The Race is on!!!!!

Well this has been an interesting couple of weeks.  The gym training is not going as well as expected because both Heather and I have had the flu; Oh okay a "VERY BAD COLD", anyway we have not been able to breath, even talking has been difficult, much to Howards amusement, he lives with two woman who every time the speak start coughing!!!!

It hasn't stopped our fundraising though, we are just taking turns with the jobs LOL!!!

So while I was in bed, Heather spent her spare time contacting load of companies, begging for donations to the raffle for our Race Night and calling loads of pubs in Aberdeen getting permission for us to visit them for last weeks Fancy Dress Pub Crawl.  She was very successful!!!!

However, on the day off the pub crawl, Heather took to her bed, leaving me and Lianne to do the pub crawl ourselves.  I think her timing was brilliant; I had just agreed with Lianne, that we were each going to try and beat Heather at the pub crawl, as she has raised the most in every event so far :-(.  Heather will do anything, to avoid being beaten LOL!

It didn't work though, it may be because it was a Saturday night instead of Friday or Sunday this time, OR it could have been the costumes, but we raised more that night than ever before; Lianne raised £338.39 and I raised £417.86, giving us a total of £756.25.

I was dressed as the lion from the Wizard of Oz but Lianne was dressed as Edward Scissor-hands.  A costume so real looking, one girl ran screaming and hid in the toilets as soon as she saw her.  Bad Lianne!!!!!

Lianne as Edward Scissor-hands and Karen as the Lion from The Wizard of Oz

This brings us to this week and some of Heathers begging has worked well.  We have several more raffle prizes for the Race Night from companies such as The East Neuk, Partylite, John Laidlaw Butchers, plus several others have asked us to come back to see the managers, with comments such as "I'm sure he/she will but you have to ask him/her" so appointments have been made to go back later in the week.

Meanwhile, posters for the Race Night have now been put up throughout the city, watch out for these whenever your out and about.

 



 Tickets for the Race Night are available online by clicking the link here Race Night OR on the door.

Don't forget you can also make donations for our biggest challenge "The Trek to Machu Picchu" online through our Just Giving Accounts here: Karen or Heather.

What A Battle

What a fantastic night we all had on Friday night raising money for Macmillan Cancer Support.  The Battle of the Bands event arranged at The Tunnels was a very successful night. 

 

The Tunnels © Karen Kennedy

 

 

Unfortunately one of the bands had to pull out at the last minute, but that still left five bands in the battle.  Easily Led got the night off to an exciting start, unfortunately they had to leave immediately after performing for personal reason's but we would all like to say a big thanks for making the effort.  Congratulations also go to Easily Led for coming second in the battle :-) Our thanks go out to Morgan's Music for donating the second prize of a ukulele plus £25 Gift Voucher.

 



Easily Led - © Howard M. Kennedy PhotoClassic





 

Eden was next on the timetable however, their was a slight problem, someone at The Tunnels forgot to pass on the message that we had a wheel-chair user in one of the bands.  Thankfully the staff at the Tunnels were very good and although it was not ideal, they did the best they could to help.  There are two rooms at the Tunnels, one which is wheel-chair friendly and one that is not, unfortunately we were in the wrong one.  Rodney could not get up onto the stage so the mikes were brought to him. 

 



Two of the Eden band members on the stage - © Howard M. Kennedy PhotoClassic



 



Rodney played the Harmonica up by the sound man and the bar © Howard M. Kennedy PhotoClassic



 

The third band up was Reverse 61, a very young band with a great future ahead of them, these lads had great voices and had everyone there was singing along with them.

 

 

Reverse 61 © Howard M. Kennedy PhotoClassic

 

 

Logic Effect were the fourth band to take the stage and have the crowd singing and dancing to their music.  They are also the band that took the third prize for the evening, a large selection of chocolates donated by Heather and Myself. 

 

Logic Effect © Howard M. Kennedy PhotoClassic

 

The last band to take the stage were a very new band to the circuit who had only performed a few times before, but they had the whole room bouncing and with the result took first place in the Battle of the Bands competition, they were I Just Punched A Hurricane.  The winners of this event got a Photo Shoot worth £250 from PhotoClassic, that the bands are free to use for promotional material, cd covers etc. Thank you PhotoClassic, its much appreciated!

