Dog Day Afternoon!

Carmel's Annual Dog Day Afternoon was much fun! If you are a dog lover, or as we say in our family, "have the dog gene," you would have been in dog heaven.

Lots of activities, fun vendors with cool stuff to say and items for sale and my favorite part - all the different dogs you get to love on!

All. The. Dogs. Danes and pits and goldens and aussies and cairns and labs and shepherds and bulldogs and mutts and and and ... A dog lover's PARADISE.

I was there representing Club Canine, where I work, as well as . . . myself! Well, Joel (my 12-year-old) and myself.

You see, I have started making custom dog collars and collar bandanas to raise funds for Joel to go on his first mission trip. So I had a display in my boss's booth for them today.

Joel came home from church camp in July absolutely on fire to go on our church's mission trip to Kenya. With that not being a good first mission for a pre-teen, our church's "tour director" of world missions (his official title is pastor of care giving) suggested he go to Mexico for his first mission. So the goal has been set.
We need to raise around $1,500 for the two of us to go since he's under age and must go with a parent.

We thought about different things we could do to raise the money, and a friend suggested that we make dog biscuits and sell them. We began to pursue that when this idea came to mind. And that is an incredibly short version of the whole story, but I'm typing this on my Blackberry, so the rest will have to wait until later.

I found out about this event a week ago. S. E. V. E. N. days. Not enough time to do much in the way of having more than a few collars and bandanas to offer, but wanted to get something in the hands of this very concentrated gathering of dog lovers. So I did what I could; and in the interest of time, merely registered a domain name and slapped up a few graphics and pages on the site to let people know that the store is *coming* - and to also explain the cause that makes up part of the name.

What name?

Life is Ruff ~ Collar Casuals for a Cause. We have decided optimistically that once we reach the goal of this mission trip, we will set another goal - someone else to raise funds for. So we will always have some goal we're trying to reach in peddling our wares.

I know. Those of you with web site experience absolutely cringe at me saying that I published a site like that. Please, please forgive me. I need to find someone who knows what they are doing to design it, and I also need someone to do some photography for me to put on it.

Anyone wanna volunteer? Please?

Anyway, I'm so excited at the prospect of raising money for something, for someone else, of creating, of my son going on his first mission trip. I hope it really was God putting this on my heart, and not some bad shrimp I ate giving me heartburn.

Please feel free to visit the pitiful site-to-be and register to be notified when it is up and running. And please pray that we reach our goal and can move on to another and then another. This is the kind of thing that makes my heart leap!

LifeIsRuffCollars.com

Sent via my very awesome BlackBerry