A Brand New Me

Just got done with the physical work of returning equipment that I borrowed for the Relay For Life. Generators, EZ Up Canopies, tables, trailers, vehicles, golf carts, the sound systems, and of course it all had to be cleaned before it was returned.
The track where we have the event has a dirt track with a grass infield. Uck.
We started setting up the event on Friday at 7:30am, and kicked off the walking and entertainment at 6pm. Since I was the only D.J., I got to be onstage with the sound equipment all night. ALL NIGHT. I got a one hour break at 3 am, since I could just put on a CD with mix music. But the rest of the time I had to be there because there were contests and activities that required someone to babysit the music and change it out often. I had two radio stations doing live broadcasts, so periodically they'd come over and interview me on the air. After each broadcast, my cell phone would ring. Someone calling to let me know they'd just heard me. Funny, but not very easy to handle because usually I had two or three people standing there waiting to ask me a question, prompt me to make an announcement, or to tell me something important. Busy, busy, busy. After setting up in the 95 degree heat all day, it was difficult to keep my cool once the event got really busy. I really got grumpy around midnight and had to take a handful of ibuprofen with some EXREMELY strong coffee. That helped a lot!!
The funniest stuff happened in the middle of the night, when we had disco hour and the Ms. Relay competition. Disco hour was quite popular, with people dancing everywhere. I had the costume stuff to complete the Village People onstage, so we recruited volunteers to do the dance. Then Ms. Relay, which was actually a drag queen competition, took the stage. Very funny! Shay participated, wearing my purple boa, Elton John sunglasses, and his shirt tied up like a tight little half shirt. He said into the microphone that his name was "Shayla." The Ms. Relay contestants circled the track asking for donations, bringing in $500. Wow!

When we did our closing ceremonies at 8am on Saturday, we counted about $50,000 in fundraising totals. That included the $400 brought in on the quilt raffle--thanks very much to Miss Brandy!! Everyone was in awe of the quilt, but I made sure that when a ticket was drawn it came from the Cancer Survivor registrants.
The t.v. and Wii went to some very active team members who had raised a lot of money for us, so I was grateful they won the prizes. Very cool.
All night long, I had our luminaries near the stage so I could keep an eye on them. Luminaries are little white paper bags decorated to honor people who have died of Cancer. Steve's mom was there with me all night, which felt kinda neat. My friend Regan was right next to her, as well as Steve's grandma. I hope I put on a good show for them.

The nicest compliment came from a gal who puts on the Relay For Life in a neighboring community of ours, Kingman. She was very impressed with how well organized and how well attended the event was. Glad to hear it.

Aaah, Truckin

Truckin Magazine's Havoc Havasu show was this weekend, and fortunately my boss and
I were hired once again to help orchestrate. I actually love this show, it's all trucks and it's a younger hipper crowd than the usual car show guys. Hydraulics, monster trucks, caminos, and tuners. Very cool.
It was hot, like it usually is in April, but at least we found shade trees to gather under. Steve brought down his boss's 1965 El Camino from hell, and he actually won 2trophies!!! When he arrived with the car, everyone just stopped in their tracks to check it out.

It has a HUGE engine in the rear of the camino, and the engine is very uniquely hooked up to the car with a boat outdrive, so people are always assuming that it's just a camino carrying an engine in the back. But then they realize there's nothing under the hood....

Return To Me

Steve and I get all kinds of tempting offers to go hang out and have martinis or
whatever, but this time of year it's just not that possible. We'd love to, and we know that if we keep turning down invitations they'll eventually stop, but we can't afford the time away from our responsibilities right now. After April, we'll have plenty of time to socialize. Maybe.
It's hard to relax with so much going on! Every time we sit and unwind, our minds are going 50mph trying to figure out what needs to be done next.

On the fundraising front, things are going very well. All I need is more people. That figures.
Huge plans, for a big radio publicity push all next week, and a live radio remote the night of the event. And we're having a telethon, with phones that a local cellular store will be activating for us. First of its kind in this city!!
We have a record number of participants signed up, and the committments from many many more people who are planning on being there. My god, it's going to be huge.

