Ann Smith died today around 12:40 in the morning.

Sunday had been a rough day for her - Dad could tell that the pain meds weren't doing much for her. After giving her another dose for the night and giving her a sip of water, Dad held her hand. She'd been twitching a lot and halucinating for the past week or so, so he had to pull her fingers apart, and she squeezed hard when he got his hand in there. He said he just felt the pressure go away.

I just read over the obituary that Dad must've typed up while Emily and I tried to get more sleep, and learned something. I knew my mom had been part of the Bicentennial Band & Chorus in high school, and toured Europe with them, but I never knew she'd been to Lichtenstein. My 10th grade History professor always made fun of it because it was just this tiny little dot of a country on the map.

While she worked at Alcoa Labs when we were little, she invented the packing process for things like yogurt. You know - how the lid is kind of melted to the cup just enough to seal it? My mom did that.

Emily and I figure that this is the end of 1000 Paper Wishes. We kind of slacked off counting in the past two weeks - once the pain med doses got high enough to make her start twitching and halucinating real bad. I'll look through the envelopes though and give one final thank-you list.

We'll still check the box once in a while. Maybe if we get seriously innundated or something, we'll come back. Thanks for your support, guys. I want to hang our first thousand at her funeral. s for everyone.

-Ben

--The Update--
On Monday, Emily and I were met with quite a surprise at the post office - 10 envelopes shoved into our tiny box! Once we counted them up, we had...

A crane and a very nice letter from *JeniOctavia (thank you!)
One from ~shadowbandit, along with a crane-tastic envelope!
Four from someone who signed a flower-shaped sticky note as Ellen.
One from a Deanna Houck in NY.
One from a Cathrine Janois (made by her neighbor boy).
One from someone in Gray Court, South Carolina whose name is on their crane, which is somewhere among the others.
And 60 from ~Maomao7!

HUGE thank-yous to everyone!

Some of the above people probably aren't on dA, since one of Dad's co-workers started an e-mail chain-letter about our project, but we'll thank them here anyways, just in case they ever see this page.

All of those cranes, plus a bunch more folded by ~madtipsy, ~hana-chan, ~neonoddity, our un-devious friend, myself and my sister, brought us up to 1000 cranes! That's 0.1% of our final goal!

Lately, Mom's been out of it a lot more, though...

Fortunately, =RockGirl1582 has taken us to the office! She braved the HR department to get a poster thing in the break room at her workplace approved, which is fantastic! We can't wait to see how it turns out! Hopefully, it'll rocket our project along!

Yes, I know I promised some advanced folding instructions last time, but I've been a bit busy lately. Perhaps after we get the first mobile made.

In other news, I'm starting to get a little confused. I'm pretty sure I've put everyone who has commented, watched or noted us on our devwatch, and I think I've got the affiliates straight, but I'm not sure. If you don't see yourself on our friends list or something else is up, let us know with a note, and I will straighten it out.

--------------------

--The Story--

1000 Paper Wishes is not a person - It's a project started by ~freerangepenguin and I, ~psychocow007.

At the end of the summer of 2003, our mother had surgery for what appeared to be an enlarged ovary. As our father told us later, when the doctors went in, they found the site riddled with cancerous tumors. Soon after, she spent almost two weeks in the Intensive Care Unit, drugged so far out of her mind that she was flickering in and out of consciousness and mumbling about the leaf men she saw crawling out of the walls to get her. That two weeks was the most healing the incision from that surgery ever did, as the chemotherapy drugs she went on soon afterwards kept it from ever closing right.

It's been almost three years now, and she's now been on every combination of chemotherapy drugs available. Some of them worked for a time, others just stopped the tumors from growing without shrinking them, but now she's grown tolerant to them all. She's gone through radiation, but to no avail, and now, all that's left is hospice. That's when they send you home and give you enough pain-killers to be comfortable during the time you have left.

--------------------

--The Mission--

The science of medicine has done all it can, so now we turn to you. I'm sure at least some of you have heard the fable behind the paper crane - If you fold 1,000 of them, the gods will be so pleased that they will grant you a wish. Add to that legend the idea of "bigger is better", and you have what 1,000 Paper Wishes is about. We want to gather a million cranes for our mother.

All we want you to do is fold a crane and send it to us. A crane folded out of a 6”x6” square fits nicely into a standard size business envelope when deflated and flattened. If you don't know how to fold a crane, we've posted instructions here. There's also an address label for you to put on your envelope! If you can't print it out though, here's the address:

1000 Paper Wishes
PO Box 164
Loganton, PA 17747

Also, don't forget to sign your crane!

We know that if the dA community pulls together on this one, we can have at least a million cranes in just a short time. Let’s see how many we can get!

--------------------

--Affiliates--
(send us a note if you want to be an affiliate!)

