Funding Max

Zack was off from school yet again today. I am not sure why today was a no-school day, but it was. According to the school calendar today was a K-8 non-contact day. Umm… what does that really mean? I do not know! We started the day in our typical hurried fashion as I had conference calls starting at 7:30AM and running continuously until 10:00AM. This meant I needed to be up at 7:00AM so that I could get the garbage and recycling out, as Monday is garbage and recycling day. After that the dogs needed to be fed and I had to think of a breakfast for the little man. (As you can tell from my prior post – Zack ended up with an omelet for breakfast – again!) Besides my conference calls for the day, I always have a number of reports that need to be sent in e-mail by 8:00AM Monday morning. Thankfully, I had generated most of these reports on Sunday night and I just needed to publish them via e-mail before the review meetings took place. Regardless, the morning was busy and I was constantly on the move from one thing to the next. I managed to keep Zack busy with reading and playing with the Wii Fit until we reached lunch time. We had decided that we were going to do something special during lunch. As you might guess Zack and I are both animal lovers. We love both dogs and cats and feel strongly about trying to do as much as we can to protect and save animals. As we have contemplated what to do with our time and our money over the past 8 months we have decided that we are going to contribute heavily to a local no-kill animal shelter called Max Fund. We will make our contributions of money and time in Patty's memory. This shelter is relatively small in the grand scheme of animal shelters. It is not huge and does not have a large fund raising arm. So they really get by on a shoe string budget. They are frequently in the need of day-to-day supplies to keep the place running. So for my lunch hour today, we decided that we were going to run to Costco and buy a very large quantity of canned dog food and take it to Max Fund as a contribution. As soon as I finished my conference call that started at 11:00AM we were off to Costco at Park Meadows. Our time in the store was relatively short as we knew exactly where the dog supplies are. We filled our cart with 4 cases of wet dog food. Each case weighs about 25 pounds and will feed 50 meals. We checked out quickly and got the dog food loaded into the car for the trip downtown. (I was a little bit silly in the fact that I drove our Honda Civic as opposed to the Explorer. It would have been much easier to fit the dog food into the back of the Explorer!)

(Zack with our 100 lbs of dog food at Costco)

The Max Fund is located at 11th and Galapagos in downtown Denver. I had called ahead and told them that we were coming with a large quantity of dog food. They were quite excited when we walked in the dog with the food. The volunteers at the front desk were very thankful and happy to see what we brought. They definitely made us feel welcome and appreciated for what we brought. We were invited to go through the entire shelter and see all the dogs and cats that were available for adoption. Zack had a wonderful time going into each area of the shelter and seeing the doggies and cats and that were available. Each and every one of them is so precious. Many of them are very scared and frightened as they have gone from good homes to a shelter – how horrible is that. We stopped and petted each one and told them they were good puppies and kitties. Both Zack and I really love animals and it was very tough to see all of them in that situation. But as I walked away, I felt good knowing that not one of those dogs or cats would be killed. That made me smile. In the future Zack and I intend to get a lot more involved in doing charitable things. Today was just a first step in this direction. We will definitely talk a lot more about this on the blog as it is just so important to help out those who are less fortunate than us – whether they be people or animals. If you live in Denver (or anywhere for that matter) consider contributing to the Max Fund. Their web address is http://www.maxfund.org/.

The rest of our day was filled with the mundane activities of day-to-day life. Zack had Sylvan this afternoon. The weather was so warm that I decided to use the grill for our dinner tonight. It was good to be outside cooking as the sun set - it made for a great ending to a busy but fruitful day.

We hope everyone’s week is off to a great start. Thanks and peace to all!