 

I Just Punched A Hurricane © Karen Kennedy

 

 

At the end of the night we counted the takings and have added a further £263.61 to our fundraising for Macmillan Cancer Support.  Thank you everyone for a brilliant night.

 

Don't forget we still have one more large event on the calendar for the 15th February at the Transport Club, join us that night for a Race Night and Fun Photo Booth.  This event should be full of fun and laughter, tickets are available in advance online or on the night.  Don't forget to buy and name your horse, prices start from £3 per horse.

 

 

 

We also have a couple more Fancy dress pub crawls arranged for the next couple of months, the next one is arranged for the 18th January 2014.  Please give generously, you will be promised a good laugh at our costumes, remember what the last ones looked like, I'm not sure I want to.

 

 

Sarah, Heather and Me!

 

Shaz, Heather and Me!

 

 

You can also sponsor Heather and Karen for our biggest event, the Trek to Machu Picchu through our Just Giving pages. Email us if your interested in joining us on one of our fancy dress pub crawls.

 

 



 

 

 

Happy New Year

Hi everyone, I hope you all had a fantastic time over the holiday season.  Lots of presents, food, alcohol and catch up time with the families.  All healthy and happy I hope!  So now to the new year and time to reflect on all that the last couple of weeks have given us. 

Unfortunately there are loads of people out there who have spent the last couple of weeks in hospital or making memories for their families as they may not be here next Christmas.  Cancer is a disease that effects us all, it is the most politically correct disease of the modern world, infecting the young, old, rich and poor alike.

Why not make one of your new year resolutions a vow to help those brave people who are facing this disease right now.  Macmillan Cancer Support does just that!  They are there to help the families of cancer patients as well as the patients themselves, through the toughest time of their lives.

As you all know Heather and I are trying to raise several thousands of pounds over the next few months for Macmillan Cancer Support and our emotions at present are very mixed.  We have had to cancel the Dinner Dance and Auction planned for the 25th January at the Copthorne Hotel due to lack of interest, this as you can imagine was a very difficult decision but the limited tickets sold would not have even covered the costs, so we have refunded everyone who had already bought tickets, I am sorry for all of you who were looking forward to this event, I know I was.

CANCELLED





We do have TWO other events coming up and have great hopes for these as luckily the out-going costs for us are much lower, meaning nearly all the money received for these events will be going directly to Macmillan Cancer Support. 

This week we have the "Battle of the Bands" at the Tunnels on the 10th January, doors open at 7pm and the show starts at 7.30pm.  Tickets are £3 each available on the door.  Check out which bands will be playing and when here.

The second event is the "Race Night" at the Transport Club on the 15th February, doors open at 7pm and then nights fun starts at 7.30pm.  Tickets £3 each, buy your horses in advance online for £3 each too.  More tickets and horses will be available on the night, as will a fun photo-booth.

We do have a couple of Fancy Dress Pub Crawls planned for the near future too, anyone who fancies joining us for a fun night in Aberdeen please get in touch by email.  The last two Pub Crawls were very successful and great evenings.

 

Sarah, Heather and Karen on our first Fancy Dress Pub Crawl

 

 



 

Shaz, Heather and Karen on our second Fancy Dress Pub Crawl

 

 

Don't forget you can also sponsor us for our biggest event still to come the Trek to Machu Picchu, a 6 day trek across the Andes to this amazing Inca city. The trek begins at Cusco 11,400 ft high and ends with a climb of 3,000 steps up to the Inca city of Machu Picchu, before we start the trek back down again ( a shorter route this time).

 

 

 

Machu Picchu

 

 

This is our biggest challenge and therefore, over the next few weeks and months both Heather and myself will be not only raising as much money as possible for Macmillan Cancer Support before we go, but will also be pushing ourselves into the biggest fitness challenge of our lives.



 

Me Just Now!!!!!

 

Fitness Target!!!!