They just keep rolling in! ~hana-chan came over on Wednesday and brought the 176 cranes she had folded since Saturday, and ~madtipsy brought 55 more over yesterday, along with a couple huge potato chip boxes from her job. A lady our father works with caught wind of our project, and turned it into an e-mail chain letter, which so far has gotten us a crane from an old phys-ed teacher, two from another of our dad's co-workers and her husband, and a dozen from the special-ed students going to summer school at his workplace as well. Also in the mail today, we got another 20 white cranes from *Morisato-kun. With all of this, we've got 656 cranes so far! Dad has also hooked us up with some old fishing line, so we might take a break from folding tonight to string a few up.

Thanks so much to everyone who's sent in cranes!

The double-sided origami paper I've had sitting around for a while came with instructions on crane folding. Along with that was what looked like a little note hinting at the possibility of making two connected cranes from one rectangular sheet of paper. After some puzzling, I've figured it out and even taken it as far as making four connected cranes from one square of paper! I'll be posting some drawings and notes for the more advanced folders later on.

--------------------

-The Story-

1000 Paper Wishes is not a person - It's a project started by ~freerangepenguin and I, ~psychocow007.

At the end of the summer of 2003, our mother had surgery for what appeared to be an enlarged ovary. As our father told us later, when the doctors went in, they found the site riddled with cancerous tumors. Soon after, she spent almost two weeks in the Intensive Care Unit, drugged so far out of her mind that she was flickering in and out of consciousness and mumbling about the leaf men she saw crawling out of the walls to get her. That two weeks was the most healing the incision from that surgery ever did, as the chemotherapy drugs she went on soon afterwards kept it from ever closing right.

It's been almost three years now, and she's now been on every combination of chemotherapy drugs available. Some of them worked for a time, others just stopped the tumors from growing without shrinking them, but now she's grown tolerant to them all. She's gone through radiation, but to no avail, and now, all that's left is hospice. That's when they send you home and give you enough pain-killers to be comfortable during the time you have left.
--------------------

-The Mission-

The science of medicine has done all it can, so now we turn to you. I'm sure at least some of you have heard the fable behind the paper crane - If you fold 1,000 of them, the gods will be so pleased that they will grant you a wish. Add to that legend the idea of "bigger is better", and you have what 1,000 Paper Wishes is about. We want to gather a million cranes for our mother.

All we want you to do is fold a crane and send it to us. A crane folded out of a 6”x6” square fits nicely into a standard size business envelope when deflated and flattened. If you don't know how to fold a crane, we've posted instructions here. There's also an address label for you to put on your envelope! If you can't print it out though, here's the address:

1000 Paper Wishes
PO Box 164
Loganton, PA 17747

Also, don't forget to sign your crane!

We know that if the dA community pulls together on this one, we can have at least a million cranes in just a short time. Let’s see how many we can get!

--------------------

-Affiliates- (send us a note if you want to be an affiliate!)

Emily and I checked the post box today, and were surprised to already find a package there! Thanks, *Morisato-kun for the 20 cranes and the pretty envelope (not to mention the spiffy promotion on your dev page)! Those brought us up to 255, which is .0255 percent of our final goal. We're getting there!

Also, ~madtipsy, ~neonoddity and another friend of ours helped ~hana-chan and I fold somewhere around 50+ cranes on Saturday night. We need a bigger box! I was thinking of hitting the new Lowes in town and seeing if they'd be willing to give us a refrigerator box to put them in while we figure out how we're going to hang them.

--------------------

-The Story-

1000 Paper Wishes is not a person - It's a project started by ~freerangepenguin and I, ~psychocow007.

At the end of the summer of 2003, our mother had surgery for what appeared to be an enlarged ovary. As our father told us later, when the doctors went in, they found the site riddled with cancerous tumors. Soon after, she spent almost two weeks in the Intensive Care Unit, drugged so far out of her mind that she was flickering in and out of consciousness and mumbling about the leaf men she saw crawling out of the walls to get her. That two weeks was the most healing the incision from that surgery ever did, as the chemotherapy drugs she went on soon afterwards kept it from ever closing right.

It's been almost three years now, and she's now been on every combination of chemotherapy drugs available. Some of them worked for a time, others just stopped the tumors from growing without shrinking them, but now she's grown tolerant to them all. She's gone through radiation, but to no avail, and now, all that's left is hospice. That's when they send you home and give you enough pain-killers to be comfortable during the time you have left.
--------------------

-The Mission-

The science of medicine has done all it can, so now we turn to you. I'm sure at least some of you have heard the fable behind the paper crane - If you fold 1,000 of them, the gods will be so pleased that they will grant you a wish. Add to that legend the idea of "bigger is better", and you have what 1,000 Paper Wishes is about. We want to gather a million cranes for our mother.

All we want you to do is fold a crane and send it to us. A crane folded out of a 6”x6” square fits nicely into a standard size business envelope when deflated and flattened. If you don't know how to fold a crane, we've posted instructions here. There's also an address label for you to put on your envelope! If you can't print it out though, here's the address:

1000 Paper Wishes
PO Box 164
Loganton, PA 17747

Also, don't forget to sign your crane!

We know that if the dA community pulls together on this one, we can have at least a million cranes in just a short time. Let’s see how many we can get!