You are missing one of your important jobs on the list in your blog blurb. Mommy! Ya gotta ad [sic] that because it’s the most important job you will EVER have!

I was on my ass with the flu at the time, which is why it’s taken me days to write about this rather than hours. Ordinarily, receiving an email like this would set me off like a lit cigarette tossed into desert shrubbery during an epic drought.

This “motherhood is the most important work in all the world” thing is, not to diminish the importance of being a good parent, annoying as hell.

And.

I just deleted 500 words of diatribe because I think this post could use your input.

Working parents of the world, unite! Consider me to have just tossed a lit cigarette into the dried-out shrubbery of your working parenthood.

The comments section is all yours.

Don’t hold back.

ETA: In the comments, Darren Barefoot linked to this TED talk by Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook. (I’ll add this thought to her very good points: We need to make it so that when children come into the picture, both parents make decisions about how to balance their career and parenting. One way to shift things so that more women make it to the top of their career is to work toward establishing the assumption that either parent can compromise.)

Don’t call me MOMMY at work. is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Lisa and I were so inspired by all that BFAS has accomplished, and by how they’ve worked with individuals and organizations all over the world to do it, that we left feeling like we absolutely had to continue to work for the animals in some way or another. And what better way to do that but to indulge our compulsive need to craft? And, really, it’s no fun unless we try to convince everyone we know to contribute, too.

So today we’re launching the For the Animals! campaign to raise handmade donations to animal shelters, and to encourage people to tell stories about how their lives have been touched by shelter animals. Go on over to the campaign’s page and read all about how you can participate. It’s simple! And fun.

So. I’ll tell you two stories, and I’ll try to be brief.

The first began over eight years ago, when Greg and I drove home from Kamloops, four hours away, with a tiny puppy at my feet in the wheel well of the car. Though Greg had grown up with purebred standard poodles, I’d never lived with a dog. I knew, though, that I was a dog person. And I had a dream of one day adopting a dog from a shelter, giving a home to an animal who desperately needed one. So we spent the first couple of years of our relationship arguing about the provenance of our future pet. I won.

We adopted Cleo as a puppy from the Kamloops SPCA. (It’s very rare to find a puppy at the Vancouver SPCA, and the compromise Greg and I had struck was that we’d adopt a puppy. A mutt puppy.) Cleo’s mother had only been a year old when she’d had her first litter, and she and the litter were left outside in December in the mountains. Half the litter froze to death before they were all found. The SPCA fostered the whole lot, and we brought Cleo home the day she was old enough to be adopted.

Cleo’s a member of our family. She’s funny, and she and Greg love each other. Any concerns Greg had had about mutts melted away with that wee puppy at my feet in the car. Even though Cleo sheds. Constantly.

Ok, that’s not really a story. But it’s Cleo. We love her. And we love watching people cringe when they come up to us on walks and ask what breed she is and we happily reply that she’s a mutt. Why people cringe is beyond us. But it makes us want to shout to the whole world how great mutts are, and how good it feels to give a home to a dog who otherwise might not find one.

Now. Story the second. This one began at Best Friends and will hopefully end happily, but it makes me sad right now. While volunteering with a group of dogs, I fell in love with one. It was sort of love-at-first-belly-rub. The year-old dog’s name is Braxon, and his one-ear-up-and-one-ear-down led me to convince Greg that, though we had never talked about adopting a second dog, we really should. From Utah. To Canada.

We made the arrangements. Because of our plans not to be home over the holidays and our desire to give Braxon some stability once he got here, we planned to receive him on January 7th. Then we got the call about adopting our son Owen, with a day’s notice just before New Year’s. Which meant that come January 7th, we’d have a two-week-old at home.

We were committed to Braxon. We were going to make it work with a new dog and a new baby. Until the adoption coordinator at Best Friends made gentle sense of it all. There was no way we could do it. Braxon, though sweet and loving, was still going to need a lot of attention, especially for the first few months of his living with us. He’d need supervision out in the yard, and he’d need help adjusting to Cleo – and Cleo to him – and we’d need to learn if he had any special needs we’d need to attend to. It simply wasn’t in the dog’s best interest to join our family right then. And so we backed out.

