Shearing the Sheepishness

About a week ago I sent out a letter almost everybody I have an email address for. For the last year I have been thinking I wanted to donate to a worthy cause. I sent it to people who I thought might be ok with getting such a letter.
I took me a while to get it together and I interviewed a few friends first to see what they thought. I felt a little weird or sheepish asking for donations. That feeling was replaced with "Damn, my friends are cool!" The response has been awesome and so now I am blogging about it and extending the offer to anybody else that knows me and might read this. Most of all remember my offer to hang out. I am fun to be with and dang it, people like me... most times

What's up my Peeps,
Let me start by saying "Hi" to some of you I haven't really seen since football started. My 4th graders are 5-0 and my 3rd graders are 4-1. We recently won the Pumpkin Bowl and have pretty much beat everyone in the city. We have 2 games left and I am excited about them. The folks are doing fine and the Punkin (My great niece Lenee) is getting bigger by the day plus she is 4 now, I am getting old. I also wanted to say a big thanks to all of you for your support and well wishes over the last kind of tough and scary year and throughout the years we have known one another. This year I wanted to do something for others during the holidays. I wanted to volunteer on Thanksgiving Day and serve food, but for reasons that some of you may know I need to be close to the house on the holidays to help out. So I thought that what I couldn't give in time, I would try to give in donation. I plan on making a donation to the 2ndHarvest Food Bank. I volunteered there a couple weeks ago with people from work and I liked the organization. So I am sending this email to see if you would like to help my donation grow into much more. I am asking that you donate what you can. $1, $5, $10 dollars or whatever you want to send. I will even collect in person if you like and we can hang out. Just so you know in advance, I will not be handing out receipts. I will not be turning this in for my own taxes.This is just an impromptu thing that I wanted to do. If you need a receipt please donate on your own. I would also like to see all of you before the holidays start. So whether you want to donate or not, let's plan on getting together. You know I miss you and the great smile you always give me when we see each other. I had to throw in something sappy to tug at your heart strings. When and If I get emails back saying yay or nay on the donations I can give the breakdowns on what our total donation amount will do. I do know that a $1 dollar donation can get $9 dollars worth of food for 2ndHarvest.
So I hope to hear from you all soon.
Love and Happiness - from the Al Green song , oh yeah, I almost forgot Thanks!!!
RickyP