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The latest spin from the GOPis that women are being ‘brainwashed’ into thinking that there is a Republican war on women, and that, by the way, it is ‘scary’ and ‘unfair’ for the President to remind the Supreme Court that... http://www.amnottheonlyone.com/naked-republicanism-and-the-response-of-republican-women/

Work on Balance and Happiness
As those of you know who have seen the noticeable dearth of posts in the last year, I love my job, which is an emotionally exhausting but fulfilling job. And yet, I’ve found myself at the beginning of burnout several times in the last year. So what is someone... http://www.amnottheonlyone.com/balance-and-happiness-during-the-work-week/

Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.

Last Week’s Pay Forward

Before I talk to you about how awesome The Hunger Site and its affilliated sites are, first an update on last week’s pay forward:

Adelheide was able to get her immediate needs met and was even able to pay forward some of the money people sent her to another individual who had unexpected medical bills and needed a hand.

My sister Janet was able to get badly needed new pair of glasses, which will allow her to drive next week to an interview she has which potentially could solve her money problems once and for all.

Both of them asked me to extend a heartfelt ‘thank you’ to everyone who participated, and I’m going to add my own ‘thank you’ to theirs.

Thank you! (I’d put fancy flash curlicues here, but that would be obnoxious)

And Now, The Hunger Site!

And now, on to this week’s pay forward. I decided to highlight a site I have been aware of now for at least a dozen years: The Hunger Site. Formed in 1999, its concept is simple. Click on a button every day, and money is donated toward world hunger.

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Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.

I Pay Forward at the Grocery Store (randomly):

Today at the grocery store I waited (and waited) behind a very young couple who were carefully counting out WIC voucher foods and food stamps (this being the end of the month). In the end, they found they had to put back a couple of oranges, some strawberries, and some corn on the cob.

I asked their permission, then I paid for the extra items so that they could have them. It didn’t cost me a lot, just five bucks, and hopefully stretched their food a bit farther.  I asked this couple to do the same for someone else someday, when they can (yes, I have read The Magnificent Obsession, several times. Why do you ask?).

I try to pay forward whenever I can. For me, paying forward is an investment in the world I want to live in. Sometimes, like this time, it is an impulse. Other times, its along the lines of planned charitable giving. It’s an inherent part of the shared joy integral to my life.

Your Weekly Opportunity to Pay Forward:

Starting today, I am going to provide my readers with a regular feature every week, pointing out worthy causes for them to pay forward. There is never any obligation. If you don’t have the ability or inclination to help any particular person or cause I point you to, that’s fine. I would greatly appreciate you sharing this post, liking it on Facebook, or tweeting it, to find others who can help. The share buttons are up there at the top of the post. There you go!)

The first two people for pay forward are known to me (one intimately). They have both given me permission to ask for help on their behalf, and I thank you in advance for any help you can offer. 

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Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.

I was exhausted last night and didn’t get my post ready for today. Here is something interesting and useful about the empathic nature of society to tide you over until I get home from work tonight and finish my post on Wrath, the first of the (Christian) Deadly Sins.

I’m interested in your thoughts on his reasoning (RSA Animate has tons of thoughtful videos out there… I invite you to ‘waste’ a day wandering through them.)

Also, this:

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Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.

I was having a conversation about content with an old friend. ‘They say,‘ she said, ‘that websites should be focused on one narrow topic.’

So I  decided to build a website deliberately left as broad as possible within the general theme of living life fully and with compassion toward others and attention to the issues around us. You know, ‘shared joy’ and ‘shared pain’ and ‘shared life’. All that jazz. (Thanks again, Spider Robinson, for the inspiration.) Go contrarian me. My friend laughed, and then decided it was a good idea after all. 

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Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.

My sister is living with HIV.

I don’t remember when I got the call, perhaps six months or a year after my mother died, so in 2000, maybe even late 1999. I know that all the open wounds from Mom’s death hadn’t healed yet and none of us siblings were very close at that time.

She was crying. Actually, she was totally, utterly freaked out. Or maybe that was a later conversation, after the reality hit. She’d tested positive. There’d been a workplace accident, and she’d gotten blood in an open cut on her hand.  And now she had a deadly disease. And I was stunned, and devastated, and utterly helpless.

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Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.

To say I have mixed feelings about playing the lottery is to put it very mildly. I once watched a woman spend fifty dollars on lottery tickets in the middle of a very cold winter while she and her daughter were wearing clearly inadequate clothes for the weather. I’ve heard the snarky geek saying a thousand times ‘Lotteries are a tax on the mathematically challenged’.

And yet, every time there is a really big payout, I go buy a ticket. Just one. I always buy it at least a day before the drawing. And then I begin to daydream…

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Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.

