“The RoseBouquet”

Along with my regular busy agenda, I’ve been taking some small blocks of time - wherever I can pinch them out, to do some research for a client/friend in Uganda. It seems banking is not as advanced there as in our North American world, and it is difficult to set things up on his website so that people can make donations to him and his ministry directly. PayPal allows him to send money but not to receive any.

I haven’t kept a journal of all that I’ve been learning, but I’m discovering that I probably have the best banking options that are available. I’m ruling out some and narrowing down the possibilities, but there is still the matter of testing them to see which would work. The processor programs I hope may work are Alert Pay and Google Checkout. But we still need an international bank and a card.

If you have any experience with a payment processing program, or a bank account, or a no fees debit or credit card that should work for dear Isaac - I’d be happy to hear from you.

He and his family, and also their ministry are in real financial need. It seems sensible to get some form of accepting donations up on his website. This adds some urgency to all this research.

I had a phone call last night from the brother of a dear Pen Pal of mine. I have profiled Louise before, but I believe I will take time to review my memories of her again today in the article below.

It’s been a struggle to find time in my busy agendas to do a little monthly chore. Mainly because it has become a bigger one with more and more websites to look after. That has been the matter of checking the STATs to see how many visitors come to each site, and how long they stay and what pages are most popular with them.

I used to fit it all into a couple of hours work on a slack night when I didn’t have so much to do for my clients, but now each evening is committed to a specific project or client and this year I’ve just been falling farther and father behind. Back in July I vowed that I’d take time for this on Wed. mornings when I usually do computer repair kind of projects before the staff prayer meeting. However, it seems each week other things were more urgent - so I still wasn’t getting to it.

Some clients like to have some notes about their site’s STATs when I send their invoice at the end of the month. That motivates me to get a few done.

Last week I got some done on Wednesday morning, but decided that it might work better if I just made a rule to check two sites’ STATs before I start answering emails in the afternoon. That way I should be able to make the rounds each month with less pressure.

Well, I have just two sites’ STATs to check this afternoon and I’m all caught up! Imagine that. Not only for last month, but for all the intervening months that I had missed, - like since April!

There’s just one hitch. It’s when I’m checking STATs that I often catch little things that need maintenance or repairs, like email addresses bogged down with bounced messages, (like yesterday, which turned into a 5-6 hour job to clean up the mess). Sometimes I spot bad links that need fixing. Hopefully by catching problems when they are few and small, will not add too much to my workload.

I mention this because it reminds me of the value of assigning a regular block of time for the things that are important for us. If we do, they get done and we have a clear conscience. If not, we tend to get overwhelmed. Then nothing, not even the work we love, is fun any more.

It has brought the corners of my mouth down to see how my neglected sites are dropping in the STATs. (sigh!) Now how can I make time for them?

Some good friends in South Africa (whom I’ve never met in person) have been telling me about a business venture that is paying off well for them. However, it was limited to people in their country until just recently. Joy sent me the link right away to check out.

Unfortunately, I’m still always somewhat behind in dealing with incoming emails. But I got a look at it last week, and late Sunday night explored the site some more. They have a free trial period so that people can check it out, and it looks like this is a sensible plan that will work out well for many friends.

The essence of it centers around motivational material that is sent out on a daily basis. I normally see that kind of stuff with caution, for I notice that many people look to such things instead of putting their faith and confidence in God, where I personally like to place my priorities. I like to be consistent with my theology.

However, the founder seems to have a Christian background, and most of the stuff can be helpful. I do agree that we need to set goals and discipline ourselves, and that our attitudes will make a world of a difference as to what we can accomplish.

So, with the precaution not to check your mind and heart at the door when you read “motivational” pep-talks I recommend that you check it out. See if it makes sense to you. Be Motivated Today

Another thing. Would you participate in a little quick survey?

Here at the mission we’ve had a debate this morning about whether it is better in printed materials like our newsletter, to refer readers to the website with;
a.) a link to the site and a description of what link to click on
b.) a complete url link for them to type in to get directly to that page.

Now, you are reading this on your computer. So you may be used to links in an email that you click which take you directly to the page you should go to. But if you were reading in a magazine or printed document and found a reference to a website, which would you prefer?

a.) a description of how to find the link on the home page to get there ie. WesternTractMission.org and look for the link to the new calendar for 2011.

or -
b.) the full URL like this; WesternTractMission.org/Signs/order-Faithfulness-Calendar.shtml

To participate in this survey, either register so you can leave a comment, or go to my contact form and put A, or put B, into the comment area.

If you have other thoughts and opinions to contribute, just write what you think on this topic. (Right now Joe is holding up the printing of the last pages of Reflections because of this. I have my opinion and he has his. I’m really curious to know which is best).