I miss Braxon. I wish we could be his forever home. But I also hope that by the time we are ready to bring a second dog home, he’ll be settled into his own forever home. He’s still at Best Friends, and he’s a sweetheart (nudge nudge).

So those are the two shelter dogs who inhabit my heart.

A few days ago I boxed up some mats and blankets Lisa and I made, and I sent them to Best Friends with a note explaining how inspired we were when we were there, and mentioning this campaign.

See the reddish one, second from the top? I designed that one, and I’ve made the pattern available for free. For now it’s over at Ravelry, but it’ll soon go up at CrochetMe.com, too. Grab a copy and your hook and get crackin’!

Want to design a pet-related pattern to encourage folks to make items to donate to shelters? You should! When you’re ready, let me know and I’ll add a link to your pattern over on the campaign’s page. Same goes if you want to run some sort of promotion to encourage people to participate.

If there’s one lesson I learned at Best Friends, it’s that every action counts. And action is more fun, and often more satisfying, when taken with friends.

Craft for the Animals Campaign and Free Crochet Pet Mat Pattern is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

A few weeks ago Greg went to a conference and I had the place to myself for five days. The universe shined on me those five days, as much as the universes shines, and as much as it directs its shine onto individuals.

During those five days home alone I was, as the athletes say, in the zone.

Between the Friday and Wednesday nights, I:

• Knitted this slouchy hat:
  
• Took a full-day quilting class at Spool of Thread and left with this nearly completed baby quilt (more thoughts on quilting soon) – can you tell I really love that chicken fabric?
  
• Sewed my first zipper pouch, following instructions at Home Ec:
  
• Sewed a patchwork pincushion, a la Home Ec:
  
• Sewed a potholder following instructions by Linda Permann:
  

Oh, and I also read the second two books of The Hunger Games trilogy, got boatloads of work done, had a coffee date with a friend and kept Cleo fed and exercised.

Friends, I want every day to be like those days (but with Greg in town).

A Home-Alone Crafting BONANZA is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Every September, my parents help put on a fundraiser for the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research, which helps to fund explorations into early-detection, treatment and cure. Sometimes I fly out to Albany, NY, to walk the walk with them, and sometimes I help raise funds from afar. I hadn’t been planning to attend the walk this year, but since Dad had such good timing with his surgery, I’ll be there for it on Sunday. (Live near Albany, NY? Come walk with me! It’s easy to register!)

The crafts community has been totally awesome in helping to raise funds – and, importantly, awareness – too. Check out the Pancreatic Craftacular! Go shopping!

And now, here’s a more general shebang. A couple of people offered to donate some amazing yarn and fibre, and I think the best way to have fun with it and raise money is to give it away.

My friend Amanda recently moved (you may recognize her from the last contest I ran here). And as many people feel compelled to do when they move, Amanda needs to destash. The first prize in the contest is over $300 worth of Amanda’s stash.

Including: 1 i <3 tricot yarn ball zipper bag ; 3 skeins Rowan All Seasons Cotton; 3 skeins Blue Sky Alpacas Melange; 1 skein Schaefer Yarns Nicole sock yarn; 1 ball Brown Sheep Lanaloft Worsted; 9 skeins Blue Sky Suri Merino; 3 skeins Spud & Chloe sweater; 1 skein Kollage 1/2 and 1/2

Rachel from Dyeabolical® hasn’t recently moved, to my knowledge. But she still wants to give some fibre away. Because she’s awesome. So the second prize is $65 worth of her hand-dyed wool for spinning, and a spindle. So even if you don’t spin, you’ll be all set to learn. And if you do already spin, BONUS.

Including: 1 ~4 oz. braid of wensleydale; 1 ~4 oz. braid of merino; 1 ~4 oz. braid of falkland; 1 Simple Market Farms sleeping beauty spindle

All you have to do to enter is this: Make a donation to the Lustgarten Foundation by following this link to sponsor me, or by supporting another participant in the fundraiser, or by buying from sellers in the Pancreatic Craftacular or by simply making a general donation to Lustgarten (it totally counts if you’ve already donated or bought things – you don’t have to do it again). Leave a comment on this post saying you made a donation or supported the Craftacular. No need to say how much you gave or what you bought; it’s just the donating that’s important. I trust you. It’s the honour system. Any donation or purchase counts equally, no matter how small or large. And as I said, it doesn’t matter if you made the donation yesterday or last week or last month, or if you make it today.

