Category Archives: Blogging

People Making A Difference

The title of this month’s blog for We Are The World Blogfest is from the Christian Science Monitor’s online section on people who are working to make the world a better place. I go to this site often to find stories for my monthly posts. This month I am sharing a story about a non-profit organization in San Francisco called Miracle Messages. It was founded by Kevin Adler who was inspired to create his non-profit to help homeless people make contact with family members because of his late Uncle Mark who had been homeless for 30 years. The story “He helps homeless people reconnect with loved ones through video messages,” by Bailey Bischoff describes how he has been able to reunite 100 individuals with friends and family and helped some of them to secure stable housing. It is very touching to read some of their stories like Mr. Spires who had lost touch with his daughter when his wife moved away and had not seen her since she was 3 years old. Miracle Messages was able to locate the daughter and reunite them online.

Kevin Adler wants to eliminate the stigma surrounding homeless people.

“A big part of our work is reframing people who are homeless as someone’s somebody”…( Kevin Adler Christian Science Monitor)

He has a goal of reuniting 1 million people by 2023 and has a hotline set up, 800-MISS-YOU.

Miracle Messages.org for more information on this organization.

We Are The World Blogfest, #WATWB, “seeks to promote positive news. There are many an oasis of love and light out there, stories that show compassion and the resilience of the human spirit. Sharing these stories increases our awareness of hope in our increasingly dark world.”

Cohosts for this month’s #WATWB: Shilpa Garg, Inderpreet Kaur Uppal, Peter Nena, Andrea Michaels , Damyanti Biswas.

Click on the We Are The World Blogfest link if you would like to participate.

Featured image Pink Perfection Camellia by Trish Hartmann on Flickr.

Hollow And Empty Spaces

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My Echeveria plant has a hollow space in the center under its leaves but it is not empty inside there. Some birds have chosen to build a nest in the interior. I saw one bird land and hop over to the side of the plant, look around for anyone watching, then hop inside the opening. I am afraid to be seen hanging around near the Echeveria because I worry I will scare the birds away and the nest will be abandoned. Recently made a visit to Joshua Tree National Park, with my daughter, and enjoyed many different views empty of people but not empty of interesting rock formations, Joshua trees, and different varieties of cacti like ocotillo, cholla, and others whose names are unknown to me. The rock formations gave the impression of prehistoric times, cavemen with their blocks of stone, Fred Flintstone at work in his quarry.

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According to the National Park Service post about the geological formations the stones are monzogranite and were formed over 100 million years ago.

Short Video about Rock Formation at Joshua Tree

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is hosted by Linda G Hill. Prompt for today empty/hollow.

Bird And Rabbit Sightings

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“Here comes Peter Cottontail’

Hopping down the bunny trail..”

We have a rabbit visitor in our back yard again mooching off our greenery. I completely support his eating the wild grass and Sorrell but I get worried when he starts nibbling on my Wooly Thyme ground cover. I don’t mean to be gruff but it is just starting to come in full and I do not want it trimmed by rabbit teeth. They eat it down to the roots and that’s just not being neighborly in my view. I wanted to catch his photo but I am having a hard time with the new cell phone camera. Not as user-friendly. I consider it user-friendly if I can push a button and it takes the photo. This one is not cooperating with me yet. There were some good shots I missed while I was trying to get it to work. You have to take my word for it but the rabbit was up on his hind legs looking at me who was looking at him with my cell phone.

I do have a small bird’s nest inside the Echeverria plant. I think it has 4 small spotted eggs. I confirmed it by peaking inside today but I startled the little chickadee out of the nest. I hope it comes back. Need to steer clear of that plant for a few days. I think the bird was trying to divert my attention from the nest by hopping around the yard tweeting and twittering at me. A good future photo may be of the nest after it’s no longer in use so I don’t caws any more disturbance said the crows.

I just checked my cell phone photo gallery and guess what? I did get capture a photo of the rabbit but I wish I could have zoomed in more.

Rabbit in planter, need to zoom in

Wooly Thyme coming in nicely

Wild Sorrell and grasses

Blue Sage and Cranberry Sage

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is hosted by Linda G Hill. Today’s prompt: Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “on the farm.” Find a word that has a farm animal sound in it, i.e. sMOOth, and use it in your post. Bonus points if you include three or more.

Farm animal words; moo, ruff, neigh, tweet, twitter, caw. Ok, caws could be questionable. 😉

‘Here Comes Peter Cottontail’ song by Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins.