First of all, thanks for the various birthday greetings I have received since last week’s issue. There are still cards coming in the mail, so my birthday season is not over yet.

It occurs to me that I have been getting new web pages up on a number of sites, and I should give you a chance to check them out. There just might be something to appeal to you.

The newest client site up is, Spanish Evangelical Resources’ at www.recursos-evangelicos.org It has several pages although not all have a Spanish counter-part yet.

Here’s some others;
Manna for Youth

Generosity-Alive.org/Worthy/Gogo-Olive.shtml
(a new guest of the month initiative that uses a craft to make money)

MHSS.sk.ca
has new additions and updates in the book lists, obituary indexes, events page, and more pages of photos of churches in the Saskatchewan Valley area, linked from this index

WesternTractMission.org/Signs/Faithfulness Calendar

It was a good thing that last week I had cleared my evenings through Wednesday, so I could attend the missions conference in the town of Waldheim (also about 40 minutes drive north). That meant I wasn’t working at home in the evenings, but I was still struggling to solve my problem of no ethernet connection at home. I called my ISP twice and the fellows assured me that the modem was fine. It had to be a problem in my software.

I applied all my resourcefulness at problem-solving, including bringing home a different computer from the office, installing a newer operating system, and though the computers would work at the office, they balked when they were hooked up at home.

On Thursday after 5, I went shopping for birthday gifts for Kathy, and also stopped at a store that carries internet modems. I explained my problem there, and they said simply, “bring in your old one and take home a newer one. In fact, you can upgrade to the 2wire modem for no extra charge.”

Ah-ha! That’s the kind I have at the office. So I gladly brought the old Westell in on Friday before I headed out to visit Kathy, and picked up the new kit. But then I spent all of Friday evening struggling to get it set up right. If it looked like it was about to work, then my phone went dead.

Finally I figured out how to use the cell phone that had been loaned to me and dialed up Sasktel again. The man promised to send a techie out on Saturday. You know what? It took that man less than 15 minutes to discover that I had a short in the phone jack on the wall under my desk. No wonder I hadn’t been able to get online! He fixed that, and now I have a fine high speed connection at home, and can even plug in up to four computers at once, if I wish!

Problem-solving takes perseverance, doesn’t it?

Two other things this past weekend and this week are breaking my stride. On Friday night I discovered that my home computer could not go online. I called the Sasktel trouble-shooting number, and a nice fellow walked me through the ways to determine if it was their modem (I have high speed lite at home), or the wiring. A spare laptop with Windows XP was able to get online without a problem, so it has to lie in my computer.

Saturday I gave up housekeeping agendas, etc., to try to solve this problem. I went to my office and brought back some spare ethernet cards, but that didn’t solve the problem. I went to OTV to ask advice. Two guys there were stumped, but thought I might need to replace my motherboard since this has an onboard ethernet (it’s a cube on the board). I can’t accept that because the computer works fine - except for going online. I NEED to go online to build and upload webpages!

Sunday I had to set it aside to go to the Waldheim Missions conference where Priscilla and I presented a project for our mission, WTM. We had to go in the afternoon already to set up our display and have faspa with the Committee and the other missionaries. So it was a long day.

I had stopped at the office and picked up a cast off computer that I had repaired and brought it home, hoping I could go online with that one, I tried that when I got home after 10:30 pm. No go.

Monday morning I had to call for a plumber because my sewer was backing up. (That was an expensive lesson in what company I will NEVER call again! A rude man, charging $364 for an hour’s work is expensive education money to learn that!)

Anyway, no need to bore you with all the technical details, but what with dealing with my own computer challenge this week, someone dropping off a laptop yesterday for me to work on this week, and we are still going to Waldheim each evening until Wednesday night - …you could say I’m busier than usual.

I did get a few emails answered yesterday afternoon, but I’m about 4 days behind now! I wanted to give myself a sewing binge this coming weekend, but I may have to spend it in email catchup. Maybe that will help me to resist the temptation to hang-out at Facebook, eh?

Hey, if you had a birthday recently. I probably saw it on my bathroom calendar, but I was helpless to do anything about it. I’m sorry! I hope you had a great day without me.

Oh, and a big thanks to Barbara and Helen who wrote to identify with the problem of being snubbed by friends in week-before-last’s article. Seems that has happened to most of us, eh?

In an old, odd-sized black binder I have some pages set up to record the STATs of my various sites and those of my clients. Unfortunately, I’ve been so super busy the last few months that there has not been time to go visit the cPanel of each site, and record the main STATs that I choose out of the plethora offered, to keep an eye on how they are doing. I get some shorts spurts of time and get a few done, but then the month zips by on me.

On July 1 I resolved to try to make time for this on Wednesday mornings before the missions’ staff meeting, but there have been computer issues to work on too, and that morning just whizzes by me. So does the afternoon!

