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Check out the links to some articles I thought you might be interested in:

Elderly Wish Foundation grants a wish to a terminally-ill woman.

HALO Animal Shelter
director Joyce Sanderson's heart and home for all stray and rescued dogs.

Happy Reading!

Cheerful Giving

Children have a right to be normal and to feel normal, and celebrating a birthday is a normal part of childhood. Cheerful Givers birthday bags give children living in a very tumultuous time a chance to stop and focus on something positive.-- Reyne Branchaud-Linsk,Executive Director,Dakota Woodlands Shelter

Robin Maynard and her husband, Kevin, came to stack an home for disadvantaged children with 12 birthday bags. Nothing earth shaking. 12 birthday bags created with love in the basement of a house by a couple who wanted to make a difference. 12 birthday bags dropped off at Trinity Mission on a Sunday night. 12 birthday bags igniting a spark that would provide warmth for thousands.

Cheerful Givers has given out 166,000 goodie bags since 1994. Filled with crayons, candy, stuffed toys, and other goodies a child's heart desires, these bags have given out joy to so many children.

The nice thing is, you can set up your own Cheerful Givers event. Just take pictures and let Cheerful Givers know what you did so they can include include your event in their count. Check out ther activities and their blog here and find out how you can find your own inspiration.

Winter Garden Crops

Though the heat wave damaged our summer crops in the backyard, take a look at our winter garden. We have leeks, sugar peas, spinach and beautiful lettuce--all organic, no fertilizers nor pesticides, just tender loving care and kitchen scrap compost. We watch out for slugs in the morning and we have been lucky. Our still sparse harvest has been quite sweet, nothing you can buy in the produce section in the supermarket. Sometimes, I eat it off the plant like the Manic Organic. He plants his own food and prepares it in a gourmet way that will make you envious. He prepared a basil-tomato salad, of course from his harvest. But to top that, he got local goat cheese made by his neighbor. Yum!







So far, we have enjoyed a fresh and crunchy salad, a spinach saute, leeks for pork teriyaki. We also the wilt the leeks in butter as a side dish. And who knew that ther flowers are edible and great in a salad? The sugar snap peas are sparse, I just eat them off fresh from the vine. That crunch is unforgettable!

Once you have grown and eaten your own food, it is hard to settle for supermarket food that travels many miles and passes through many hands before it gets to your table. It makes you wonder what the farms injected into those fruits and veggies before it got to your table, doesn't it?

John Woods' Room to Read

In 1999, John Wood, then 35 and Microsoft's No. 2 in China, journeyed to Nepal with some 3,000 books in tow—not to read on vacation but to give to a school that could not afford any. The project was a joint venture between Wood and Dinesh Prasad Shrestha, a rural-aid worker in Kathmandu whom the IT executive had met earlier. It planted an idea. "We should get serious about this," Shrestha told Wood. "We should be more organized and do this properly."

Read more in Time Asia's article Asian Heroes.

John Woods: my hero.

How shall we change the world today?