I mentioned in a recent post that you would be able to follow me on Twitter as I was traveling. Well…that hasn’t really worked out as planned. I didn’t realize when I wrote that post that Twitter, Facebook, and several other social media sites are now blocked in mainland China. I was able to connect for a short time this morning with Tweetdeck, but I seem to be cut off from Twitter once again. Blogger is supposed to be blocked here as well, and I wasn’t able to connect to it at all until today, so hopefully this post will actually go through.

Since I finally had a good internet connection today, I started checking out some of the blogs in my feed reader that I haven’t read since early last week. As I scrolled down, I was saddened to learn that Susan Nelson died last week after a long battle with breast cancer. For those of you who don’t know, Susan was the wife of Elden Nelson, aka “Fat Cyclist”. Elden’s blog was one of the first ones that I started reading many years ago and it certainly served as an inspiration for me to start my own. Other good tributes have already been written, so I will keep this post short. If you haven’t already done so though, I want to encourage you to click over to Elden’s blog and leave a comment to let him know that you are thinking of him and his family. While you are there, consider making a donation in Susan’s memory to the Team Fatty Livestrong team. It is certainly not too late. As Elden said in a recent post, “Susan’s part in the battle is over, but she didn’t lose. She led the charge. She showed the rest of us how to fight: with determination, focus, creativity, and outrageous endurance. Now it’s up to the rest of us to Fight Like Susan.“