Miles

For about six months now, I have been reading a blog written by Miles Levin, an 18-year old from Michigan battling rhabdomyosarcoma for the past 26 months. His blog is an amazing chronicle of a boy growing up facing the harshest of life's circumstances. Yesterday morning, Miles died. Click here for a link to a story on cnn.com about Miles. To read Miles' blog, go to CarePages. You'll have to register (it's free) and then in the page search field type "LevinStory".

In announcing his death Sunday afternoon, his family wrote:"Miles went from a boy-man to a man-boy. At a cost that would knock your socks off, Miles still managed to pack a wallop. He could not and would not be held back ... from living life to the fullest."

And this is from one of Miles' last posts, on August 3: "It's a stupid system, but the the only way to fully understand what you have is by losing it. Therefore, luckily for me, I'll probably never know how blessed I am to be enveloped in the sort of love my family provides, especially now. I can only try to imagine how much scarier this would be without them."

Watermelons and music

This past Sunday our band played at the annual Carytown Watermelon Festival here in Richmond - more than 60 bands, more than 100 performances, on a total on ten stages - thousands of people, lots of watermelon and other summer foods - it was a beautiful and a fun day!

Another Christmas in July report

During the second Christmas in July event last week - a ten hour marathon concert at The Positive Vibe Cafe - we had several guests come in who had no idea of the event taking place. First you could see them think "Christmas music? In July?", but they got the picture pretty quickly of course.

One gentleman came in as part of a small group of chimneysweepers on break from a job. He approached our merch ladies and told them how much he enjoyed the music and te cause, and proceeded to buy three of our CDs. Then he mentioned that he wished he would have known about the food drive, because he would have like to have contributes cans of food. He asked if instead he could write a check to the Foodbank, which of course we said "yes" to. A few days later we were processing our paperwork for the event, and realized he has written a thousand-dollar check to the Central Virginia Foodbank.

Needless to say, we're still a bit speechless.