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Growing a mustache for a cause!
The walrus. The imperial. The handlebar. The fu manchu. Mustaches: they grow on you.
And, now, they can help school children ages 6-18 improve their literacy, creative and expository writing skills!
I’m going to be participating in the 826Michigan Mustache-a-thon. What’s that you ask? Well, I’ll let them tell you all about it at their official website – http://www.826michigan.org/mustache/. But in summary: author Dave Eggers started the non-profit 826Michigan to focus on mentoring kids in creative writing. It’s a great organization that offers tutoring, writing workshops, seminars, field trips and publishing for Ann Arbor area students and even adults, all at no cost to the students.
The Mustache-A-Thon is an aptly named and equivalently awesome fundraising event, where participants get together and yes, grow out their mustaches for charity! It runs over 6 weeks, during which we’ll start clean-shaven and slowly let our upper-lip hair run wild. No goatees. No soul-patches. And hopefully in return, if you care about education, or creative writing, or just feel bad for the embarrassment some of us may endure, you’ll make a small donation. It’s a mustache cash bash!
So if you’d like to help out, please just use the Donate button below, which will go directly to 826Michigan in my name. And your donations are tax deductible! That’s right, you can get a tax rebate from my mustache. If this wasn’t a charity to support education, I might have said it was too cool for school.
Not sure how much to donate? $8.26 is a great way to start, but even $2 will be appreciated. The A-Thon goes for six weeks, so if you don’t feel like you can make a donation now, you’ll have all the way until April.
You can also be a grower yourself! If you’re in the Ann Arbor, MI area, check out this poster image to see how you can participate: http://www.scythematters.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/mustache-poster.jpg
The official website will be posting updates as the weeks go by, showing the progress of all the growers. You can check out my personal profile page here, and I’ll also post some updates on this blog. Just to give you some final motivation for donating, I’ll leave you with this – a photo of my current facial hair, which will ALL be coming off, along with a serious haircut, in preparation for this event. That’s right, I’m sacrificing all this manhood and winter-mountain-man pride for the children. All I ask in return is that you skip that double-tall latté tomorrow morning and instead help some kids to become better writers.
Update: Seems that I had the wrong link code for the paypal donate button. Should be working now.
Bad Timing
I thought about why starting a blog would be a good idea. I thought about where, and how, and what.
I did not think about when. When turned out to be in the weeks leading up to a move to a new city. Bad Timing.
This will be, by rough count, my 10th move in 8 years, although easily the largest since most of those were either for college or the Peace Corps (the latter being long distance moves, but you don’t exactly pack up a whole house when you go to the Peace Corps). It’s an intrastate move, only 70 miles, but there’s a very narrow time window to do the actual moving, plus the amount of junk my wife and I have accumulated since those first moves is just astounding. I can’t actually fathom how all of those stuffed animals, board games, juice glasses, fake decorative flowers, Hannukah candles, crappy end tables, bean bag chairs, and ice cream makers fit into our little two-bedroom apartment. And there was no way we were going to cram them all into the next one. Let’s just say the Goodwill drop-off center was a little more crowded this year, and that I’ve had a little less time than expected for extraneous web musings.
Once the move is completed, I’ll follow up with some thoughts for anyone else preparing for a life-upheaval. Until then, why don’t you all enjoy the weather for me while I’m taping boxes.