This evening Mr Bea ran as part of his work team in the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge. It was a 5.6km run which benefits various charities. [There was going to be a photo here but the computer is being icky.] Seems to be the week for it - Melissa's March of Dimes is coming up soon, and I believe you can still donate. My recent physical exercise, on the other hand, consisted of a turn on the treadmill in our apartment's fitness room, inspired by Serenity. I am ashamed to say I felt it the next day. I need to get out more.

You'll be pleased to know I put a good deal more effort into this week's Good Deed Challenge, although I did change the rules a bit. The challenge was to write a letter to a business praising an employee, but I couldn't think of anyone in particular, and I sort of did a similar thing a few weeks ago. Instead, I wrote an email to my younger sister, M.

Let me tell you a story about my younger sister, M. You may remember I was recently upset with my mother because I'd sent her an email telling her what was going on with Jester, and heard no reply after several days. Shortly after we sorted it out, and as I was instant-messaging with M, a bunch of flowers arrived at our door*.

"Some flowers just arrived," I typed.

"Who are they from?"

"They're from you guys. Cheers for that, hey**."

"Oh yeah, I think I heard our mother say something about flowers, now you mention it. I'll tell her you said cheers."

I then sat down and emailed a thankyou note to my mum. "Good, you got them," she replied. "I hope you like them. It was M's suggestion - she arranged it all."

And not only that. She visited me every day when I was in hospital with OHSS. She asks about our IVF at just the right intervals. She's looking after our beloved dog (who is still worryingly unwell) and arranging top veterinary care. She calms our mother, and encourages her to say and do the right things, at the right time. She also chatters incessantly, doesn't have a proper sense of my privacy, borrows my clothes and shoes without asking even if they don't fit her properly and returns them bent out of shape or not at all, ditto my CDs, and generally gets up my nose and on my goat***. But I left out those last bits in the email, having addressed them fruitlessly on many previous occasions.

I don't think I've ever truly realised how good she is to me, and I've certainly never told her. So M, as much as it pains me to break the family code by saying it, this deed's for you.

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If you've completed your Good Deed Challenge, post it in the comments, or point us to your blog post about it.

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*Yes, I am going for the Most Hyperlinks To Your Own Archives In One Post record.

**Statements like "cheers for that hey" are expressions of the highest order of gratitude in our family.

***Couldn't resist the mental image of having my sister, on a goat, up my nose.