The what?
Woke up this morning after a great fundraising shindig - we put on a great party
to benefit my workplace last night. I should say my colleagues did - I’m not the party planner, that honor goes to my talented coworker & boss, with the help of some great board members. I was quite impressed - it was actually a really nice event.
Problem is, a couple of hours after I woke up I realized I had the flu. I’m just glad it wasn’t yesterday. It’s been a while since I had the flu, I forgot how craptacular it really is. I’m pretty worn down.
Aside from sleeping, I’ve just been sitting here crocheting - I find that you can do that without too much nausea. I put the Share A Square blocks up on the wall to organize the colors and have started stitching now that I’m done with black borders. I wasn’t done with borders when I took the picture. So close! A finished project!
What does it say that my closest-to-done project was done mostly by others?
Very Tasty
I appear to veer wildly from healthy to sugary in my cravings. You’ll see. But they’re both really very tasty.
On the healthy side, these lowfat muffins are the only bran muffins I’ve ever liked or will even consider eating. I hate bran, and I love these. I make a double batch of muffins and we eat them for breakfast all week. I replace the 1 cup of blueberries with 3/4 cup blueberries and 3/4 cup cranberries - because more berries is always better. Recipe from Allrecipes, which has an awesome RSS feed, recipe box and shopping list options.
Jeff likes his with butter. 
On the sugary side, I got a huge craving for banana pudding. Not the plastic pudding in plastic cups, but real, warm cooked pudding and homemade meringue baked with ‘Nilla wafers. This is, I’m told, a southern thang - about that I do not know, but I do know my favorite recipe is on a site called Texas Recipes Online. Also a grand place for barbeque flavors, peach fixins and vittles with jalapenos, too (sorry, I’ll stuff my Texan back in there).
The funniest thing about this recipe is the author’s attitude. She cuts that ol’ high-falutin’ tiramisu down to size, tells you that if you don’t have a 9×9 pan, you really ought to and warns you not to get carried away snacking on the vanilla wafers. But her banana pudding is awesome.
Crafting for Charity: Etsy for Charity Folks
I can’t say it enough, but there are really a lot of people out there interested in doing for others in a creative and otherwise generous fashion. Which is great! For example:
In January I posted about the Etsy for Charity folks, a street team that supports a variety of charities, chosen monthly. What I didn’t know (I should really do a Google search on things before hitting post) is that they have their very own social network through Ning. The Etsy for Charity Social Network has 67 members participating right now, and is of course connected to the Etsy shop that does the actual donations.What a great way to form community with people who are like-minded!
What does this social site offer? Well,
- you can get Etsy for Charity badges for your site like the one above and promote their work,
- you can get more information about their charity of the month (in February it’s Farm Sanctuary and Make It Right in New Orleans, and March will be Sightsavers International). Also see their Charity of the Month blog! aaand,
- you can link to their blog, which talks about what they’re doing and features some of the group memers, and also!
- you can get to know the people who donate their wares or link to the gallery of members. You can also get to know the folks that support these charity-minded folks.
I saw some familiar faces there - for example, Etsy for Animals is an advertiser. In fact, one of the organizers of Etsy for Charity runs Etsy for Animals!
I got to know some new folks there, like this Etsy shop called Creations4Causes. This shop is made up of a family of artists who donate 15% of their proceeds to rotating charities. They are a very active part of this network, and also do some of the posting to the Etsy for Charity blog, such as featuring members.
More new folks and connections: the Etsy for Charity network is run by Caged Bird Sings, with her coworkers/helpers- UniqueGrabs and Mvegan5 (who also runs Etsy for Animals).