The contest closes on Monday, September 13th, 2010Wednesday, September 15th, at noon Pacific time.

After that, I’ll randomly draw two winners. It’s possible I’ll be traveling home at the time the contest ends, so I’ll ask you to be patient if winners aren’t contacted until Tuesday the 14th.

Go forth, yarn and fibre lovers, and help conquer pancreatic cancer!

Contest & Fundraiser! Donate & you could win yarn or fibre! is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Dad and me. The inclination to make stupid faces when a camera's in view is genetic. I was able to fend off the urge here, but I think I compensate well by being bedecked so ridiculously in crochet.

See, the day before we left town for Greg’s grandfather’s funeral, we got a call from my parents after one of my dad’s routine pancreas screenings. He gets those about four times a year. The short story is this: About 10% of pancreatic cancer cases are hereditary, and my family’s one of those affected. My father’s mother, brother and sister all died before the age of 70. After my uncle Bruce died several years ago, we discovered the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research, and it has given my family something to rally around instead of feeling like walking cancer time bombs.

One of the main reasons pancreatic cancer is so deadly (95% of patients don’t survive five years) is that the cancer is asymptomatic until it’s too late. And if there isn’t a familial link, there’s no reason to do the invasive, expensive screenings to test for it before symptoms arise.

So the bitter irony of the story I’m about to tell you is that the only reason my father gets routine screenings is that so many of his loved ones died young.

Mom, Dad and Greg at Webs for my book launch in 2007. I loved that they all came, all the way to Massachusetts.

Dad, and some of my older first cousins, participate in a study of hereditary pancreatic cancer that’s funded in part by the Lustgarten Foundation. At his last screening, about ten days ago, his local doctor in Albany, NY, found a mass in the tail of his pancreas. They sent the results to the leader of the study at Johns Hopkins, and she said she wanted to see Dad as soon as possible. Six days later he flew down to Baltimore for more tests. It was the day after Greg and I returned from the funeral.

That one full day waiting at home was one of the most stressful, trying days of my life. There was nothing to do. No emergency flight home to arrange. No doctors to call. Just me and my overactive imagination, doing dances around each other.

I did my best to hold myself together. I didn’t pace too much. I spent lots of time on the phone with friends and family.

It was only come evening that Star Trek made me cry. Greg and I decided to distract ourselves with television. We’ve been watching The Next Generation. Surely great sci-fi would do the trick.

Irony, however, seems to be the theme of the month. Season 3, Episode 5: The Bonding. The entire damn episode is about a boy whose mother died on an away mission, leaving him an orphan. Wesley Crusher, teen phenom with some astonishing ’80s coifs, played by Wil Wheaton, was brought in to talk to the boy about his own father’s death a few years earlier.

Seriously, people. Give me a break.

I lost my shit.

Actually,  don’t let my overdeveloped tendency toward melodrama fool you. It felt pretty good to lose my shit. I love fiction for its ability to help us work through the confusing and overwhelming plane of reality. As Wesley talked about his anger and his grief, I sobbed and thought about how much I love my dad. I acknowledged how terrified I was that the tests would show a metastatic tumour. That the prognosis would be grim. Grim prognoses are what we’re used to when pancreases are involved.

Poor Wesley Crusher was like the Dawn Summers of the late ’80s – decried as a dreadful whiner and as just plain annoying – but after the moment we shared the other night, I’ll forever be his champion.

Did I mention I'm a geek because I grew up in the presence of my father's love of sci-fi?

I got a call much earlier than I expected the day of the tests. It was my brother, who told me it seemed to be good news. Excellent news. Preliminary findings didn’t indicate cancer at all. No dire prognosis. No emergency flying.

