Happy Bit of News Sunday!

I decided this week to write about the idea for phriends I had that was inspired by a dearly departed phriend, TaraJ. Tara was a lively person, despite living with Lupus and PH. She went through many periods of just plain not feeling well at all, yet she was always thinking of others no matter how she was doing. Tara and I used to send messages to each other over Myspace, and often we talked about beads! She had a slight addiction to them as well. Maybe not as bad as my addiction, but nevertheless, she loved to oogle at the sparkly beads on a wide variety of websites. We even talked about maybe buying beads together to get a discount! Sadly, that never happened, but it was a nice idea at the time!



Over a year ago, Tara sent me a box of stuff. She used to make soaps and other pretty smelling things, and she sent me a few items she was trying to get rid of because she was moving with her husband to a new house. Inside the box also contained 24 tiny little cats and dogs, figurines that she just had no use for anymore. However, she did have a nice thought. She wondered if maybe we could do a PH Pal idea, and send a little cat or dog to a phriend who could use a bit of cheering up and good thoughts. I thought it was a neat idea, but at the time, I had no idea how to go about it! The box kind of got lost in the vastness of my computer room....ok, it's not that big, but I do have a mess going on in one corner, and the box got buried!



Anyway, I found the box last week, and as I was cleaning my bedroom, I contemplated on how to get Tara's idea into place. I decided to post about it on the boards. I stated how Tara had this idea, and I wasn't sure how to put it in place at the time, but now I had a little plan. Every month, I would take votes from phriends by email only (putting votes on the message boards might cause problems, I can just see it!!) for who they thought deserved a PH Pal, and why. Since I have 24 figurines, we could either have a winner once a month for 2 years, or we could have two winners a month, and keep it going for a year. I asked for any suggestions, whether anyone wanted to do it or not. I also included this photo of the little PH Pals (well, some of them!), so they could see what they looked like:

Aren't they cute?? Well, before I checked back on the boards later on in the day, I had gotten a couple of emails voting for people already!! When I did check the boards, several had posted that they thought the idea was a great one, and a wonderful way to honor Tara.

So, voting has officially begun, even though it unofficially started before I said to go ahead and vote! I've had several great nominations already, and I would LOVE to just give everyone a PH Pal, but, that is why we are doing this every month!!

So this is my Happy Bit of News today, because it just shows how much of a phamily we all are, and how much we care about each other. It also shows that when one of us has gotten their wings, like Tara did back in October, our memory for each other will always be there. Finding out ways to honor each other and our fights to endure this crappy disease for as long as possible means a lot to all of us!