Happy Anniversary to joanspear.com

This is the one year anniversary of http://www.joanspear.com! Just want to say that I still enjoy posting, I love your feedback and I appreciate all you readers who check in with my site regularly. My readership is consistently growing. Thank you to Josh for his encouragement. And viva the Lemon Cucumber! xo Joanie

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Josh’s Birthday Wish

I am so proud of Josh’s 25th birthday wish: for all his family and friends to donate towards building a well with charity: Water .  charity: water is a non-profit bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.

Imagine if you had to walk 5 miles to get a drink of  water.  Yet more than 1.1 billion people on the planet don’t have clean water. It’s hard to imagine what a billion people looks like really, but one in six might be easier. One in six people in our world don’t have access to the most basic of human needs. Something we can’t imagine going 12 hours without. 

Unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation cause 80% of all sickness and disease, and kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Many people in the developing world, usually women and children, walk more than three hours every day to fetch water that is likely to make them sick. Those hours are crucial, preventing many from working or attending school. Can you imagine spending all day to secure your drinking, bathing, cooking water? Really?

In the founder, Scott Harrison’s words: “For me, charity is practical. It’s sometimes easy, more often inconvenient, but always necessary. It’s the ability to use one’s position of influence, relative wealth and power to affect lives for the better. charity is singular and achievable. The dictionary defines charity as simply the act of giving voluntarily to those in need. It’s taken from the word “caritas,” or simply, love. In Colossians 3, the Bible instructs readers to “put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness.” Although I’m still not sure what that means, I love the idea. To wear charity.” I want to meet you, Scott!

Watch a video of Scott presenting charity: water

Watch this too.

Honor someone with a donation towards a well! 

Buy 7

 

I have lots of shopping bags in my car, in my mudroom, folded inside my backpack so I don’t have to take a plastic or paper bag from the store. Many of them are canvas and are durable but take up alot of space. I like to have some that can compress easily into a small space until needed. Check out Flip and Tumble’s colorful collection, cheaper the more you buy- get every color, buy for gifts, folds into a little ball, weighs next to nothing, useful. If you buy more than 7, it’s $7 each. Figures, it’s Josh’s post. 

VIA: Joshspear.com

Where the Wild Things Are

 

Josh says he can’t wait for this film- well after this trailer–neither can I.  Check it out.

Using Twitter to Plan Dinner

K, I watch Josh twitter day and night. Letting people know that now he is buying new shoes or boarding a plane or eating sushi. I think, “so, what, who cares besides his mom who always loves to know what her kids are up to?” Surprise, surprise. There are 1800 plus people who hang on every word he tweets and I can assure it isn’t rocket science that he’s writing about.

I mean, I truly want to know what’s in it for me to follow, be followed and post pithy clips of my brilliant daily life? So I’ve been reading and following some conversations that are interesting- mainly belonging to friends of Josh’s. He posted that I was “talking to myself” and encouraged a few friends to connect. Some did. Thanks, Josh. Haven’t yet figured out how to have a conversation but will do that.

But I have looked around and found some very interesting blogs and a great recipe for Sweet Potato Soup from the FeelGoodGuru! Check out her woowoo site. Silly me, I just blithely commented on the site that I’d be making this soup tonight- except I have yams not sweet potatoes and I’m going to use them instead.

So, here is what I did:  my adaptation of the recipe (which came out very nicely)- organic yams, 1/4 tsp salt while veggies sauteeing, and 2 tablespoons white miso blended in at the end. Tastes awesome. I added the miso and more salt because it’s the winter and I wanted to balance the cooling nature of the coconut and lime. Love the lime and ginger and coconut milk combo, very nourishing and fulfilling feeling. If someone didn’t have coconut milk I think it would be great with almond or soy milk, too. What do you think? Thanks, Moira!

Easy file sharing

Leave it to Josh to know a very way cool way to share files via his friend’s site: drop.io . So now, I can use this site to upload information for business or for friends and drop.io provides a place for retrieval for private viewing or you can even publish drops on your facebook page.

“Each drop is:

A private place for exchanging photos, video, audio, notes, docs, and more. Each is accessible only to those whom you tell exactly where to look.

No signup and no account. We don’t even ask for your email. Create as many drops as you want.”

Now no excuses for sharing music and photo’s from Thanksgiving, Micah!

Day in the Life of a Born Digital Human

A French blog,fubiz, just highlighted a stop-motion video by Micah! Some of the comments include what I suppose must be slang like cool and terrific- but read like: “epatant” and “bof”….He created the video “Stop-Motion Day in the Life of a Born Digital Human” for Josh’s presentation to an advertising forum on how people are “hyper-connected” today. You can view it here. And fyi fubiz music broadcasts interesting sounds.

Congrats and thanks to Micah.

Start Wearing Purple

For me, life is about creativity, authenticity and courage to self-express. So here are some self-expressed folks- including my son, Josh!

via: Yahoo