The birth of a new blog...

I found the inspiration to finally get around to setting up a blog in a roundabout sort of way...

I've been participating in microloans via Kiva.org for the past year and have found it a very rewarding part of my charitable portfolio. These international microloans are a very positive way to help individuals in other countries by giving a hand up rather than just a handout (both have their place). It is really neat to be able to pick which loan(s) I want to contribute toward, see the money go to that individual, and see it repaid and available for another use.

One of features of kiva.org is that individuals contributing to a loan can elect to have profiles shown to other loaners and optionally provide a web link to their own website. So sometimes it is interesting to see where other kiva participants are coming from (very cool to see the wide variety of backgrounds, occupations, resident countries, etc).

I ran into one fellow participant's web site blog listing on kiva a while back: amber365.blogspot.com . On Amber's blog she says that she is attempting to do something new every day for 365 days -- quite an ambition -- it is interesting to see what she comes up with to try in her posts!

Somehow I found the idea of that inspiring, not that I plan to do something new every day... But it was a good reminder and excellent example of trying to live and experience life rather that just falling into autopilot mode which is sooo easy to do sometimes.

So anyway, that kicked me into gear to try a few new things (I tend to do that anyway) and also get around to setting up and exploring some new concepts to me like keeping a blog (I tend to put off some things on my to do someday list like this).

This also led me to listing a few DVD, book, audio book, music suggestions on the blog via Amazon.com's associate referral program which is another thing I hoped to do someday via part of my personal web site. If you click on one of my suggestions and then choose to add it to your amazon cart and purchase it (no price penalty), then they give me a whopping 4% of the purchase for the recommendation/referral. I always appreciated seeing other people's recommendations on such things and hope you find some of mine helpful as well. Amazon's associate referral program is free and you might consider looking into to help share some of your own recommendations with the rest of us.

I found the blogspot.com setup to be amazingly straightforward to setup and start using.

Enough playing on the computer for now, time to get ready for Ted and Barb's annual Christmas / Holiday party tonight. yes, yes, I know it is January 12th... It is a long story, but the short version is that sometime back, due to a schedule conflict, they moved their big annual December party to January and all of their guests overwhelmingly liked having it in January since nobody had conflicting parties, guests, shopping, travel, or other conflicts... So it stuck, and now their annual Chili and Eggnog Christmas party is always held early in January!