MN Thompson's

The 2008 Relay for Life is over. I made it. 11 hours walking. 1 hour of sleep. There is a bucket of beads that you pass every lap around the quarter mile track. I grabbed one every time around. Count ’em…

I ended up with 59 beads (plus a few walks back and forth to the truck to pack things up)…or 15 miles. Not bad for a midnight stroll. I think I pushed passengers (who donated $) on the gurney around about 15 or 20 of those laps.

Otherwise, I probably only did 2 or 3 laps the entire night without talking to someone on the way around. Amazing. Several friends and coworkers were there – we had a lot of memories and inspirations to walk for this year. The firefighter who lost his wife to cancer a few months ago was there all night with his two kids. His youngest, Sam, is probably in 3rd or 4th grade. At 2:00 a.m. Sam came running up to us with a bag filled with junk (straws, corks, cloth material, velvet material, stickers, license plate holder, binder clips, newspaper, 2XL t-shirts, etc.). He said we had 45 minutes to dress him up for a ‘runway walk’. Ok. We did the best we could – he looked ridiculous and at the end started asking if he looked too goofy. We told him ‘nnnaaaahhhhh’, wadded up some newspaper to give him some massive biceps, and sent him on his way with his purple velvet cape flowing, cork stuck with stickers to his forehead, straws coming out of his fingertips, and both of his legs stuck through arms of an upside-down t-shirt so he looked like he was wearing monster diapers. At 2:45 a.m. the “walk-off” started. There were about 15 contestants and they all had to one-by-one say their name and their team and then strut their stuff across the stage. There were some pretty creative entries – most notably was a dude decked out in a bikini-looking number, complete with lipstick, etc – the competition was tough. When it was Sam’s turn he took the mike and said he was “muscle man” with the fire department. He walked across the stage and then stopped repeatedly to pose. After everyone had a turn the judges gathered together and had 3 prizes. They gave the first one, “most artistic” to a young girl – clearly a sympathy vote :). The gave the second one, “crowd pleaser” to the dude in the bikini, and…the last prize, “best overall costume, whatever” to………Sam. You should have seen the smile on his face – priceless. That is what the night was all about. Sam is already talking about next year. I’m definitely in too!

Can anyone guess what is causing the leaves in our hollyhocks to get a bit shredded? These little buggers are everywhere on our hollyhocks. Sawflys maybe…which I can tell because (1) the larvae clearly have six or more pairs of prolegs on the abdomen (and, duh, caterpillars have five or fewer), and (2) they have two stemmata instead of a caterpillar’s six. Alex, I’ll take ‘bug facts’ for 400…

And, of course, the daylillies are out in full force now…I swear they will be deemed a noxious weed someday…but until then we will enjoy them.

Grandma T gets in tomorrow…we can’t wait to see you!!!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Children, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.