I’ve been spending my week-day afternoons here at the office, working on an assignment to get a grant application ready on behalf of Western Tract Mission. In November the Board had asked the director and me to start applying for grants for our big Impact Canada project. In December an email announced a brand new consortium of 12 Christian foundations pooling some funds to give out some big grants. The application period was to be between Jan. 3-31. I studied their website, strongertogethergrants.ca and felt that we would be a perfect fit to apply. I sent Arnold, our Director, the link and he thought we wouldn’t qualify because we’d have to have an annual budget of more than $150,000. I assure him that no, it said “less than.” So I got a green light.

Their specifications document was available on Jan. 3, and I went to work. Usually I give the mission one hour of my afternoon, but many times I went over to 2 or 3 hours in an afternoon. Last week was especially stressful as I had to get all our financial reports for the past two years and a budget for this year set up neatly.

I had set my heart on posting our completed application yesterday to beat the deadline by one day in case there were any complications. By about 3 pm yesterday I had gone over the whole 9 page document and cover letter with a fine-tooth comb, tweaking and perfecting it as exactly as I could.

But once I had registered and logged in and was answering the five qualifying questions I kept getting an error message that said, “Sorry, but you don’t qualify…”

What?! After several tries and checking on our gov’t registration number with two others, I finally emailed the person we were to contact if we ran into problems. With two time zones between us, I didn’t really expect an answer until today, but the man in charge replied quickly and asked me to give him the answers to those first 5 questions. I did, and a little later I had another reply from him. “Sorry, but you don’t qualify because your annual budget is less than $150,000.”

HUH?!! I went to read that part of their website again. Sure enough I had misread it. Oh no! My heart just sank. All this work - for naught? I’d pushed and prodded others for numbers and proof-reading last week, and I even got the required signatures on Saturday. - Have you ever had a cold flush just wash down through you?

Well, there were other deadlines to meet last night, and the Lord helped with those. Maybe it’s a good thing I had to stay up until midnight to get the first issue of Reflections ready for today. That kept me from having a pity party.

My work is not wasted either. The Board wanted me to really hunt down more foundations to apply to, and now I have all our “ducks in a row” to use a cliche. I have a free membership at Ajah.ca, which is a huge database of foundations, and now I’ll look for other individual foundations to apply to for grants.

No wonder professional grant writers make $100/hr. Whew! They earn it.

What I really need now is some friends who have Facebook accounts to visit my sites, and find some of those buttons and click on them, and make nice comments about the site or that particular web page. This will show up on the walls of your friends, and tweak their interest so they come to see my site too. That will greatly improve my visitor STATs! Best of all, if they really like my website and click on some affiliate links - ah-ha, then I’ll really profit!

I don’t want to push anyone to get a Facebook account just because of this request. This favour is totally optional. But so many millions of people already have Facebook accounts and don’t know how to use them. If you are one of them, here’s a wee thing you can do to encourage and bless me.

If - just IF you are willing to do this, here are the sites to visit;
www.aloe-vera-and-handy-herbs.com
www.online-shopping-guides.com

Hey, I just went to peek at the STATs for January and I see a tremendous increase. The LIKE buttons have not been in place a full day yet, but 8 pages have had over 1000 visits a day already, with the one on eat-your-aloe-vera.html having 4198 for the month! Wow! The daily average for all the pages is 641!

The other one is making good progress too, but is just moving into the triple-digit figures. However, I should stop this before I make someone discouraged about their STATs. I really don’t want to brag; I’m just brimming over at good news.

The other week I discovered a message from an Italian friend I had back in London, Ontario, more than 30 years ago. She had got homesick and returned to Italy, and I moved back to Saskatchewan, and we just lost track of each other. I had sometimes wondered what ever became of Mickie. Here she was, asking if I remembered her at all. But of course!

It also allows me to keep an eye on relatives that don’t make much of an effort to keep in touch. A nephew is getting married in Mexico next week. I suspect pictures will be up on their Facebook before they get back. Meantime I know to offer extra prayers for my sister and her family as they travel in Mexico.

