A day off

Today is my birthday,* and I plan to spend it doing things that I like**, with people I love, and as is the sometimes tradition*** around here, someone else wrote the blog for me today.  I found this amazing thing in my inbox this morning – a beautiful birthday present from Ken that made me cry.  He’s been with me for 33 of my 48 birthdays, and this sort of thing is exactly why.  Ken’s wildly overstating some (well, most) of my qualities here, and leaving off the part where I make him and everyone else crazy, but that’s just another reason to love him. ****

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Because she doesn’t work on her birthday, I thought I’d share with you what Stephanie looks like in my head:
meyoung 2016-06-14

(Note from Steph: I think I’m about 25 there. This is one of the terrible things about people who’ve known you for years and years. They have all the damn pictures.)

Okay, she looks like this too:

meyoungnot 2016-06-14

But when you’re old like I’m old (I’m much older than Stephanie, so this is in no way to imply that she is old), there’s a multiplex lens on everything, especially people, and you see not just what they are, but what they’ve been to you.

This blog, which I gifted to Stephanie so long ago because she so clearly needed more people to talk to about knitting, is more than simply a blog. It’s a community. The message that Stephanie takes from knitting is that small actions add up to large outcomes, and that is the backbone of this community that collectively has raised (and continues to raise) over a million dollars for Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders. It’s a community that has surprised, delighted and flabbergasted the Toronto People With AIDS Foundation’s staff, volunteers and clients, who are all so fortunate to have made your acquaintance. All because Stephanie wanted to do more, and knew that as a community, you could do so.

Stephanie has given me a life I thought I would never have, held to a higher standard, filled with more love and more fun, than I ever would have or could have believed. That’s what she does, really, she gives, more than anyone I’ve known, to a degree that even I, after all this time, find incomprehensible. So much more than just friendship, she has given me my life.

Our relationship remains 999 cranes.

All my love, Stephanie.

Ken

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* If you wanted to give me a present, a donation to the Rally would be pretty amazing, and the icing on my virtual birthday cake – which would be kinda great because I don’t like actual icing.

** That includes knitting on the Great White.  3.5 rows to go, 3 days to deadline. Unless I break my arm in the next ten minutes while sitting quietly at my desk, I think I got this. Actually, let’s not say anything like that.

*** Ken did it last in 2004, then over the years, my Mum, my girls, my sister and Jen all took turns. I must be getting really old to have wound around back to Ken again.

**** There are a lot of reasons to love him. Ken is not just the reason this blog exists, he’s also the way this whole family got into the Rally. This year – despite a fall from his bike that resulted in a separated shoulder, he’s riding again, and Team Leading. If that impresses you, you can say so through his donation link.