 

 

Please sponsor us for this amazing challenge, through our just giving accounts here: Heather and Karen.

Christmas is coming.......

We are all having great fun getting ready for Christmas in this house as well as fundraising for Macmillan Cancer Support.................



Its Christmas

 

...................... so why not combine the two.......if your anything like me, your having difficulty deciding what to get everyone.



Presents!!!!!!

Here's an idea..............Tickets LOL!  You get a chance to give someone a great night out to chase away the Post Christmas Blues and Help Macmillan Cancer Support at the same time............

Its a Win Win Win!!!

You can buy tickets for our "Not A Burn's Supper" Dinner Dance OR our Race Night directly online using PayPal, we will then give you an e-ticket so no chance of your "present" being lost in the post or late, you can purchase online right up to Christmas Eve and have it in time for Christmas.

Dinner Dance

 

 

Race Night

And if you choose to join us for our Fantastic "Not A Burn's Supper" Dinner Dance so called because we are NOT having Haggis, although I do love a nice bit of Haggis, but its not for everyone AND we are holding our Dinner Dance on 25th January "Rabbies Birthday".  Anyway as I was saying if you choose to join us that night and you have some money left why not try your luck at our Auction...this week we picked up a voucher from Aberdeen Football Club (AFC) to add to the amazing items we already have.............if the auction is not for you, we have a Fun Photo Booth or just join us for the meal and then dance the night away.

 

 

Aberdeen Football Club

Well Heather and I both had a week off work, so spent the time marketing our events.  As you know the website is up and the posters are made but where are they.  Well several large companies in Aberdeen have been receiving emails from us this week, asking them to put our posters up in their staff rooms.

We visited North Sound Radio and Original and they are going to advertise our events nearer the time for us.  We are also going round community centres this week as well as visiting ARI, they have already given us permission and placing posters up on their notice boards.

As I said at the beginning though, we have also been having FUN, we had our second Fancy Dress Pub Crawl last week, as it was very cold we went in Onsies this time....you should have seen us, if you did, you would remember, we were "Once Seen Never Forgotten" LOL.

 

Sharon (Panda), Heather (Racoon) and Karen (Bat) an animal night out!



It was all worth it though; as usual Heather raised most of the money, managing to raise over half the total.  Sharon was nice enough to join us this time.......BIG THANKS TO SHAZ.............. and between the three of us we raised another £336.13.  Many thanks Aberdeen and we didn't have any problems this time, giving us a much better impression of the Aberdeen Pubs.

If your not free to join us on one of our events but would like to make a donation to Macmillan Cancer Support you can do so through our JustGiving pages listed here:

http://www.justgiving.com/Karen-Kennedy5
http://www.justgiving.com/Heather-Kennedy5

Trials and Tribulations

Well, quite a bit has happened since the last blog entry.

Our website is now up and running so people can go on and have a look at what we are doing and can purchase tickets for our events.  The link to the website is:  http://www.batwoman.org.uk/Macmillancancersupport.html

On 8th November we did our first fancy dress pub crawl, which despite a couple of hiccups, was a big success.  We were meant to meet in town at 10pm but the bus was late so me and Sarah were late and left mum stood outside the pub freezing for half an hour while she waited for us.  We did text her to let her know we were running late but she left her phone at home, oh well!!  We finally got going and were immediately given a sign of things to come when in the second pub we went into, a drunk man with vomit all down the front of his jacket kept trying to force us to give him a hug or a kiss, so that was fun. We finally managed to shrug him off and continued on our journey.
After a few more pubs we got to The Malt Mill which, like all the pubs we went to, we had phoned prior to going in and they said it was all right for us to take in our collection tins.  However, when we got there we got some donations from the two punters in the upstairs bar then headed downstairs where people seemed to be very annoyed at our presence and nobody donated any money.  After a few minutes the barman finally told us that it was a private function and everybody had already paid £20 a ticket to get in to help raise money for a little girl with cancer, so we quickly hurried out and continued with the pub crawl.
A few pubs later and we arrived at Filthy McNasty's where I was very successful and lots of generous people donated lots of money.  Sarah however was not so lucky.  She approached some people at the bar and was asked by the barmaid to show her fundraising licence. She stopped to open her bag to get the licence but before she had a chance to reach into her bag, a big burly man grabbed her by her necklace and pulled it across her throat so that she could not breathe and he proceeded to grab her bag and take out the licence, all the while the barmaid just stood watching what was going on and not doing anything to help her.  Luckily, mum was able to go over and help Sarah while I finished gathering donations from other punters.  Just as I was about to leave I walked past a group of men who'd said they wanted to donate some money.  I stood patiently and waited but instead of putting money into the tin, the men decided it would be more fun to try to take off my dress.  When I shrugged them off and started walking towards the exit one man from the group told me that since I was no fun (i.e I wouldn't take my clothes off) they were not going to donate any money anymore.
We carried on with the pub crawl relatively problem free, other then the occasional rude person, and in the end Sarah raised £126.95, mum raised £145.91 and I raised £185.07, making it a successful pub crawl with a total amount raised of £457.93.