I read the other day that I should be mentioning my Facebook URL in my ezines and in my signatures, so I think this is the first time I’m doing that. Come by to visit my public porch, so to speak;

www.facebook.com/ruthmarlene.friesen

I also have some business pages related to my sites, and I could use some “Likes” there;
facebook.com/pages/aloe-vera-and-handy-herbscom
facebook.com/pages/online-shopping-guidecom
(I believe those long numbers at the end are to disappear once I have 25 “Likes”)

P.S. For those who are disappointed at all this FB talk, I’ll try to be on a different theme next week.

So then I prepared my codes for the Aloe vera site again, the right way, and then I stumbled on the instructions for applying for a developer account at Facebook, so I could make myself a moderator over the comments that people might leave on my site. I got that part too, but ran out of time to paste all those codes on every page of that site. That part will now be easy, just time-consuming.

On Saturday night I tried those Facebook “LIKE” buttons, just the FB way on the http://revival-time-ministry.info site (for the ministry in Uganda). They are said not to be as good as the SBI way, but they showed up right away when I tested the code on 2 or 3 pages.

Now that I’ve got the hang of the two different ways, I need to tackle pasting the codes on each page of - well maybe not all the sites in my care. Some of them are on the back burner and need a complete renovation first.

See…? There’s another job for when I can hire employees or virtual assistants to do them for me. I’m starting a job list for them.

Buy 2, get 3 FREE, or Buy 1, get 1 FREE at Puritan’s Pride!

By the way, I get another separate rebate by first logging into BigCrumbs (that’s free to sign up), and I click on the link there to Puritan’s Pride. The next month BigCrumbs deposits a rebate of about 12% on my total order.
< BIGGRIN > Yep, I’m a smart, frugal shopper! Want sign up under me? my.bigcrumbs.com

However, as I continued to listen to the radio while I had my bath, I persuaded myself that it would be really smart today to stay home and not venture out at all. I could certainly write the RoseBouquet from home. True, the mission project I work on right after lunch is only on the office computer, but…I could something else in place of that.

You see, for some time now my car has trouble starting in the mornings. Having it plugged in helped, but we’d had a big dump of snowfall over Saturday night to Sunday, and the temperatures had plummeted down-down!

My car moaned and groaned but it did start in the morning, and again when I moved it to the parking area behind the mission building (Joe had been shoveling that area when I arrived). However, at 5 pm when I went out, hoping to do my banking, and some grocery shopping, it would not start.

After trying for about 10 minutes I came into the office and phoned the CAA. The woman said there would be about a 45 minute wait, but the big orange tow-truck arrived in about half the time. The young man tried boosting the battery, with his box n’ cables, and with the big truck cables, and no go. He gave up after about 15 minutes.

(Sigh!) I went back into the office and found a tangled yellow cord, so I plugged the car in and came back into my office and set about making myself a supper with a box of macaroni and cheese (from my emergency stash). I tidied up some shelves of computer/electronic parts too.

Finally, after about an hour and a quarter, I bundled myself up and in faith took along my purse and backpack, believing the car would start. It took about three tries and earnest prayer, and lo, it finally kicked in! Hallelujah!

I had phoned my neighbour Joe, during my wait and he advised going to one of those Parts Source stores, and asking them to test the battery. I headed over there, but they had closed at 6. (This was after 7 by now).

I stopped for gas, and then spied an ATM for my credit union, so did my banking and then headed home.

Back to this morning. Through my prayer time, my attitude gradually changed from wanting to hole up at home and work from there, to thinking that I could go try the car again at noon, when it would be the highest temperature we’ll have all day, and then see about having that battery tested. I could go to the office after that. Then it changed again to thinking, well, I could start out about the usual time at 9ish and go do that, and if I had to buy a new battery, I would. Then I’d be fine the rest of the day and henceforth.

A woman/clerk cheerfully came out to test my battery, but found it doing fine. She figured it must just be losing charge. Maybe even just one cell was low.

I was heading toward the office, but dreading a repeat of last night, so I detoured around to Atomic, the taxi service station where I’ve found good mechanical services before. They are booked up for the next two days. So many are having car problems, but Scott, the desk man, took pity on me and when to find a mechanic who would come with me to the office, and drive the car back so they could check it for me.

He has already called once to say the battery really is fine. But they are looking at the block heater now.

