Category Archives: Links

7 Quick Takes: Crowdsourced Content

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7 Quick Takes

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What I’m doing and why I’m doing it. Daniel is off school for the next month and now that we’re back from my parents’ house, I’ve got him pretty much all day. My mother-in-law has stepped up and helped *A LOT* this week because I’m fighting stomach issues (which is meaning that I’m feeling more run down than usual and am napping a lot) but today, I had him pretty much all day so writing this post with insightful Quick Takes was just not going to happen.

So… I decided to take a page from Kelly of This Ain’t The Lyceum and crowdsource some content. I had three people give me questions that I’ll answer (and I’ll put one person’s two part question into two Quick Takes) and then I’ll give you two things I saw online that amused me. Sound like a plan?

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From Kelly of This Ain’t The Lyceum: Your feelings on Klondike bars? Absolutely neutral. I don’t think I’ve eaten one in years so I honestly can’t say what I would or wouldn’t do for one.

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From Beth Anne of Beth Anne’s Best: In honor of your 15 years of blogging, what site did you start blogging on? I started out hand-coding a web journal on Peacefulwaters.Org, my own domain, in July 2000 and used Microsoft Front Page to generate some of it. (I’ve been doing website stuff for 18 years so this wasn’t that weird.)

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From Beth Anne of Beth Anne’s Best: What sites have you used over the years? This is actually the second part of the question and I split it up because her question could honestly have been a post of its own. I did the hand-coding for a year and then did Livejournal for a bit, tried Grey Matter a few times, used Moveable Type for a few months, and then switched to WordPress’ predecessor b2. I fully switched over to WordPress in 2004.

::Meditatio:: itself has existed in pretty much unbroken form since 2003 when I switched to b2 and has been hosted on Grace-Filled.Net since 2005. I’ve imported all of the hand-coded stuff, the Livejournal entries, and one of the Grey Matter sections. I still need to import about 6 months or so of Grey Matter and Moveable Type which unfortunately has to be done by hand and it requires a working CD-ROM… which I currently do not have. (Laptops don’t like falling on hardwood floors. It’s under warranty but that would involve sending it to HP for weeks at a time.)

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From Jen (@Jentoinfinity): How many people have you met IRL from blogging? You can name them if you want or just a number. This is kind of a weird question because I’ve known some of my blogging friends since before they had blogs, as in the case of my BFF Rebecca who was my maid-of honor, is Daniel’s godmother, and whom I have known for 20+ years. As far as fellow people I’ve met because of my blog, I’d say 3? I met Ellen of Stranger in a Strange Land in 2002, Dawn of ladydusk in 2003, and Chris of Father Christopher (and formerly of SomethingUnderstood.Org) in 2004.

Related to this, I think one of the stranger things that has happened was standing in the receiving line at a church in Ponoka, Alberta where Jon was interviewing for an associate pastor position in 2009 and having someone come up to me and tell me that they love my blog. It turns out that they were talking about my Blogathon site but it gave me a shock for a few days because I keep pretty quiet about my real name on here.

**UPDATE** I also met Kym back in 2011. Sorry for missing you in my count!

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Something for which I really respect Sen. Lindsey Graham. So some of you might have seen the news about this yesterday:

This was Senator Graham’s response:

Stay classy, Senator!

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Finally, some lovely music. Here’s one of my favorite videos from The Piano Guys:

For more Quick Takes, visit Kelly at This Ain’t The Lyceum.

7 Quick Takes: Thank God It’s Almost Friday!

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7 Quick Takes

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Because I *TOTALLY* want to start a battle on here today! Seriously, who has natural births these days? It’s, like, so primitive of people. [/snark]

BabyCenter: Why no one should ever throw shade at c-sections

Seriously, I hope y’all can have the birth experience you want and if you didn’t for whatever reason, it doesn’t make you any less of a mama. So please, for the love of all things holy, stop whining about how c-sections are so crappy and unnecessary and going off on how natural birth is *SO* much superior. My c-section was the best birth experience possible: mama lived and baby lived. End of story.

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If you send a mom an email… Angie of The Jammie Girl had a delightful post about what happens if you send a mom an email. (It’s a parody of If You Give A Mouse A Cookie.)

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Getting Ella some wheels. There has been some crowdsourcing this week to try and get a sport wheelchair for the daughter of blogger Rebecca Frech. Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Texas has been being buttheaded about approving an appropriate wheelchair for Ella and so some bloggers decided to do something about it. Since Rebecca gave up cursing for Lent, people created an online swear jar for the purpose of raising the $$$$ for Ella’s chair. Blue Cross/Blue Shield has since relented (after a brief Twitter campaign) and is working with Rebecca but if you’d like to help out, you can go here.

Kelly of This Ain’t The Lyceum put together a positively *LOVELY* video on the subject (being more than familiar with “negotiating” these things):

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Update on the Lenten disciplines. I seriously almost cried yesterday morning because I had a late night on Tuesday night while working on taxes and had to be at Daniel’s school at 8 to meet with the school psychologist about some IEP-related things before heading to Bible study. A can of Coke would have been *REALLY* useful… but I promised Jesus not to consume any until April 5th at midnight. *grumbles* Instead, I stopped at the $tarbux inside one of the local grocery stores and got my iced vanilla latté with whole milk.