My dad still needs surgery. At a minimum, he needs to have the tail of his pancreas removed, and along with it his spleen. He’d like to take the whole damn organ out, which is something people with a family history like ours can do. If he’s able to work that out with his doctors, he’d live the rest of his life like a diabetic, dependent on insulin and also digestive enzymes to survive. But he wouldn’t feel like a time bomb anymore. He’d know he wouldn’t again experience the same terrifying shock he did this month.

And all this six weeks or so before the annual fundraiser. The fundraiser that takes on new meaning for me this year because I credit the study, and the foundation whose money helps fund it, for catching my father’s tumour before it could morph into a deadly beast.

The boy on Star Trek was twelve. I may be thirty-four, but I’m certain I’m too young to lose a parent. My parents have a lot of life left to live.

So this year for the fundraiser I’m again asking you for money. Even the tiniest donation can go a long way, but I know times are tough and you have your own causes to support. So I’m also asking you to go shopping, which as we all know is different. Some very special crafters have volunteered to donate some or all proceeds from some of their products to the Lustgarten Foundation as part of my campaign. They rock, and you probably want their stuff anyway. If you’re a maker, please consider donating some proportion of the proceeds of something you sell. This way you can jack up your prices, and help to spread the word about this very important research. If you’d like to participate, please fill out the form in the middle of that page, or drop me an email.

Ah look, a not-ridiculous candid shot. This was at Dad's 60th birthday party four years ago, which, as you might be able to pick out from the banner behind him, he coupled with a fundraiser.

Right now the research supported by these funds is important to me and my family in ways I hope you can understand from this post, but as the research advances I hope it will produce answers that will be important to absolutely everyone.

Star Trek Made Me Cry (AKA I’m Asking You for Money Again) is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

I had like the anti-high school high school experience. Not “anti” like “against”. More like “anti” like “antimatter”. I hibernated. That’s the way I think of it. I put my head down and woke up on the first day of university.

It wasn’t a conscious decision. I had all the self-awareness of a seahorse when I was fourteen. I don’t know why I hibernated, but I did. I had some friends, but not close ones*. I barely dated. I was super active in the youth group but that was like a separate world to me.

But there was one week. One week when the ground thawed and all the high school crap seeped in. I was seventeen years old, accepted to college, impatiently waiting to get the hell out, just like everyone else. For one week in the spring of 1994 I experienced four years’ worth of full-on pain.

My cousin was dying. We’d known he was sick, but there were a lot of hushed conversations about it. More speculation than frankness. I sat one night with my parents and asked if he had AIDS. They said he did, but it wasn’t to be told. And my aunt, especially, wasn’t to know I knew. She thought of me as a child. It was too much for me.

I freaked out. If I could put together how sick he was, and from what, and how he got it, damned if I was going to accept being thought of as a child.

I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d doze in an uncomfortable chair in the school library.

That semester I was taking a sociology class that made me want to poke my own eyes out. The teacher was so smart, but the other students were freaking idiots. We could have all learned things, but instead we collectively rolled our eyes and popped our gum. The teacher never gave up, though. And one day that happened to be during my week of insomnia and angst, he decided to make a point.

We were learning about deviant behaviour. As our textbook told us, as far as sociology is concerned “deviant” bears no value judgment, it just means the behaviour isn’t performed by the majority of people.

And the example our dear, well-meaning teacher gave was homosexuality. In his mind, homosexuality isn’t bad, it’s just that the majority of people are straight.

Picture me sitting across from the biggest asshole I’ve ever known. His name was Justin. He was a mean kid and my only run-in with him was in t-minus two minutes.

Justin goes nuts. I can’t remember what he said, but it was homophobic and it was passionate. Hateful. Cruel and mean and I hadn’t slept in a week.

So I interrupted him. I asked him what if I were gay. Would he still say those things, knowing he was saying them to a gay person?

That’s when everything stopped. He stopped. He stared at me and I had no idea what was going on. I heard the blood rushing in my head.

And then a whisper from somewhere behind me. From one of the eye-rolling girls. “Oh my god. She’s gay. That explains it.” More whispers.

