minifesto

Please help Mariah get her Life-Saving Medical Procedure

My friend, Nichole​, needs some help for her 8-year-old daughter. Nichole started driving for the same school bus company that I drive for within the last couple years and is a wonderful friend and mom who loves helping the people that she drives around all day.
Her daughter is sick and has been through at least 20 surgeries to help her condition.

Here's the kicker: Just like my story where I had to travel to Seattle to get further treatment to get closer to the end of the journey, have money for said travel (fuel, car maintenance, etc), have money for lodging while I was there (we were fortunate to stay with Laura​'s mom), food, medical cost, rent for our home that we were going to be away from, friends to check on the property while we were gone, and all kinds of other things...
Anyway, she's needing to travel from Portland, Oregon to Cincinnati, Ohio to see a specialist for her condition.

The minimum donation amount is $5. GoFundMe takes 5%, the US/Canada payment facility takes 3% + 30 cents (for a cut of 8% + 30 cents, making a $5 donation actually give $4.30 to Nichole for her daughter).

Please help if you can! Please share! I hope to get even a fraction of the traction that my fundraising received.

Thank you!
minifesto

Invincible Spring, A Novel, on Kickstarter

My friend, Jeanie Davenport, has been working on this book for quite some time. She and I met when I was working at Shari's between 2006 and 2009. She's an Eight Track Girl in a Gigabyte World and she's trying to make heads and tails of it all. With where our country is going, I believe the revolution is approaching. Society is changing faster than the government can handle and write legislation for. Our culture is evolving in both meatspace and cyberspace. We also need to make them understand that we've already depleted our natural resources. We're importing a lot that we should be making in-house. If and when those trading partnerships cease, we're going to be in big trouble.

This Kickstarter project that she's launching is her opinion and vision for our potential future. The goal is to spark brainstorms about how we, the people, are going to shape our future.

Washington, D.C. has proven many times throughout our history that it's not hearing all that needs to be heard. We need to stand up and make them hear us.

We're not breaking down any walls, we just want to be heard.

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2026. Dinah and David Leary are escaping a crumbling America, finding a home in the strange and strangely familiar world of Pacifica.
kunzite1

Chemo-Sabe: Help Save Mike!

Surgeries are done! Yay! But we're not out of the woods yet! We don't have enough money to pay for our apartment rent for the month of May. May 1st is coming up very quickly and I'd like to have a home to come back to after I recover enough to survive a 3 hour car ride!

Please visit our blog for updates!

And remember... You Can't Stop The Signal!
kunzite1

A reach out for help

I have been absent from the community for quite some time and for that I do apologize. A lot has happened in my life and now I need your help. I realize that it is against common LJ courtesy to not <lj-cut> a long post, but this is important.

I married a wonderful woman back in September, just before my birthday, and we have landed in a tight spot. She's drafted a letter that I will enclose below.
To whom it may concern,

Hello, my name is ephyra_pixie, and I would like to tell you a little about myself. I'm 24 years old. I live in a tiny apartment with my wonderful husband. I love my family, and my family loves me, we even have a cat. I'm not working right now, nor am I going to college, but I will be doing both very soon if I can help it. I want to own my own home, and my own business someday. Sounds very average right? Apparently not.

Now I would like to tell you a little bit about my husband. He's a 28-year-old, tall, skinny, kinda nerdy looking guy who likes to play computer games. He's very fond of me, and is very supportive of the aforementioned dreams of going to college and being a small business owner.

In August of 2010 my then boyfriend (now husband) was diagnosed with stage 2 testicular cancer. At the time we were both working, I lost my job somewhere between planning a quick wedding, personal dental surgeries, and taking my husband to the doctor. His job is sitting very uselessly in limbo at the moment. I was let go, being as all the absences were not covered by FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act) as I had not been at my job very long. He could not go to work because if he wasn't recovering from a surgery, or chemotherapy, he was on so many chemicals he felt like he didn't know which way was up. Chemotherapy isn't any fun, I don't feel the need to elaborate on that.

After November of 2011, after dozens and dozens of phone calls, letters, emails and prayer, we were unable to keep up the insurance premiums, rent, car payments, and all the other bills. Until then I was able to make it work on a $500 a month budget, and whatever we had in savings, and borrowed from friends and family. We had finally run out of money. So now we don't have insurance. However, by some luck we were able to finish chemotherapy.

So here's the problem: Mike still needs a very expensive surgery, something to the tune of $100,000.00 and we don't have insurance. We currently live in the state of Oregon. Oregon Health Plan, right? Apparently not. We've applied for this coverage four times, and have been told he doesn't qualify four times.

However through this entire process, I have been been looking under every rock within eyesight for any kind of financial assistance. We have bad credit or no credit, so no loans or credit cards. We have contacted every agency anyone ever suggested and all that got us was a $100 gas card, and food stamps. (Just to weed out a couple of suggestions: I have called everyone, if you can find an agency I didn't contact I'll eat my freaking hat, O.K.?) Minus those two, we got a big fat stinking NO, or they were out of money, or we didn't qualify for a laundry list of stupid reasons (too young, too old, not a father, not terminal, not the right kind of cancer, we don't live in the right state, we haven't been poor long enough, not the right minority, that kind of stuff).

So here's my complaint, my issue, whatever. My husband is sick. Really, really sick. He will die if we don't take care of this. He doesn't have a toothache, he doesn't have a cold, we've been working through this for darn near 6 months, and he's not better yet. So, what would you do? How would you feel, if all you wanted to do was take care of someone you loved, and it felt like every bureaucratic bean counter didn't give a crap about your loved one because you were poor and normal. Well, that all being said, I care a lot about my husband, I would like to grow old with him, so would he.

So what are YOU gonna do about it? I just need enough of the right people to help, do what they advertise, fix my husband so he and I can go back to our jobs, and our lives, continue paying our taxes, and being productive members of society.

Thank you for reading this.
ephyra_pixie
If you've read this far, thank you. If you can help with ideas, please comment below. If you can help with monetary donations, please send via PayPal to miketrethewey@gmail.com.

Thank you for your time.
kunzite1

embedding content in entries and comments

LJ used to have a whitelist for allowed embeddable content within entries and comments.

this ceases to be the case.

any <embed> tag can now be entered into entries and comments.

it will still eat <script> and <iframe> tags.

if embeddable media placeholders are turned on, the html code will be escaped and enclosed in a placeholder <div>. when the placeholder is clicked it will unescape the html and display it inline. it is displayed within an <iframe>.

the <iframe> sources to something like ( Collapse ).

the resulting html looks like ( Collapse ).

now, you may or may not be wondering about the whois record of http://lj-toys.com/. i know i was when i found out what was going on. fortunately, the DNS servers are NS*.SIXAPART.COM.