Please Help !!!!!

As you know I am involved in raising funds for breast cancer vaccine research. For more info go to www.penniesinaction.org
Which by the way has now expanded to ovarian cancer vaccine research at Penn.
If you or anybody you know gets diagnosed with DCIS with over expressed HER2/neu please tell them about the option of the vaccine /treatment
I am so upset. A friend of the family was diagnosed in march with having breast cancer again after 20 years. I heard about it after she had surgery , and had started chemo and radiation.
Christmas eve I saw her and found out she had DCIS with HER2/neu.
Which means she would have been eligible for the trial…!!!
She wants to see Dr. Czerniecki now after the fact. We, women and men, need to know our options. The doctors do not tell us all, we need to help each other and inform each other about what is out there.
I cannot stress it enough. By next year an estimated 1, 000 000 people will have been diagnosed with DCIS.
Please tell your friends to get the message out. The first 3 patients in the new trial have had amazing success. Do not keep this option from your friends and loved ones!!!
I know I am pushy about this fact, but in the case of our friend I should have been a lot pushier so she would have known…
I wish you all a happy, healthy and prosperous new year and please help to get us all closer to wiping out the threat of cancer!!!!!

Pennies in Action got the final approval as a 501 (c) (3) public charity

This is the best Christmas present. After almost 2 years we got our final papers from the IRS . We filed 4/28/08 and received the final approval 12/14/09. This means that our hands have been untied to start fundraising in a big way.
Thru the generosity of the Seifert family fund we had been able to start a term fund at University of Pennsylvania so we could start immediately our efforts to raise funds for cancer vaccine research. It all had to go thru the Trustees of the University but because of the term fund all moneys went directly to the research….
Now we are able to deal direct thru Pennies in Action.
The new trial is showing amazing results so far.
Pennies in Action wants to raise funds and awareness for a Immuno therapy center and a cancer think tank so that the brightest minds get together and eliminate the threat of cancer in the next decade. But I need every bodies help. This is a global threat and affects every body to some extent. I am the first one in my family to have had cancer and I had 2 kinds. So I felt first hand that no one is save.
If every body gives just a little we can do this.
Remember economic down turns are temporary, but the affects of cancer are permanent.
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I wish you all a Merry Christmas and Holiday season !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Some of the losses in skating since we got rid of school figures

It is 18 years since we eliminated figures in skating. I am always working on analyzing what we lost because of that. And how to put back into the grammar of skating to fill the void.
One of the major things is that the skating side is not getting educated anymore and the free-side is taking over to much.
In order to not change edge and have flats in turns you needed to stay properly over your hip. As we concentrated on the print it was a natural development. We always were told “ stand over the hip” Doing it hours a day it was inevitable to get a good amount of that.
Recently I watched a tape of Janet Lynn and it was amazing how controlled she was on the skating side. Which is partly the reason that she had such great run on the blade . As my coach Helmut Seibt always said the run of the blade is supreme to everything else… As Elvis Stojko put it “ The blade rules…”
As we took away the education of the print the blade made it seems the blade has lost its voice.
It is amazing how few skaters now have true blade control. Imagine a concert pianist having very little sense of touch in his or her fingers…
We lost accuracy, sense of symmetry , true flow during transitions and true sense of circle.
In my humble opinion all these things are contributing to all the injuries we are having in skating. When properly aligned over the skating hip, skating is low impact. If not it becomes very high impact and our hip knee and ankle joints are not able to endure the daily abuse…