Relay For Life

I'm so sore that I'm waddling like a duck and so tired that caffeine isn't helping to alleive my urge to avoid being awake for more than two hours at a time, but I am quite thoroughly happy. :D Relay for Life was a blast. It was a fun-filled 20 hours. :) I spent the majority of my time goofing off with Stephanie and Lydia and Kristen and Emily. We enjoyed being the most annoying people walking on the track and even dared to get into tricycle crashes and sing loudly and skip happily.

There was even a period of time during which we were tent rescuers. We were camping in Husky stadium which is astroturf, so we weren't allowed to use tent pegs. This made more than one tent unsteady. We saw a tent falling over and it didn't look like anyone was around who had any claim to it, so we ran over and tied it to a hurdle. :) It was fun watching the people come back and see their tent standing up. By the end of the event, I believe a total of three hurdles had been utilized. Everyone was experiencing tent problems. It was raining hard and extremely gusty. Both Lydia and I were almost murdered by tent awnings. You know, the kinds without walls that are extremely susceptable to wind gusts. Anyway, Lydia was almost killed by an awning when we were rescuing the anonymous tent. It flew up over the tent behind us and almost landed on top of her. I was almost killed during the time that I spent as a tent prop. Our tent had a big rain cover on it which was catching the wind like a sail. The rain had stopped, so eventually we got smart enough to remove and just let the wind blow completely through the tent. Anyway, I was almost killed when another awning took flight and smashed half of the tent. I screamed, of course, thinking the tent was blowing over, and was rather surprised at the apparent bend in the laws of physics when the tent popped right back up again. Emily ran in to see if I was fine, and I was, so she went off to secure the renegade awning. Overall a smashing time.

Then, there was the Luminaria. It didn't start out extremely well. The Luminaria is a time to remember those loved ones who have passed away because of cancer. The idea is that the lights in the stadium are turned out and candles in paper bags with the names, and sometimes pictures, of the loved ones put on them. I made one for my Grandma Burke. The only problem was, it was still rather gusty. I stomped out more than one burning bag as they were tipped over. It was kind of funny and more than a little of a detractment from the intended mood to watch hesitant people trying to blow out the fires. Very few suceeded and by the end there were more piles of ash than bags left of the momentos in the areas where the bags were exposed to the wind. At first, I thought that my little remembrance of Grandma Burke had burned before I had gotten a chance to see it, which upset me just a little, but then Alisha told me she had seen it up in the bleachers which I hadn't even known held luminarias. So, I made my way up there, and found this small token, and I cried. I don't cry out loud when I'm in public or really even when I'm around people at all, but there were tears running down my face. Even so long after her death it's hard to acknowledge that she's gone. It was a moving time and I'm very glad I got to participate.

My whole weekend consisted of mainly Relay for Life. Other than sleeping and studying for my biology test tomorrow I have done little else. Oh, I almost forgot to mention a few stats on Relay for Life. The UW Relay for Life was the highest grossing online campaign. This means that though we didn't raise the most money of any campaign in the U.S., the largest portion of our proceeds came from online donations. Hooray for a computerized generation. ;) Total, we raised a little over $181,000, no small sum. :) I heartily encourage anyone who ever has the opportunity to particapate in Relay for Life to do so. You won't regret it. Most likely . . . you can't be feeling sick or it's not much fun. Poor Stephanie was feeling sick. She went home early.

And on a final note to clear up some confusion, I did not mean to imply that having a goodly amount of rain is what makes a city a "real" city. I meant to say that a city is a real city when it does something wholeheartedly. Take Yakima for example. When it's hot in Yakima, MAN it's hot. So that's what I meant about Seattle. I wish it would be either hot or cold, not any of this stealthy mist stuff. Although, I'm not entirely certain I shouldn't have kept my mouth shut. We had quite the tempest while we were at Relay for Life . . .

The Exhausted Emphatic Entity