Wow, I’ve been away for a while! I’ve had a hectic month and just haven’t been taking the time to keep up with my blog or twitter. Sometimes real life just takes hold and everything else has to take a back seat. As I mentioned in a previous post, my family and I have been organizing my mom’s recent move. My mom has early Alzheimers and the move was very disorienting for her. She’s been in the new place for 9 days now, and I think she’s finally settling in. I’ve been going back and forth to her place for weeks now. I had to change some of my vacation time that I had booked for July to take it in April so I could be available for her. May is going to be a heavy work month because I did shift switches with other nurses to get extra time off in April, and now I have to work those switched shifts.

I’ve also fallen behind in posting new auctions for my fundraising. I was put off a little when I sent a message to an Etsy seller asking her if she would like to donate something and she replied calling me a spammer and basically tore a strip off me and threatened to report me to Etsy administrators. She said that her sister had died of cancer and that cancer isn’t something that is appropriate to ‘cold call’ about. Needless to say, I was disappointed and felt a little deflated. I couldn’t even reply to apologize because she ended her message with ‘do not contact me again’

*sigh* Well, I’ve otherwise had great, positive responses to any requests I’ve made but I feel I can no longer send direct messages to sellers. This was the way I’d received most of the donations, so things have slowed down quite a bit on that front.

I’ll have to come up with some new fundraising ideas soon. I’ve got about 3 more months to raise the remaining $916 I need for Jon and I to participate in the Weekend To End Breast Cancer in August. I’ve raised $3084 so far! Some ideas I found online that sounded interesting:

-Bowling party (get lanes to donate towards it and charge admission)

-Brunch for Boobies (invite friends and family for brunch and take donations)

Anyone else have any good ideas that have worked for you? I normally work from home, but when I go into the office I’m planning to bring some homemade goodies to share for donations- that usually goes over well. I missed an opportunity yesterday when I worked at the office. Our staffing has been very high since this whole Swine Flu thing started. I could have made some great donations but I thought of it too late to get any baking done!