We’ve had cold winters like this every year of my life, and I know we can’t make it go away by waving our hand, or any magic formula, so I accept it. The hardest part to bear is to have car troubles at these temperatures. Yet, once I accepted that my grocery shopping plans were cancelled last night I found grace and peace to deal with the situation at a sensible pace. I was reminded this morning too, from 2 Cor. 9, about “God’s abounding grace…” So I’m not in knots over these experiences as I have some other times. That’s good too.

AFTER LUNCH: A couple of calls and I got a ride to pick up my car. Turns out there is nothing wrong with it. Just deal with the cold by keeping it plugged in when not driving! Also - no charge! Amen!

It will be interesting to see whether these really increase visitors to the sites as they say. I’ll let you know when you can go click on my “Like” buttons and give me a spike in popularity.

I’m waiting for some “occasional clients” to get some material to me to update their sites, and another friend wants to discuss a site when they get back from Hawaii. That will probably not take too long, so I can probably tell another prospect that I’ll be able take his site on in a couple of months. So my Thursday nights will soon be promised away again.

How to fill the meantime? I’m grabbing time for my own projects and a learning curve. I think last Thursday night I caught on to how to change a Word Press blog theme to look like the site I want to match it too. That will be useful information for my clients as well as myself!

Just out of curiosity, how do you fill your “meantimes” when you are between projects or clients? Is that your time to veg-out?

So I did a search online and wow, there are plenty of sites with this information. In case you have yet to find this, here are some links, including one at the snopes site, which checks on the validity of such emails.

www.benefits-of-honey.com/honey-and-cinnamon.html
www.naturalnews.com/034280_honey_cures_cinnamon.html
www.advancedhealthplanhealthplan.com/honeyandcinnamon.html
www.snopes.com/medical/homecure/honey.asp

Guess what I’m sipping these days, with some relish!

Normally, January is our coldest month of the year, when we tough it out at -36 or -40 below 0 Celsius. Over the last two weeks we have seen as high as +17 C in Maple Creek, a small town in the southern part of Saskatchewan. In fact, they were the hottest place in Canada one day last week, and I believe this week too.

We even hear that in Florida it is colder in the daytime than up here! Wow!

Most people can take this as a friendly joke, and remark that this is easier to take than spring flooding that wipes out all your crops and ruins your home’s basement. So if we are to have freak weather we’ll happily accept these warm temperatures, sometimes known as a January Chinook.

I’ve seen a warm thawing Chinook in February or March, but never this warm in January.

Ah, but even this is too good to last. The forecast is for a cold front to come in from the north, and our temperatures will drop this afternoon. By tonight we are to have snow flurries and a drop to -17 C.

I have friends leaving today for Hawaii. What perfect timing!

Yesterday I walked to and from the office for the first time since my fall in early December. Yes, all healed up. I really felt winded, but this morning when I weighed myself I had lost 4 lbs since Sunday. So I need to discipline myself to do that walk more often again.

Then there is the matter of computer monitors. It seems whenever friends or acquaintances got a new monitor (the LCD or LED kind), they would offer me their cast off CRT monitor. (Yes, those big monsters that are hard to lug around).

For years my policy has been not to sneeze at gifts, and to see if I can find a use for theses castoffs. My office was cluttered with them. Over the holidays I had carried about 5 of them to the landing at the top of the stairs outside my office. My plan is to wait until some stronger friend is available and ask them to carry them down the stairs for me. I nearly popped an aneurysm in my neck the last time I tried to carry two of them up.

However I was having frustrations with the biggest one that I was still using with my own desktop computer, even when I’d set the system font to a large size, and finally said to myself, “Squinting at the tiny font on this huge screen is nuts! I’m going to use some gift monies to buy myself an LCD/LED monitor too!”

A quick computer search before 5 pm showed me which store had the best price, and I headed across the city to that store. The lowest priced one was $80 and I snapped it up. I have not regretted it for a moment!

What a wonderful difference!

SarCan, here in Saskatchewan takes electronic stuff for recycling. I see with a quick search that there are other options in other places, so don’t take it to the garbage bin, but drive your stuff over to a recycling center when you are ready to get rid of it.

But hey, if it is still working, consider donating it to a charity that provides computers to those who can’t afford them. There are still many people left who don’t have any computer at all, and no hope of buying one.

Oh say, thanks to all my friends who rejoiced with me over my tent garage or carport, and my crocheted collar recycled into a cute hat!