I remember walking out of that room and feeling such an overwhelming number of emotions simultaneously that I may have stumbled. I have no memory of that night. I don’t remember if I talked to my parents. I don’t remember if I slept. But I do remember having the suffocating feeling that I couldn’t go back to that school. I had visions of every student pointing and staring. Nobody would talk to me. I’d go from being a benignly awkward A-student to being a reviled freak.

But those thoughts were nothing. The part that broke me was knowing it wasn’t true. I wasn’t gay. But it didn’t matter. I couldn’t say so, because if there’s nothing wrong with being gay, why should I care if people thought it of me? I was misunderstood and I was lost and the injustice was so massive that I can barely put words to it even now.

And honestly, I don’t remember what I did. I don’t remember if there were stares the next morning. I don’t remember if I even talked to any of my peers about it at all. All I remember is that I finished the year just fine. I eventually slept. I came out of my years-long hibernation the first day of college. I buzzed my head in the fall of 1997 and then I went to an Indigo Girls concert and many of my friends thought I was coming out, and they loved me and I loved them and I was still straight.

I’m straight, and I’ve experienced crushing homophobia. And I cry every damn time they address it on Glee because we didn’t have Glee when I was in high school. And I wish with all my heart that no one ever has to feel what I felt. And I know that every day people do.

And it breaks my heart.

—
* ETA: I was exhausted and emotional when I wrote this, and I’m embarrassed to correct myself – I actually did have a couple of very close friends in high school who were also youth group friends, which is why I just didn’t think of them. My forgetting of them in the heat of this post doesn’t diminish how important they were to me then, or now.

We’re All Freaks. is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

I started off this morning crying before I even had a chance to drink my coffee.

Last September when I went to Albany, NY, to participate in the fundraiser for pancreatic cancer research my parents spearhead every year, it was bittersweet to bump into Janice, an old high school friend. We hadn’t been close friends, but I’d sure liked her a lot. It was sad to see her because her family was at the fundraiser to support her father, who’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

It’s very hard to talk to people who love someone who’s recently been diagnosed, because unlike with many other cancers, there’s very little hope of survival. When someone tells me their father’s been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I know it’s likely they won’t survive a year. That’s a shitty context for reconnecting with an old friend.

Last night, Janice’s father died. Jay was a journalist and he blogged prolifically throughout his illness. If it won’t derail your day to get a little emotional, you should head over there and witness the honest, rich life he lived during the last eleven months, and meet his family. They’re lovely people and I hope they can keep Jay’s strength with them as they learn to live their lives without him.

The Upside Down

Shari & Neil Piper (aka my parents) at last year's walk

As my friend Chris has been saying so frequently recently, fuck cancer.

There’s four months until the big Albany fundraiser on 12th September. I don’t think I’ll be able to get out there this year for it, but I’m going to participate in the walk on my family’s team in spirit, cheering on the several hundred walkers and trying to raise some serious cash.

Last year you helped me raise almost $2,000 USD for the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research, the recipient of the more than $45,000 raised during the Albany event. Lustgarten is able to put 100% of raised funds toward research because a corporate sponsor – cable company Cablevision – covers all their operating costs. The research they help fund will hopefully lead to the discovery of early-detection tests that will allow pancreatic cancer to be discovered before it’s too late (it’s usually discovered too late; that’s part of the survival problem). My father and several of my cousins participate in some of that research. Hopefully by the time my brother and I are in our 60s, the results of that research will allow us to feel a little less inhabited by a cancer time bomb.

(See in the photo how they call it the “Walk for Hope”? Hope would be a pretty freaking amazing advancement in the realm of pancreatic cancer where, as I mentioned, very little hope exists.)

The Big Time

I had a dream (it might have been a hallucination) about the crafts world knocking pancreatic cancer out of this world. In my dream, this was quite literal. There was like a war of rainbows and glitter and felt and glue and pins and needles and a hell of a lot of wool and jewelry and monsters and creatures, and pancreatic cancer was outta here.

I think we can, within the natural bounds of physics, maybe make this happen.

If you’ve got some money…

Please donate to support my virtual walk. Every dollar counts, so you don’t have to have a lot of money.

