So, I’ve been chipping away at my student debt. The sales from my two PODs, Cafepress and Zazzle, helped a bit. Of course, I will likely end up paying additional taxes on the wee bit of income, but such is life.

This blog is going to change over the course of the next few month. I am starting on a new adventure with trying to add income to my wallet to help pay down my student debt faster. I’ve been reading up on running small businesses, tax regulations for small business, and all kinds of fascinating and enlightening things on running blog for fun AND profit.

From what I’ve seen online there are several tracks, the first is some pretty blatant THIS BLOG IS ABOUT MAKING MONEY BY BLOGGING blogs out there. More power to them, so say I. Not really my cup of tea. There are also the Mommy blogs that simply scream OMG I LOVE MY KIDS AND CLEANING HOUSE SO HARD but I fear that is also not for me. (You’d agree too, if you’d seen the state of un-cleanliness in my current abode) But I am learning a lot from reading their awesome and informative posts.

One of the things I have up my sleeve is a new blog for re-enactors and living historians called All the Times Past. To do this, I will need to move web hosting servers as the place I am currently using is just a tad too expensive now that I am moving from hobby for-fun to a small business model. This makes me sad, because I love my host as they are so responsive with supporting my frequent issues and questions.

The next few months will bring a new hosting service, a fun-filled blog design and testing, and pulling a whole bunch of content together. I figure to have it up and running by July. Yay! Something new and exciting and challenging, and I am sure…. rewarding.

This idea was sparked when my Dear Husband casually remarked that it would be awesome if we could get paid to visit other re-enactor groups in Europe. MMMmmm. What a clever clever man! So while I am sure there will be other benefits from running a blog for re-enactors and living historians, meeting new people around the world is one of my center-of-the-matter goals.

BENEFITING: PROVIDENCE PORTLAND MEDICAL FOUNDATION

EVENT: Hood & Portland To Coast – Providence Cancer Center

EVENT DATE: AUG 22, 2014

DAYS TO GO: 273

“There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community.”

M. Scott Peck

Define your community – An outreach program is as much an opportunity for you to learn about your community as it is for the community to learn about earthquake and tsunami preparation. Begin by understanding what makes your community unique, what are its strengths, and weaknesses. This portion of your program will enable you to identify leaders that will make your program a success.

Community can be anything from a single hospital or school to an entire county or region. Some will have defined organizational structures and others will be less structured. You can leverage the various advantages from either system,

Example: “Small regional hospital in mid-sized town”

In order to function well and foster a “sense of community”, a few traits need to be considered.

• People feel like they belong to the community
• People believe they can influence the community
• People are integrated into the community
• The community fulfills a need of the people
• There is a shared emotional connection to the community.

Spend some time defining and learning about your community and then write up as detailed summary as possible. Include points that address the concerns above. Since the goal of an outreach program is to influence behavior, in this case, to create action in the public leading to earthquake and tsunami preparedness. There are many ways to listen to a community hopes, needs, priorities, and resources. Some involve surveys, extensive interviews, mapping technologies, and complex processes. Those detailed processes are vital for community-wide visioning and strategic planning for public outreach and education. And while these resource-heavy strategies are good, you can also accomplish this process with much fewer resources. Anything that you can do to stimulate dialogue and community-self- reflection will help you to better define your outreach program.

Geographic communities: These communities are based on place or location. They can be a neighborhood, a town, a city, and state, a country, a planet, or a universe.

Communities of culture: These communities are based on interests, whether they are hobbies, special needs, sub-cultures, or arts.

Community organizations: These communities range from informal kinship groups to civic organizations to faith based groups to political organizations.

Keep an eye on this site for more information as I pull together the many strands of my thoughts and actions.

I am finally making the change to a much more dynamic site. Yeah, I know. I’ve been on the interwebs since the early day back when it was still called the world wide web and people knew what “http” stood for. But I’m not an early adopter by nature, so I’m a tad late to this bloggin thing.

On these pages, you’ll find an eclectic mix of my various endeavors, odd bits of what ever amuses me or strikes my fancy.