Today, mum and I braved the cold and went to Thainstone for another car boot sale, selling lots of clothes, bags, books etc generously donated by our super smashing friends and ourselves.  We arrived around 8.30am and immediately were approached by several people looking to find a bargain.  The first hour we were there was really busy and we sold quite a lot, afterwards it settled down and by noon there were hardly any people going about.  By about 12.30pm we ended up just packing up and going home as there were no more customers and everybody else had packed up or were packing up.  Despite the freezing cold and people being really stingy we managed to get rid of everything, well almost, which is great as it means no more car boots for a while - yey!!!  Even if we hadn't sold so much we probably wouldn't be doing any more car boots anyway as they don't really generate much money and it's getting far too cold now.  Today we took in £81.20, which doesn't seem like much in comparison to other things we are doing like pub crawls and bag packing but it's more then we have taken in the other car boot sales, besides, every little helps!!!

In other news, we now have more bands organised to play in our Battle of the Bands in the Tunnels on 10th January.  The bands are: Eden, Zodiac Arrest, Logic Effect, I Punched A Hurricane, Reverse-61 and Easily Led.  Tickets for this event will cost £3 and will be available to buy at the door on the night.

You can check out the details for this event as well as the "Not A Burn's Supper" Dinner Dance with Auction and the Race Night (tickets for these two events are available online) at our events website http://www.batwoman.org.uk/Macmillancancersupport.html.

Other than organising and participating in events and getting cold and abused by drunk men, we have pretty much occupied ourselves by emailing lots of companies and asking for donations for our raffle and auction which doesn't seem to be very successful thus far.  We did also find time to go for long walks up hills carrying our day sacks to practice for Peru.

So, that's about it from us this time but remember that if you would like to join in with any of our events then please get in contact, also you can sponsor us using the following links:
http://www.justgiving.com/Heather-Kennedy5
http://www.justgiving.com/Karen-Kennedy5

Success!!!

Oh my word, what a busy couple of weeks we have had.

First of all, we now have a venue for our 'Race Night', it's booked for Saturday 15th February 2014 at the Transport Club.  It's got plenty of space and more importantly, it's cheap, we don't have to pay to hire the hall we can hire it for free if one of us becomes a member and pays the annual £20.80 membership fee.  So that's good news.  Also, Alex, a friend of a friend, is going to help us run the race night (for a small fee of course) which he has done many times before and he has all the equipment we need so we don't need to hire any of that which is good.  So all we need to do now is get raffle prizes sorted out, get tickets printed and sell some horses.

Secondly, we have now also organised a Charity Battle of the Bands event which is going to be held in the Tunnels on Friday 10th January 2014.  The Tunnels are letting us hold the event there free of charge which means that any money we make from it goes straight towards our fundraising.  So far we have 3 confirmed bands, 'Zodiac Arrest', 'Taxi for Bongo' and Mike Weber and his band.  We still need to find at least 3 more bands to compete but I am already on the case, I have emailed a bunch of bands and am awaiting their replies.  As we cannot pay the bands to play we are organising prizes for 1st, 2nd and 3rd places.  Tickets for this event will be available to purchase on the door.

