What's your charity? (My apologies. I've spent most of the last two days working on the American Diabetes Association Tour de Cure out in Hillsboro.)

What's your charity?

It's been reasonably hard work for the last two days; a few hundred miles on the road, setting up signs and taking them down, using "spray chalk" (which is really rather cool, when you think about it) to reinforce the directions by spraying color codes and arrows for the 5 or so different courses...

Hundreds turned out, dozens volunteered to do road patrols looking for mechanical breakdowns and so forth, manning the rest stops and the like to make sure they had food and healthy beverages to fuel these fantastic, giving people.

I owe the ADA a lot; their research helped to discover medications that helped me cope with Type 2 diabetes until I could get my weight under control (drop around 90 pounds or so, in other words) and now, no longer required to take pills for this killer, this is my 5th or 6th year of doing first, the Mt. Hood version and then, the one run out of the Hillsboro Stadium.

Those of you who ride bikes ought to consider it for next summer; the people, facilities and scenery are beautiful, and worth the trip.

Later next month, Danielle and I will be doing the American Cancer Society Relay for Life at Battle Ground Stadium in honor of Luke Jensen, a fine young man of 9 who fought Leukemia bravely and well, but ultimately was taken from us some two and one-half years ago.

We've also signed up the infamous Red Dually to hall the trailer for a local food bank on a substitute basis here beginning this upcoming week; they need to look it over for the connections and so forth to assure that it's fully compatible.

If you are fortunate and can give of your time, effort, energy and even, occasionally, money, please do so.  It's worth it, and you get much more out of it then you ever have to put in.

That said, I really do apologize for not blogging.  And that leads me to the next post, below.