The offering up of my day on behalf of someone else has been a blessing as it’s allowing me to try and do something to benefit others even if I don’t have the time and resources to do it in person.

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Good customer service. I had to go to Staples on Monday for a new “binder of fun” because the one I use for education was getting too full. When I was checking out, I was having to get my debit card out one-handed because my other hand was holding on to Daniel. The assistant manager took it upon herself to talk to him and try to entertain him while I was doing this. I thanked her for this and she told me that when I come in, he will always be treated like a person.

If you’re in the La Verne area, please go patronize them. 🙂

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Plans for my 35th birthday. I turn 35 years old on May 19th and I decided to do a Promise Walk for Preeclampsia instead of getting a mid-life crisis tattoo. Details (and my SUPER-SECRET last name) are here.

And yes, I am *TOTALLY* taking a page from Kelly on this one. 😉

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Love. As I was leaving Bible study on Wednesday, one of the women called after me that she hadn’t received her hug. Given that this woman is 94 years old and reminds me so incredibly much of my grandma, I definitely raced back to hug her. She kissed my cheek and told me that she loved me.

My day was totally made. 🙂

For more Quick Takes, visit Kelly at This Ain’t The Lyceum.

7 Quick Takes: Ashtags, Simcha Fisher on Lent, and Ministry Links

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7 Quick Takes

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#Ashtag. Ignoring the naysayers, here is my #ashtag:

#ashtag

Not the best picture of me but it seemed wrong to do any photo-editing to make me appear like I wasn’t exhausted and my hair wasn’t standing on end after being in motion for about 9-10 hours at that point. There was also the fact that I was taking the pic in Daniel’s room with the lights off because I was trying to get my bear child (who was being a holy terror) to sleep.

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Lenten disciplines. For Lent, I’ve got the follow disciplines going:

[-] Giving up Coke.
[-] Taking on extra reading. (I’m using this).
[-] Kelly’s discipline for me which is offering up every day for someone including 5 “enemies”. I was already planning to pray for a different person daily as suggested by priest’s wife so this totally works.

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I heart Simcha Fisher. Girlfriend has two really good posts up about Lent here and here at the National Catholic Register.

Why do I love her so much? In March 2011 when I was dealing with a critically ill kid in the PICU at UC Davis Medical Center and wondering if I’d ever see my cats or my own bed again, she posted this. The idea of doing extracurricular work at my local Santaria club caused me to laugh so hard I was crying and caused nurses across the floor to congregate in Daniel’s PICU bay.

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More Lenten fun. My favorite Jesuit author, Fr. James Martin, linked up a video on his Twitter about Lent and showed various America Magazine staffers as well as Stephen Colbert talking about what they’ll be doing for Lent this year.

Oh… and for those familiar with his buddies telling him what to give up for the last 30 years, this year’s list is: sno-balls, wintergreen flavoring, snow peas, and quinoa.

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Understanding introverts. I think I saw this on Facebook but regardless, I think you need to read it. It’s about the things introverts would never tell you and it very perfectly describes me.

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A blog post that should be sent to every church looking for a pastor. One of our dearest colleagues from Montana shared this article on Facebook about when churches are looking for a pastor to bring in young families. It says everything I’ve wanted to tell people when they kvetch about how “young people don’t do ________” and they wonder why young families don’t go near their church with a ten foot pole.

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Promise Walk. I’m pondering the idea of doing a virtual walk for the Promise Walk this year as the closest one is 2 hours south and on a Sunday. I’ll let y’all know what I end up doing.

For more Quick Takes, visit Kelly at This Ain’t The Lyceum.

Day 3 of This Thing

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I missed yet another day of work so I could sleep and try to get rid of this freaking cold.Â? I have somewhat of a voice again but it’s pretty limited and I’m dealing with coughing fits every so often.Â? I’m wondering if I should have seen my doctor by now to make sure that this isn’t harming the sea monkey but I think I’m *probably* OK.

Heather of Dooce.Com is due 6 days before I am.Â? This making her site a little more interesting for me to compare what she’s going through to what I’m going through.

Hannah Im

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I discovered Hannah’s blog today while surfing on a few others and ended up reading all of her archives as well. It is really interesting to see what she has to say because she’s also a female seminary student and she’s done something that I am terrified of doing: leaving my comfort zone and going to a completely different culture. She’s living la vida South Korea (and has been for almost a year) and I’m terrified of moving on when Jon eventually seeks another call. What does that say about my faith in Christ?

She also has a really balanced view of social justice where it relates to the Gospel and our mission as Christians to spread the good news and in doing that, we also are to expose wrongs in the world and work to make them right. I admire the fact that she is speaking out on Darfur since I haven’t had the drive to do that.

Rate My Kitten

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Since site reminded me of Jen and her furballs, I decided it would be most appropriate to share it on her blog: Rate My Kitten. It’s a Hot-or-Not style site where people post cute pictures of their cats, and since it’s not powered by Hot-or-Not, no icky adware. And to be fair to the dog lovers, there is also Rate My Puppy. Both sites have loads of cuteness! 🙂