If you live somewhere near Albany, NY…

Please consider attending the walk and raising funds on your own. I guarantee it’ll be a fun time, and my parents will love to meet you. (If you attend, you simply must march up to them and introduce yourself.)

If you’ve got an audience large or small…

Please talk with them about pancreatic cancer, and please send them over here so they can help out and maybe make a donation, too.

If you sell your handmade goods…

Please consider donating some of your proceeds according to any system you’d like. For example, you could designate one item in your shop and say you’ll donate the sale price of that item. Or you could designate June or August, or even July, as pancreatic cancer research month, and donate some percentage of your sales for that month. Or you could make several items of a particular sort and donate those sales. However you’d like, according to whatever you’re comfortable giving. (And of course, feel free to inflate your prices as much as you think your customers will endure!) This would be a great way to inform lots of people about the huge need for pancreatic cancer research, and I bet they’ll enjoy knowing they support a generous seller such as you.

No good deed will go unnoticed!

If you participate in raising funds via sales of your handmade goods, in addition to loving you in that ooey gooey cyber way I’m known to feel for people who support my family, I will promote the hell out of you on a very special page right here on my website. On that page, I will put a link to your shop or to the particular item you’re selling as a fundraiser, with a description of how you’re helping. And I will tell everyone I know about this special page.

If you’ve already listed your pancreatic-cancer-research-supporting goods, please tell me all about it right here:

If you’d like to donate an item to the pick-a-prize auction that’ll be held on the day of the event, please email me and I’ll let you know how you can do so. Donated items should be valued at no more than $50 each.

If you have ideas or suggestions for how to raise even more money and thus possibly save many people from tragedy…

I’m all ears!

Turning Sadness Upside Down, Big Time is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media. Sedighi is Tehran’s acting Friday prayer leader.

Jen McCreight’s response, between putting down her university coursework and watching television?

Time for a Boobquake.

On Monday, April 26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own. Yes, the one usually reserved for a night on the town. I encourage other female skeptics to join me and embrace the supposed supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that’s your preferred form of immodesty. With the power of our scandalous bodies combined, we should surely produce an earthquake. If not, I’m sure Sedighi can come up with a rational explanation for why the ground didn’t rumble. And if we really get through to him, maybe it’ll be one involving plate tectonics.

Now, let’s talk about science, theism and feminism.

Science. I think Boobquake is brilliant. In a paragraph, McCreight sets out an (admittedly unrealistic for strict scientific exploration, of course) experiment to test Sedighi’s assertion. Yeah, it’s cheeky, and yeah, she meant it facetiously. But who cares? This is an important lesson, kids: Question people’s assertions – especially the ones coming from those you hold to have such great authority that you make decisions in your life based on what they say. Question them often and when you do, question them responsibly. If they make an assertion of fact you’d like to question, gather a large enough sample, allow for scientific controls and analyze the data without bias (even if you have bias). Then come to your own conclusions, keeping in mind how flawed your experimental design might have been.

Theism. People invoke god and religion to keep other people down. Not everyone does this, of course. But there’s no denying that it happens a lot. To an appalling extent, really. On my most cynical days, I wonder how we’ve managed to survive this long having used religion against ourselves for so many millenniums. It’s not okay. It’s not okay for women or men to be held to have different rights, different privileges, or less power in society simply because of their sex. Ever. It’s not okay EVER. When religion is used as some sort of justification for inequality and oppression, the people using it that way are WRONG.

Feminism. Boobquake has become this week’s excuse for a feminist pissing contest. There seems to be constant competition to be the best feminist (and really, when it comes to realms of activism, this holds for all of them – animal rights, environmentalism, etc.) in the world. The best feminist (environmentalist, vegetarian) in the world is the most righteous (and therefore earns the privilege of being the most self-righteous), knows which products of culture are acceptable and which ones aren’t, knows the most about history and philosophy, knows which decisions are okay and which ones aren’t, knows which jokes are funny and which ones aren’t, and earns the right to live her life within perfect feminist (environmentalist, etc.) harmony while verbally abusing those whom she thinks are wrong and who therefore contribute to the evils she’s dedicated to fighting.