Women Of Letters

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In the Regency Period of England, when Jane Austen was writing, people wrote with quill pens and ink. Good penmanship was important. The quill pens were made from bird feathers, usually goose or swan, with sharpened tips to be dipped in an inkwell. The ink was applied to the paper with light pressure. It must have taken a lot of practice to get it right. Jane Austen published her books anonymously because it was not acceptable for women to be writers in her time.

Glad that women can write in their own names nowadays.

Jane Austen writing sample via Wikimedia.org

It would’ve been wonderful to receive a letter from Jane. 🙂

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is hosted by Linda G Hill. Today’s prompt ‘letter’. Use it in your post or theme your post on any meaning of the word “letter.”

Writing Eclectic For Fun

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Thinking about my blog and writing and I have come to the conclusion that in the present I write for self-expression and creativity. I do not have professional writing goals. I write about different topics that interest and inspire me. I create flash fiction and microfiction stories. I do consider myself a writer, maybe with a small ‘w’. And that’s ok. I am a work in progress.

Insecure Writers Support Group #IWSG . Cohosts for May 2 posting of the IWSG are E.M.A. Timar, J. Q. Rose, C.Lee McKenzie, and Raimey Gallant!

Featured image by Natassa64 on Pixabay.com

Yard Birds

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Amateur backyard birdwatchers my husband and I. We have noticed a little bird on our patio the past couple of days. It seemed pretty bold coming up to perch on our patio table chairs and tweeting its head off at us. It was making quite a ruckus this morning. I may have discovered why. I saw a pair of birds flying back and forth from the large Echeveria plant near the edge of our patio with pieces of wild grass in their beaks. Are they building a nest inside the plant? Is the bird on our patio standing guard?

Our little lookout could be a chickadee because he fits the discriptions with a black head. The sound he was making at us was like that warning alarm sound you hear in the last part of the little video above. Why are you sending up the alarm? We were minding our own business inside our kitchen when you happened to spot us.

I read that in California you are called the Chestnut-backed Chickadee.

Chestnut-backed Chickadee by VJ Anderson

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is hosted by Linda G Hill. Today’s prompt is ‘Why/Y.’ Chickadee video by LesleytheBirdNerd on You Tube.

What’s The Matter With Happy Endings

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I like happy endings to stories. I like to have things come out right in the end. You might think I am pretty naive. That is not real life you say. It is more important and worthwhile, even great writing, to tell it like it is. I can read the newspaper if I want stories about all the bad in the world. It is satisfying to have things work out positively. It gives us hope about life and the possibility of good in the world.

Once a month I participate in the We Are The World Blogfest sharing positive stories about people making a positive impact in the world. Seems like you have to search through the news nowadays to find these stories. One source I have is Gratefulness.org. and their monthly Gratefulness News. In it, I found a post about community health workers in Kenya who bring healthcare access to impoverished and remote areas, “Meet the ‘backpack midwife’ bringing healthcare for all.” Phillips Africa is the company that developed the backpack and is “working with local government, Philips is developing a number of community life centres to support community health workers and midwives equipped with these hi-tech backpacks.”

This story reminds me of the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS) of the 1930s, founded by Mary Breckinridge a public health nurse and midwife, in the state of Kentucky in the United States. Nurse midwives brought obstetric care to women in Appalachia by horseback, their supplies in saddlebags.

“The nurse-midwife carried all of these materials in her saddlebags because she was usually far from both her outpost center and the small FNS hospital; she had to be prepared for whatever she found. With the help of the equipment in those saddlebags, FNS nurse-midwives lost astoundingly few mothers. FNS was a great success by any measure….Kentucky, the birthplace of American nurse-midwifery, now houses Frontier Nursing University, which has provided graduate education to nurse-midwives (and more recently, nurse practitioners) since 1939. This university combines distance education and clinical work in the student’s own community to educate a significant percentage of American nurse-midwives.”-Midwives on Horseback: Saddlebags and Science

Check out the complete story by Dr. Laura Ettinger from the Smithsonian “Stories from the National Museum of American History.”

History of Frontier Nursing University with some great photos.

Mary Breckinridge

Featured image ‘Crepuscular rays in Golden Gate Park’ by Brocken Inaglory via Wikimedia.org

We Are The World Blogfest #WATWB cohosts for this month are: Shilpa Garg, Dan Antion, Simon Falk, Michelle Wallace , Mary Giese

Notes Tied On The Sagebrush

Writing About Life