Year: 2008

As citizens of the Great State of Washington working in New Jersey, we got our ballots in the mail. Will vote tomorrow.

Fairfax is about 35 minutes away from the house – with a stroll-a-thon walk start time of 10 am, I left the house at 6:30 am to set up the silent auction – the plan was to have the rest of the family follow 2 hours later. However, Vince caught whiff of this plan and insisted that he leave the house with me before the sun got up. His reason? He wanted to be there as soon as the DJ turned on the music. He wanted to do the Electric Slide, the Makarena, the Chicken Dance, the Line Dance, and the Cha-cha Slide from the very beginning. Powered by the strength of half a bagel with cream cheese, he boogied his little tushie off for a good 2 and a half hours.

The silent auction went well, the take was about $2700 for about 50 items which was down significantly from last year – but as the person doing the tally mentioned, it might have had something to do with everyone’s net worth being 72% lower this year. I wanted to break last year’s total, but I think about a month ago I realized it wasn’t going to happen – with the move, the end of the fiscal year at work and whatever else got in the way, and I just had to let it go.

This year, I was a little more relaxed about the stroll, I got to meet a few more families in the area and chat with them – about 25 families participated. Also, our wacky shirts made a huge difference. Couldn’t you just feel the smiley-face love? It’s a nice way to get together and say hello. I just wished it had been about 10 degrees warmer.

I’m spending the day at the computer – coordinating the bid sheets and the descriptions for the Fairfax, VA stroll-a-thon‘s silent auction tomorrow. I’m very excited this year because we have some crazy Team Edda shirts that Uncle Seth has silk-screened (by hand! he’s crafty!) with our logo that you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see.

Blog fans and readers, if you would consider making a donation in Edda’s honor, it would mean a lot to us here at Just Regular Folks! No donations too small or too large!

Donate now!

Here’s a photo of us when Edda was a month old – when we had no idea of the quirkyness of Edda’s genetic makeup. I feel like this was a lifetime ago!

I’ve put a few buttons to the left side of the blog – Goodsearch and goodshop. I’ve set these buttons up so that if you use Goodsearch to do all your online searching, it’ll contribute about a penny a search towards finding a cure for Rett Syndrome. It’s powered by Yahoo! search, which I have to say is not as sexy as Google search, but I’ve switched over to Goodsearch for all my searches, even if it is to enter “Google Patents” into the search engine. I’m a professional searcher, I think in the past 2 days, I’ve raised over $2 (that’s 200 searches if anyone is counting, I search a lot) towards finding a cure – my goal is to fund 1 drug screen in the next six months just by surfing the web.

The other button on the web site, is Good shop which is probably better suited for folks who might not be able to tear themselves away from the Google search tool. Goodshop will donate a percentage of the $ spent at major online retailers (Amazon, Gap, Home Depot, Zappos, Apple, iTunes, eBay and LLBean to name a few, there are will over 700 stores to choose from). If you click on the button to the right, it’s already set up to donate the $ to Girl Power 2 Cure which is directly funding research to find a cure for Rett Syndrome. So try and remember when you buy anything online, you can probably help us out!

Jeremy got back in touch with his college chemistry labmate, Susan Matthews, via Facebook. Susan was attending medical school when she realized that she loved music more than medicine and became a professional organist and is now the music director at a church in San Francisco. We don’t often get to hear organ music, it just so happens that Susan was in Maryland for a concert and we all trundled down to Annapolis to hear her rehearse and eat at the Macaroni Grill (our favorite kid-friendly place when we want to be a little more upscale than McDonalds).

We hung out at the church playground.

I went to Winchester, VA today for my friend’s V.’s wedding. I met V. only 3-4 months ago, we report to the same manager at the patent office. She’s the person my boss told me to talk to if I had any questions with my work. Well we hit it off pretty well – we talked about the details of her wedding everyday (as well as details about patents) and I was very excited for her.

She had already made up her invite list when we met and wanted to keep her wedding small, I was not expecting to be invited. But I did get invited a few weeks ago and I was so happy I got to go. I went by myself – I did not know anyone else at the wedding, but I just loved being in the country on a beautiful afternoon, with a good spiked apple cider drink and seeing all this happiness around me.

I have a fantasy of being a professional photographer, maybe in another life. Well my true fantasy is to become a professional photographer and use the money I make as a photographer to find a cure for Rett Syndrome. Do you know the going rate for a wedding photographer is $2500 a day?