For me, it’s the science that makes Boobquake important. Oh man, science is important. Science that challenges institutionalized, religion-based misogyny, with humour, is a special kind of important.

Oh, and I totally own a good cleavage shirt. I wear it sometimes, too, not even to make a point about some or another dogma I subscribe to. Tomorrow, though, I’m going to wear it so I can be one of hundreds of thousands of data points for McCreight’s experiment. Maybe I’ll schmear some glitter on my girls while I’m at it, but probably not. That’s just not how I roll.

There’s a Boobquake meetup in Gastown in Vancouver tomorrow night, too. I hope you’ll make it. And if you’re a dude, I hope you’ll come, too. Not to oggle, because, really, I doubt anyone there will be dressed much differently than they might be on any other night out on the town (the invective instruction is, after all, to wear something you already own) and I’m sure you only make eye contact when you talk to women in bars anyway, but to support the effort to chip away at misogynistic religious nuttery, one viral boob joke at a time.

Let’s Talk About Science, Theism, Feminism and Boobquake is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

The event was a huge success. Well over 200 people walked the short route in perfect weather. Of course, it wasn’t the walking that was the point. It was the community and the fundraising. How much fundraising? By the end of the morning Sunday, the event had raised over $41,000 (USD) for the Lustgarten Foundation for pancreatic cancer research. And we’re still accepting donations (hint).

My cousin Bonnie spoke before the walk began. She recently had a prophylactic pancreatectomy (translation: she had her pancreas removed before it was cancerous). After five years participating in the same study my dad’s a part of, doctors agreed her pancreas wasn’t looking good. She lives now as a diabetic; she looks and feels terrific.

One woman on the organizing committee had pancreatic cancer twenty-six years ago. She’s in great health, and she’s pretty awesome.

Still. The overwhelming majority of walkers were there because they’ve lost a loved one, a friend or a colleague. One woman, whose husband was recently diagnosed, asked my mom, “So many people are wearing cards in memory of someone, not in honour. Does anyone survive?”

It’s not an easy question to answer. The answer itself is easy; it’s just not easy to say.

At the end of the event, on a high from the successes, I ran into an old high-school acquaintance. There are few people from my adolescence I’d be happy to randomly bump into, but she’s one of them. She looks just like she did fifteen years ago. Except it’s her dad who was recently diagnosed. I wish I’d bumped into her at a bar so we just could’ve had a pint and caught up. Instead, we skipped the small talk and went right into the thick of it – radiation treatments and prognoses. Her dad is a journalist, and he’s writing a blog about his daily life.

I’m so proud of my family and the community they’re a part of in the hometown I so often deride. There’s much work left to do, but they call it the Walk of Hope for good reason. My own spirits are bolstered, and it just feels good to face my fears with action.

Thank you. Thank you all so very much for your support in words and donations. You’ll hear from me about this again next year.

Nobody Puts Pancreatic Cancer in the Corner is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Let’s talk about health care. You know I’m happy with the care I receive here in British Columbia; I don’t think the system’s perfect, but I’ve had no major complaints about it, and it compares favorably against the care I got when I lived in the U.S. But I don’t want to talk about my personal experience.

I have a nagging knot in my gut that tightens the more I read about the state of “debate” on health-care reform south of the border. In an attempt to untie it, I’m confessing the following:

I think it’s wrong—capital-W, amoral Wrong—to deny society’s responsibility to take care of its members. It’s not an issue of whether you’ve pulled yourself up by your dead-horse bootstraps, it’s not an issue that’s in any way related to killing old people or the infirm, and it certainly shouldn’t be an issue that’s even remotely related to corporate interests.

Most countries of the developed world spend less per capita on health care than the U.S. does and provide coverage to all citizens. Decent coverage.

Given all these things, I don’t understand why people oppose universal health coverage so vehemently. Please tell me why.

(If necessary, I’ll moderate comments that don’t contribute to productive discussion. But I’m sure I won’t have to.)

Talk to Me (Us All) About Health Care: Open Thread is a post from Kim Werker's blog.