Roll those credits

Relief! My fingers are again working normally. So onward we go:

As much as I would like to take credit for this entire blogathon-thing, the truth is I just kind of sat here and typed. The only reason this was a success was because of all my Fairy Blogparents:

Dr. Janet at AboutVetMed, whose mentorship through all of this has been heaven-sent. Moral support, lampwork-beads-of-amazingness support, and the generous usage of tomes of material from her fantastic and much more educational than mine website.

Anthony Holloway at k9cuisine.com, who I don’t think actually intended to see me eat dog food on the web, but once I said OK supported it 100%. I had to cajole him a bit to allow me to even share this next bit since he was trying to be low-key about it , but aside from his generous contribution during the official blogathon he also let me know he is matching the total amount raised. HELLO! That is over four thousand dollars to support shelter animals! *keels over*

The generous e-tailers who offered me their wares as prizes to wrangle even more contributions out of people: Biscuits by Lambchop (who also did a lot of behind the scenes work for me organizing the chats and offering advice throughout); Calming Collars, and PetSquared.

Small business owners who generously offered their time and services: Becky Caudill, Dr. Annmarie Hill at the Animal Care Center of Huntington Beach, and Rwan Hardesty at Learned Paws Pet Services.

Su, a newly minted personal hero of mine, who sampled her way through a good chunk of the limited ingredient prescription allergy diets live on YouTube so that I would have video of a person actually eating it should I chicken out on eating my relatively unexciting veggie food. Plus her video is way funnier than mine.

Ana Cilursu, from the Atlantic County Humane Society, who was kind enough to join me on the kickoff chat and answer many questions about her excellent work with the organization.

Romeo the Cat (and staff), who inspired this whole thing to begin with and is a model for what one person- or pet- can do if they just go for it.

And of course, everyone who contributed during this blogathon. People donated very generously, some more than once, and for that I am humbled and grateful. And those who could not donate were there to cheer, encourage, and offer moral support galore which kept me going in the wee hours of the night and was a huge boon.

I feel so blessed to have gotten to know so many amazing people in such a short amount of time. I am pretty sure I am setting some sort of record for the usage of ‘amazing’ in one blog, but really, there are no other superlatives that describe it better.

Last but not least, thank you to my family for putting up with a slightly eccentric wife/mother who does wacky things like sit up for 24 hours making zero contribution to the household in order to post video of herself eating dog food on the web. I probably owe them a trip to Disneyland for this one.

(if I have by some major error forgotten to recognize a sponsor, please e-mail me. I want to recognize everyone who gave so generously.)

I am currently at a conference learning veterinary type stuff like how to cut this thing off and sew that thing back on, and while it is certainly useful information is it way less fun than what I did this weekend. Same goes for the company. You guys rock.