drop before we move on? Why not work now towards more natural energy? You don’t have to be a tree hugging, bleeding heart, hippie to know the oil won’t last forever.

You Can Do Anything...

Re-Using Wine Bottles - Future Project

This morning while looking through my blog list I found one of the most awesome entries I’ve seen in awhile. It was on one of my favorite blogs, Be Different Act Normal. In the posting, here, she showed a few of her favorite things to do with leftover bottles, and a link to The Stories of A 2 Z, which had even more ideas on reusing bottles, here.

So it got me thinking.

I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but, my parents are winos. Wait, I mean they are wine aficionados, which means they really like wine, going to wineries, tasting new wines, doing wine pairings, etc. So they would have lots of leftover bottles to use for some of these. I already have them saving the corks and wine labels that they love for these two other projects, so...why not the bottles, too?

My favorite is this outdoor grill station:

Happy Anniversary Mom and Dad!

Forty Three years ago my parents sealed the deal and got married. I'm so glad they did! Take a look at these pictures from that happy day:








I hope you guys celebrate your day together and have lots of fun remembering your past, loving the present, and looking forward to the future. I love you!