Last year's event was documented with a really great DVD that a local videographer put together for us. He focused on the Cancer Survivors and the Wings of Love project that was put together for them. A local gal supervised a group of sewing volunteers who sewed these shawls that had the shape of angel wings. They produced over 100 sets of these "wings," and the wings were presented to each Survivor as they checked in at the Relay event. Everyone loved them, they were so honored to get something that was put together specially like that. I assumed that the Wings of Love volunteers were doing the same this year, and unfortunately I found out a month ago that they had decided it was too much work. Desperately, I searched around for something to replace the Wings because I knew this was something very important to the Survivors. Everything I researched was too time consuming and expensive. And with all the other details of the event needing attention, I couldn't dedicate every day and night to the task.
So I received, by surprise, this amazing rag quilt from Tabor Iowa. It was perfect. Something done by hand, with love, by someone who's always been so special to me. I love telling people the story of befriending Brandy, going thru those awful things that we did, then somehow losing touch and then reconnecting many years later. So every time I show someone this awesome quilt from her, I get to tell the story again. I can't convey how important this gift is, really there's no words for it!
To be sure that this quilt goes to someone very deserving, I am offering it in the raffle that is for the Cancer Survivors only. People might buy tickets for it, but I will ensure that it will go to a Survivor. Someone who has faced death and beaten it down. Someone who needs the warmth of such a special item, and who would truly respect the message of the ribbons sewn into it. It won't be folded up and put away, it will be proudly displayed for everyone to see it.
When I see that quilt, I think of all the loved ones we've lost to Cancer and how it represents what we're fighting for; a cure so we won't lose another friend, mom, dad, grandpa, grandma, or sister. I still feel the awful pain of losing someone a year ago to Cancer, and I can see the pain in Steve's face when he talks about his mom. His cousin's funeral card still sits in our kitchen, and once in a while the realization that we've lost so many in recent years to Cancer just overwhelms us.
Time to stop all this pain.

Pity Pity

Well, we had big plans for the weekend, but then Steve's oldest daughter dropped a bombshell. This was the reason why she had to have that "one on one" conversation with him. She has been attending Arizona State University since last August, and she has now decided that she doesn't want to anymore. I'm torn. Steve is too. We can understand completely if she is leaving the college because the major she's chosen, architecture, isn't what she wants to do. We both understand that one COMPLETELY.

But. And that's a big but. She has this boyfriend here in Havasu, who is a total asshole. We call him Mitch the Bitch. He throws hissy fits if he doesn't get his way. He complains and berates Steve's daughter if she stays down in her dorm room on the weekend rather than driving the three hours to come here to see him. She had to blow off plans with us on Christmas Eve because he needed her to clean his house. And most of all, he doesn't want her going to college. He works for his mommy and daddy doing plastering, and I'm sure he knows that college will enable her to get very far away from his bleak future. We know he isn't right for her, and we've had talks with her about this. She set our minds at ease by telling us that Mitch is not permanent and that she knows school is more important than any boyfriend.
So when she broke up with the Bitch recently, he kicked his efforts into high gear. Started driving down to see her in Phoenix, adopted a dog that he knew would make her feel obligated to stay with him like it was their own little baby or something. And of course he got his tentacles on her. Made her believe that ASU was not right for her. Talked her into leaving ASU. We don't know this for sure, but we suspect that's what happened.

Once Steve's daughter broke that news, we just fell into a depression. We know there's a chance that she'll change her mind and stay at the University, but it sucks to have to worry about it. We found ourselves lying awake that night, plotting the Bitch's untimely death. Mitch the Bitch, that is. We had no desire to go and do anything positive the next day, we just wanted to sulk. So the McCain trip was out. Eventually we got the motivation to go for a motorcycle ride. Then after that we decided to take the boat out to a nice quiet spot on the lake to stay the night. We got into our parking spot shortly before the sun set, and we had a simple dinner.
Here's the neighborhood we stayed at:



It was an exciting evening, because the cove was visited by Great Horned Owls, ducks, Javalina, and Burros. We heard them all, as we sat on the back of the boat. We had one flashlight, which had dead batteries. So we relied on the little candle that I brought. No big deal. It was cool to sit in the dark and listen. And forget about the stress at home.

