Morning, gentle readers, and welcome to the beginning of this year's blogathon where I will attempt to raise money for Band of Parents As I've mentioned in the past, this is a particularly important charity for me as I am a survivor of Neuroblastoma myself. I know first hand what these children and their families and friends have to face. The best hope for a cure as well as safer and more effective treatments lies with generous donors to help private insitutions and dedicated researchers. Making the world a better place can often seem overwhelming, if not impossible. Today it is as simple as offering to sponsor me for this event or leaving supportive comments.

In order to sponsor me you can either email me directly with your pledge or you can go to my fundraising page at change.org. Every little bit helps, so please give what you can.

If you can't give, at least post this information on your blog/myspace/facebook/twitter/plurk/cat's ass so that others will come here and lend their support. The more people who know, the more likely I am to reach this year's goal of $1,000.

Now for the fun part. This year's theme is going to be I Love the 80s. I'll be writing and hopefulyl discussing with you everything from Bad Hair Bands (Hall and Oates anyone?) to Bad Fashion (stirrup pants, dayglo colors, off center top of the head ponytails) to Bad TV (Alf, the Love Boat). So let's put a scunci in our hair, and dig out some of those Genesis and Huey Lewis and the News albums and remember when...