by Cathy Davis
Hasn’t the weather just been beautiful? Aren’t you anxious to get outdoors? Well polish up your sneakers because on Saturday, May 10, you’ll have a chance to give those sneakers a workout.
Every year the Houlton Humane Society hosts a walk-a-thon, adopt-a-thon and yard sale. This event helps us to showcase some of our beautiful adoptable animals, gives you an opportunity to collect pledges and walk for a cause, affords some excellent networking time for animal lovers all over Southern Aroostook, and when you’re done, even a little yard sale experience.
Walkers can pick up pledge forms at the animal shelter or the Varney Agency and shortly we will also be trying to fax them to various businesses so you may work for an organization that will be receiving a form, so watch for these if you’d like to have one. But remember, you don’t have to have a special pledge form to collect pledges. Just a piece of paper with the names and amounts of your pledges will suffice; we can always have you sign a pledge form at the walk.
Walkers will take off around 10 am on Saturday morning and walk a route of approximately two miles. Bring your dog, or not, whatever suits your fancy. But if you bring your dog, there will be prizes for the cutest dog, oldest, youngest, smartest (show off your tricks for a treat!) and so forth. You could be a cat lover and join in on this walk, you could walk a Shelter dog if you want, just let us know in advance that you’ll want to do that so we can bring a Shelter dog with us.
After the walk you will be treated to a nice lunch, we’ll have water available, and there will also be prizes for the walkers.
We will be trying something new this year; we want to sell “Breakfast in Bed” baskets. This will be a very nicely decorated basket including a bagel or muffin, fruit, gourmet coffee (as gourmet as you can get in a package anyway), and you can present this to your mother for mother’s day. We are only making baskets if we receive advance orders so if you would like to order a Breakfast in Bed Basket for your mother, please call the Shelter at 532-2862 and leave your order. You will need to pick them up on the 10th. The location will be announced shortly. The cost of these baskets will be $10 each.
If you have yard sale items and can hold onto them until the 9th, please do, and then we can let you know where to drop them off. We’ll be accepting items from 5 to 7 p.m.
If you would like to volunteer for this event, we’ll need folks to make sandwiches and sweets for the walkers and if there are extras we can have a bake sale table to sell off the remaining food, we will need help setting up and taking down the yard sale and help moving any left over items back to the Shelter.
Mostly we need walkers. I recently did a 6-mile walk for MS and if this old lady can do six miles, two miles should be a piece of cake! Think of the fresh air and exercise! We’ll even provide doggie bags for you to pick up after your pooch!
So come strut your mutt, have a blast, network with your fellow animal lovers, and help raise some badly needed funds to keep the Shelter going. This has been a hard winter for us financially, and we have struggled through by the grace of God and the generosity of our friends. Without you, we could never make it from day to day. We appreciate your help and your support and we look forward to seeing you on the 10th!
