Exciting news: we’ve now raised over $4,000 – that’s $8,000 with our 1:1 match.  We’re 40% of the way to our goal of matching $10,000 by the end of the year.  Our hearts are full of gratitude toward everyone who has chipped in – many of you have been incredibly generous, and we don’t know how to thank you enough.

Today is the last day of 2012 that we’ll be able to receive snail mail, but we’ve worked it out that if any checks trickle in during January that are postmarked Dec 31 or earlier, we’ll be able to apply the match.  In the meantime, online donations will continue to be matched 1:1 for the next three days – and by the way, we’ve added Google Wallet as another payment method.

As a treat to reward all of your generosity, we’d now like to share what we think may be the funniest thing that happened in 2012.  The backstory is this: about a month ago, many of you got an email from us announcing that we’d launched Prion Alliance and asking for your support.  A few days earlier, when Sonia first sat down to start drafting that email, she tried to do so on Swype on her Android phone while waiting outside for an MBTA train in the Boston winter.  Both the phone and her fingers were extremely cold and if you’ve ever used Swype before, you know how it can suddenly freak out for no reason and start adding all kinds of random words you didn’t even type, and then when you go to hit backspace it gets even more excited and interprets the backspaces as whole new words.  On that fateful day, this series of events gave rise to the following text:

 Dear friends and family,
As most of you know, Eric and I learned about a year ago that I am a carrier of FFI, the genetic prion disease of which my mom died in December 2010.
Since receiving this news we jabber both been hard at work retooling in order to best address plop I r lloml lMm loololoo ml mollusk mml mml mml mmmml Mloloo LOLml lololoo ml,

If you agree with us that having a sense of humor about even the hardest things in life is awesome, then please donate, like and/or share!  Thank you!!