We cruised around on the boat until 2 this afternoon, which definitely is the longest we've stayed on the boat. Almost 20 hours. We just didn't want to come home.

Road Trip

Might be driving a few hours in the morning to Prescott, Arizona, where John McCain is doing a campaign stop. I was mostly excited about my son going, because how often do you get to show your kid the whole presidential thing in person? But Shay's dad has camping plans for him, so he'll be doing that.
Okay, fine. An adult weekend it is!!
After McCain, we'll drive an hour or so to Phoenix so Steve can play at the drag strip.

I found out today that something I delegated to a person back in September wasn't actually done. It's for our Cancer fundraiser, and she offered to take care of the reservation for our banner to be hung up on Main Street. If you don't reserve the space, six months in advance, then you don't get the space. Now I have this HUGE expensive banner and no place to put it. No one can ever say that I didn't try delegating. I've found out time and time again that if you want it done right, you do it yourself.
So pissed right now. Here comes the headache!!

Last night we took the SS Minnow out for dinner on the lake. Subway sandwiches, champagne, and a starlit cruise down an empty river. Very nice. We took a couple of friends with us and they couldn't believe how much fun they had, without a stripper pole! That's the trend right now, putting a stripper pole on your boat.
We're waaay behind the times.

Sleep Is Good

Inconsistently, my early waking insomnia has been torturing me since 1997.
Early waking is when you go to sleep okay, but then you wake up at 2 or 3 am and never go back to sleep. I say inconsistently because I don't have it all the time; I will suffer for a few months, then it goes away. It's not tied to a certain time of year, stress, hormones, apnea, anxiety, physical activity, or work load. It's just there.
Everyone has suggestions, but rarely does anything work. I've been to doctors, I've taken all sorts of prescription and non-prescription stuff, I've talked to a counselor, I've tried all sorts of mind-over-matter techniques, and I've seen a whole lot of middle of the night t.v. programming. I tried to work the night shift for quite some time, and that was a huge mistake. Just because you have insomnia, it does not mean you are naturally cut out for that stuff.
One thing remains, though. I have a bad habit of internalizing things that bother me. At 2 am, those things come to the front of my mind. I am in general a secure person, but there's those little items that I don't seem to react to--and they resurface when I'm laying there trying desperately to go to sleep.
Some negative comment that someone made to me, an unfriendly look from a guy who is normally very open and friendly, the feeling that I've let someone down....I could go on and on. It leads me to believe that I'm waaay more insecure than I act.
The insomnia has started to subside lately, I've been able to get more than 4 hours of sleep each night and that's HUGE.
But then Steve mentioned to me yesterday that his older daughter, who is away at college, wants to sit down and have a one-on-one conversation with him because she "never told him something." She wants to talk to him without me present and that makes me ENORMOUSLY self conscious. I shrugged it off at first but then later started wondering if I did or said something to her that insulted her. Or hurt her. Or pissed her off. I know that not everything has to be about me, and these people all have their own lives; it's just the fact that her request to talk to her dad without his girlfriend there makes me cringe. It throws me back into that mindframe that I am waaay down there on the totem pole, below even the cat or dog.

Or maybe it's just nothing.

We're In the Money

Well, not really because all the money goes to the American Cancer Society.
I raised $700, but $200 goes to Steve because he sold something that he
really didn't want to sell. I MADE him sell the pinball machine. It was taking
up so much space in the garage, and it was rediculous to believe that we would someday move it into the house and play it.
I was certainly exhausted, because I was the only one who worked the sale. By that I mean I moved all the merchandise outside, priced it, worked all day and then moved the stuff back in at the end of the day. Then got out there the next morning and
moved everything outside at 5:30 am, and worked all day. I did well, though,
because all I've got left is some clothing and the Christmas stuff. I had a literal Christmas land over on one side of the yard, with a tree and decorations. None of it sold. It's going to the thrift store today.

We've decided this weekend that since Steve's boss is busy with jobs in Hawaii and my boss is gone to work in California, that we're taking off out of town. We have to figure out where we're going yet. Likely we won't have kids with us, so I can research some destinations online that aren't necessarily 10 year old friendly or teenage girl friendly. Yay for meeee!!!