It's Almost Here!

Well, next week at this time I will be camping out in Metro Atlanta!! How crazy is that?? Yes, less than a week until Tiffany & I begin our big adventure: The Breast Cancer 3 Days. For those of you who haven't been following along, this means we will walk 60 miles over 3 days with about 3,000 other crazy people, in an effort to wipe out breast cancer. In order to walk, we each had to raise $2100 for research into a cure. It was an extraordinary commitment, but here we are! Ready to take the plunge.

I just reached my goal yesterday, I have raised $2115. It's an amazing feeling! Some of that money was from total strangers, some from my closest friends. Tiffany is at about $1800, but she will make it! If you would like to help her, PLEASE do!! Here is her website: www.tinyurl.com/4eojq We are allowed to raise money for 4 weeks after the event, so any donations you can make through October will greatly help us out!

I am getting really excited about all this. I know it will be hard and tiring, and there will be no TV, but I just think it will be amazing. I think I will be so proud when it is over. My whole life I have been slow, weak, and fat. I always found excuses not to participate in gym, I never could play sports or swim or rollerskate, and I was like 14 before I learned to ride a bike. So when I accomplish physical things, it means a whole lot to me. At the very least, it means I am not a quitter anymore.

This also means a lot because I am doing it for my mom. Last year, her best friend Lori died from breast cancer. My mom and Lori became best friends about 13 years ago, when my mom's previous best friend Sylvia died of breast cancer. Yep, that's right...two best friends lost in 12 years. And that is not all. My mom works in a hospital that is a veritable cancer cluster. She has so many friends from work with breast cancer it is obscene. I am really bad at the sympathy thing, so I know she always thought that I didn't care, or didn't even notice. But I did. And this is my way of showing that. And truly, it is making her very happy, and that is great.

The best part of all this is that Tiffany and I are doing this together. Training for this has made us incredibly close, and she is certainly one of my best friends. So much so, that she has conversations with me completely inside her own head without even telling me about them! LOL But thankfully, I can usually sense that and figure it out. But seriously, we will never forget these three days. I don't know if either of us will ever do this again, but no matter what, this will be our first and it will be an incredible landmark in each of our lives. I have friends literally all over the country. It is hard to keep up with everyone, but we make it. We make it because with each of those people, there is something extraordinary that binds us. Something that exists in our friendship that is only between us, so that we don't need the group dynamic to bind us. I hope that, because of this event, Tiffany and I will be close forever no matter how far apart we are. And I hope she will know that when I say my place is your place, I really mean it. Needless to say, I will be taking a million pictures so we will never be able to forget it.

So, next weekend, when you are all comfy on your couches at home watching TV, think about us sleeping in tents in Atlanta and smelling the worst we have ever smelled in our lives!