As far as the Dinner Dance goes, we have some more good news.  My friends son plays the bagpipes and has agreed to play while the guests arrive.  We also have a folk band lined up to play a live set and a DJ who will play while people are eating and after the folk band have finished their set.

Yesterday we did some bag packing in Morrisons on King Street dressed in onesies.  My dad and my friend Sarah came along to help us, also dressed in onesies.  My sister Lianne was going to come and help but she got a little confused and turned up at Sainsburys instead.  Sarah and mum were packing bags on the tills while my dad and I were stood out in the cold at the front doors collecting money from people as they were entering and leaving the supermarket.  Despite the cold, wet and windy weather the bag packing day was a success.  Sarah raised £52.58, mum raised £106.31, dad raised £137.30 and I raised £191.20, so in total we managed to raise £487.39 so nae too shabby!!

Other then all that, we have kept ourselves busy emailing companies asking for donations for raffle prizes and for the auction, which seems to be going very slowly.  We have emailed hundreds of companies and so far we have a £525 voucher for Bedlam paint-balling, two £50 vouchers from Sailor Max Tattoo Parlour and a voucher from Ishoka Hair Salon which is still in the post but hopefully we will receive more donations through soon.

We have also been busy trying to sell some stuff on Ebay and we have a massive pile of clothes donated from various friends for the next car boot sale.  We also have our first fancy dress pub crawl on the 8th November so keep your eyes peeled for photographs from that, hopefully it will be another successful fundraising event.

Again,if anybody would like to join in and help with our fundraising please get in touch so we can sort out your licence.  Also, if anybody would like to sponsor us, you can do so through justgiving: 

www.justgiving.com/Heather-Kennedy5 or

www.justgiving.com/Karen-Kennedy5

Ups and Downs

Well the last two weeks have been full of ups and downs.  The detox was a disaster, lasted four days before the headaches and stomach cramps got so bad I had a sandwich, well a hotdog.  The funning thing is, when I told Heather, she told me she had broke the detox too with a hotdog, like mother like daughter LOL!!!  The good news is we still lost weight, one hotdog each didn't hurt too much, I lost 3lbs and Heather lost 2lbs.

Heather

That was on Monday last week, the diet has done downhill since then, it was my friends birthday this week so I've had cake and alcohol plus we have ended the detox early, basically we are back to eating tatties - NOT CHIPS just baked tatties, still no caffeine though or dairy till next Monday.  The gym has been getting easier too, I no-longer suffer for days afterwards and am managing to do more each time, so I'm hoping I haven't put on weight even if I haven't lost, I'll let you know.

Karen

Good news - The council fundraising license has arrived so we can start the fancy dress pub crawls, these should be good fun.  We are also bag packing at Morrison's in West North Street, Aberdeen on the 2nd November wearing Onesies, anyone fancy putting on their onesies and joining us OR chose Morrison's that day to do your shopping and let us pack your bags for a small donation of cause.

The Copthorne Hotel has been booked for the 25th January 2014, as we are having a "Not A Burn's Night" Charity Dinner Dance that night with an auction.  The tickets will be £35 per head if anyone is interested send an email.  I've sent letter out to the large oil companies here in Aberdeen to advertise the tickets and ask them to sponsor a table at the dance, hopefully they will take us up on this as it will allow us to put all the ticket money to the charity but we will have to wait and see.

If you can't make it to the dinner dance, how about joining us at the "Race Night".  For those of you who don't know what a race night is, its a fun pub event where you can purchase a horse, nominate a jockey and even bet on the races, lots of fun.  If your horse wins you win!  The date and venue for this is still TBA but we'll keep you informed.

So as you can see its been a busy couple of weeks, but hopefully we can start raising some descent money now.  Anyone who does fancy joining us on any of our events please email me first, as under our licensing rules we do have to make sure you all have passes at each event.  In the meantime don't forget you can sponsor us directly by making a donation through our just giving pages: Karen or Heather.

GREAT NEWS - We both lost weight..... I lost only 1 pound but Heather lost 3 - Yipee!!!