Donate Donate Donate!!

So I've finally chosen which charity I will donate my time to. For 4 hours a week, I will be sorting books and scanning them in for the Friends of the Phoenix Library. These are books that have been donated that they will sell at warehouse sales, in their stores and online. I am very excited to help out and I go for my first training session on the third!

www.phoenixlibraryfriends.org

I used to volunteer for this charity:

http://in2books.epals.com/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fdefault.aspx

and it involved reading along with a child in another city. The child picked the book, and as their penpal, you asked them questions to get them thinking. I enjoyed it, but their communication fell through, and I was having trouble getting signed up for this year's session :(

I found out about these and the other charities I contemplated through this website:

http://www.volunteermatch.org/

and considering all the chaos in Haiti right now, they are looking for help like crazy!

So in the spirit of donating today, I decided I needed to FINALLY donate blood! I've never done it, don't know my blood type, and considering I do transfusion medicine in animals on a near daily basis, thought it was silly of me NOT to. It's just not something I think about. But since there is a catastrophe in the world right now, I thought that some of our blood would be shipped to Haiti, decreasing our available units. I asked the phlembotomist about this, and he said that yes, that was the case....so DEFINTELY donate if you don't or haven't already! Took about 1 hour of my day, and the actual blood draw only took 10 minutes! If you've never done it before, it was totally painless!!! And you walk out of there feeling like you've done something amazing. I was all proud of my little pint just rocking away while I filled it up....its going to save 3 people!!!

And if you are in Phoenix, right now if you donate through United Blood Services, they will give you a ticket to the FBR Open...had no idea when I went in, so what a nice suprise! :D Hope to see you all there! And I already have my appointment to donate again in March! :D

http://www.unitedbloodservices.org/herostatepage.asp?state=az

Now, for a quick nap before my shift starts at 11pm....ugh! :D