But blocking out some time for certain sites means that I do get some things done. Last week I got a big batch of new Bible study booklets set up on the Mannapublications.org site. These are offered free for anyone to download and print out. The copyright doesn’t allow you to edit them, but you may freely make copies to distribute to a small study group, or to distribute further afield. Meaning of– studies

There is also a profile of Starfish Malawi on the Generosity-alive.org site; Starfish Malawi

Do you donate when charities send people around to your door? How do you decide which ones are good to support and which ones not? Or how much do you give? These are questions I grapple with in my article below.

With all that work on one manuscript’s preparation, I have not written any inspirational articles ahead of time. I’ll write the first one this morning for this RoseBouquet. I’m as curious as you to see how it turns out.

Hopefully I will be able to claim some pockets of time to write as many inspirational articles as I intimated last week. A project like this always works best if I can block off a chunk of time and guard it like the queen’s private chambers. Even if it’s but a small block of time, if I faithfully use it for that one project, it begins to grow and eventually becomes a fairly big thing.

That’s why I’m so busy these days. Little blocks of time dedicated to small projects years ago are all ripening and beginning to bloom and bear fruit at once. A harvest season is always a busy one.

Oh, l want to share Tess’s feedback on my garden photo story last week;

“I really enjoy it when you send photos of your various doings. The more you do it the more I enjoy it. I am really astonished at how many sites you have and how you manage to take care of them all. It seems like such an impossible task! I have not been in touch for quite some time because I had a bunch of surgeries…” (Tess)

Robin also responded during the writer’s workshop. I don’t want to share too much of the personal news, but here’s a bit;

“Thanks for the SBI link to Suzanne’s very inspiring story. It was something I needed right now.

Things have changed quite a bit here, I’ve retired from my job because I know I’d completed the work that God had called me there to do (set up the Customer Services dept and identify a future manager and train him up to take over). . . . Anyway Suzanne’s story was quite inspiring, thank you.” (Robin)

As I said last week, I had some dormant sites come to life, so I had extra work to squeeze into the cracks of my time. I must say, I’m surprised at how much I got done. But a couple of jobs are still carrying on, so I’m getting more practice at “filling the cracks of time.”

Another thing I decided while talking things over with my Friend, was that I should try to write more inspirational articles. I reviewed what they are; true articles or stories about people dealing with an emotional crisis or challenging decision, that carries you along, and that ends up with a victory or solution that you or anyone else could apply in their own lives. It’s about people solving problems victoriously. We all love such stories.

Hey, I had no trouble making a list of 8 sites that could use such articles or stories, and the perfect place to start and to practice writing them regularly would be right here for the Ruthes Roses spot in the RoseBouquet!

Now, it is the beginning of a month and time a photo story of my garden. So we’ll do that today, but then I’ll start looking for inspirational topics to write about.

No one, but no one has commented on the blog evangelism series I just finished, so I guess the educational slant is not everyone’s “cup o’ tea.”

A number of sites that I look after slip into a more dormant state after a while. The owners get busy with other things and forget to keep providing fresh material for me to add. Once in a while they send a few photos or some announcement to add, but usually they don’t all ask for a spurt of work from me at once. It was because of this, that I decided that it would be possible to take on a new client for a new site. The first few weeks or months are often intensely busy, and then we begin to slow down.

However, on Saturday night when I checked my emails before going to bed, I realized that this was going to be an unusual week. One friend of a friend, for whom I’d promised a web page when she got her special calendar made, suddenly came through with it. Almost a year after we first discussed this. Another ministry client now wants me to add 28 books to the site. Yet another one wants to discuss adding some inter-active courses to their site.

And just yesterday still another wrote and asked about updating his site altogether. From what he described I think he needs a blog setup so he can enter his own information on a daily or weekly basis. (If he can spare the time!)

Hmm… I’ve been giving two evenings to my new client’s site. He has a deadline too. At first glance this looks a little crowded.

However, the Lord often deigns to help me through these things. Last night I was able to squeeze in the work on the first request. The 28 books have not reached me yet, so that may go on hold.
I’ve already told the client wanting the inter-active courses that we’ll need to discuss this by email first, and they’ll need to wait until next month, July. Assuming the last one likes the idea of a blog where he can login and make his own entries without going through me… I can squeeze that in somewhere too, over the next couple of weeks. Meantime, we need to toss some emails back and forth so I clearly understand what kind of changes he wants.

Oh, and the client wrote on the weekend, suggesting a simpler template than the one I’ve been working on. Hey, that’s good news! That means the work of the last 2 weeks is sort’a down the drain, but it solves several other problems, so I can move forward better, faster.

No need to panic. It’s all going to work out.

Today, my article will show how to set up a Blog, assuming you are ready to evangelize online via that route. See below.