‘Tis the season to make a wish list of gifts that you really, really wish someone would buy you because you would never spend your money on that for yourself. In the spirit of the season, here are a few things that I think are beautiful, adorable, or just plain cool:

Goes with anything, pretty, reminds me of the dance of life. I love jewelry. I don’t love fine jewelry, because I’m brutal on it and tend to lose or break it. But I love good costume jewelry and handmade beadwork.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cap’n Reynolds, Zoe and the rest. Great company for a winter day or two. Firefly just makes me feel good. And determined that good shows like this one get a good run, instead of a few measly episodes.

 

Klimt‘s Three Ages of Women. Just Lovely. I have a gallery of women’s images in in office at home, and this would be right at home there. Okay, ‘gallery’ may be too strong a word. ‘Collection of random art with female images that I almost can’t see through the clutter’ might be a better way of stating it.

Oh, and this. Oh my god! This. Unfortunately, this is the largest image they had on the site, but really: Walking around New Orleanson a food tour? I’m in! (Followed by some serious blues searching after dark? Magnificent!)

I am in love with the company that offers this tour, Xperience Days. They sell interesting experiences, everything from spa days to skydiving to driving a race car, and their packages start at under $100. There are a couple of local packages I intend to try very, very soon.

 What is on your wish list?

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Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.

I got a shock the other day when I discovered that despite being one of the older and easier ways of finding things on the web, more than half of regular internet users polled didn’t know what RSS was, let alone how to use RSS, and less than 20% use it regularly (and darn it, I can’t find the source that shocked me. Help please?)

How to Use RSS

RSS is really simple to use. In fact, two thirds of ‘RSS’ are ‘really simple’, and the whole thing is ‘really simple syndication’. You can even use it inside Facebook, though honestly I can’t recommend that any more, now that Facebook has decided that it knows better than you do which of your friends and pages you really want to see. (More on that later).

It’s a huge time saver, and available in mobile as well as large formats.

Imagine for a second that you can put together your own magazine of your favorite sites on the web, automatically updated for you every time there is a new post, and attractively arranged for you to read on your choice of dozens of different formats. There is no need to imagine – that’s what RSS is.

This is how to use RSS:

1. Choose a feed reader (that’s what you call the magazine). The most popular one is probably Google Reader, but there are lots of others out there, most of them free. Pick one that suits you and set up an account. I like Google Reader because I’m already signed in to Google most of the time anyway, can be adjusted by a ton of various browser extensions, and has built in a feature called ‘Reader Play‘ that makes it feel even more like a magazine.
2. Start adding feeds. Feeds are updates to your favorite blogs and websites that will now be automatically be delivered to your reader. Do you see that nifty orange and white icon up in the top right hand corner of my website? (The one that looks just like the one to the left, there.) That’s an RSS icon. Click on it, and it will invite you to add my feed to your reader, and give you choices as to which reader you use. A second click confirms your choice (it’ll navigate you away from here, so be sure to come back).Look for more feeds. Most websites have a feed, but not all of them are nice enough to make sure that their orange and white RSS icon is easy to find. So you can download extensions for Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome to make it easier.
3. Read RSS on your phone or tablet. I use an Android app called NewsRob on mine to read my Google Reader account, which is synced between my phone, my tablet, and my computer. It has a free version, but I like the benefits of the paid version enough to have upgraded. There are lots of others for Android and Iphone around as well.
4. A word of warning: If you use an RSS feed reader on your work computer, your IT department will see it as you browsing hundreds of websites, not one. You really don’t want to be in the position of explaining to your boss that you’re just skimming headlines looking for articles to read on your break (even if its true). I bet you can guess how I learned that one.

So why not Facebook? Don’t get me wrong. I like Facebook. I think, on balance, it’s more helpful than not despite some jerkishness on the part of Zuckerman et al. But Facebook started, in spring of 2012, to decide for you which of your friends and pages are valuable to you, on an algorithm that isn’t close to perfect. It had two purposes in this.

First, it was trying to ensure that you saw first the articles you wanted most to read – your closest friends, your favorite pages – but second, it was increasing revenue for itself.

It is now significantly more expensive for advertisers to use Facebok. It used to be an ‘organic’ way to discover new pages, where you just kind of ‘naturally’ picked them up. Now Facebook deliberately makes it harder for you to find new pages, and the owners of the pages need to pay Facebook for the privilege of making it easier to find them.

I don’t blame Facebook for wanting to make a buck. They’re not in it for charity, after all. But speaking as someone trying to get people to read my website, they are now a very expensive option, rather than an inexpensive one, to let people know about my site.

RSS doesn’t exactly advertise my website or anyone elses’, but it does make it really simple for people who already want to read it to find the new articles I post nearly every day. Really simple syndication – and yet most people who are on the web haven’t figured out how to use it on a regular basis.

Oh, and if you’re curious, my own RSS feed of other peoples’ stuff is fed to the left hand column on my site pages (‘below the fold’ a bit), listed as ‘blogroll’, and the most recent couple of articles are linked on my curated life page (which, unfortunately, is glitchy because of the app used to set it up. Looking for better. Help?). Feel free to add any or all of them to your feed. Happy reading!

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