Daily Things

I'm a creature of habit. Most of my habits tend to be "bad" habits, but I do have a few that aren't so bad and I thought I'd share them today.

For the past 10 years (maybe even 12), since I discovered cyberspace, I have become devoted to what I think of as "the one click sites." The first one I discovered was the Hunger Site and encompasses five other categories besides hunger, each accessible through this same link. A daily click at The Hunger site donates 1.1 cups of food for hungry people around the world. A click at The Breast Cancer site goes towards giving women free mammograms. Next you can click for Children's Health and this goes towards offering free health care for children in need. That's followed by the Literacy site, which buys books for children. The next click - the Rainforest - helps protect 11.4 square feet of rainforest and the last on the list at the Hunger site is Animal Rescue site where your click provides six tenths of a bowl of food for rescued animals. It only takes a couple of minutes to do all this good and over time, if you do it every day, you wind up contributing quite a bit.... for example if you click on the animal rescue link daily, you end up giving 219 bowls of food over the course of a year. Daily clicks on the hunger link add up to 401.5 bowls of food. Not bad for two minutes effort every day.

But you don't have to stop there. Next is Care2.com where with another few minutes of your time you can:

* Stop Global Warming,

* Save some more rain forest (or Prairie or marine wetlands - they give you a choice),

* Save baby seals,

* Help protect dolphins, sea turtles and other ocean life,

* Click for the Big Cats (I favor the jaguar, but you can also click for tigers or snow leopards),

* Support the Jane Goodall Institute for chips and primates,

* Help Children International provide food and medical care to needy children

* Help the Humane Society of the USA protect pets and homeless animals in need

* Support work to prevent violence against women world wide and

* Contribute to breast cancer prevention

Care2 is very well designed, so all those clicks only take about 3- 5 minutes (I haven't timed it, but it's very fast).


But us fanatics don't stop there. Some wonderful person who is as enamored of one-clicks as I am, created a site where he gathered all the one-click sites he could find from all over the world and sorted them into categories. I won't bother to list them all here. The two sites above are included in his lists along with sites from the Netherlands, Japan, Poland, Mexico, Brazil... It's pretty nifty. His site is called One Click at a Time subtitled You Too Can Save the World. This one takes a little more time as there's quite a lot to sort through and there are a lot of them. Still, with maybe another 10 minutes from your day, you can build homes, plant trees, feed children, build hospitals.... It's quite wonderful. One of my favorite links at One Click at a Time is something called Land Care Niagara. I don't know why I'm so fond of it... Maybe because every every 5 clicks plants a tree and that gives me a feeling of great accomplishment.

I've mentioned it before but Linda alerted me to something called What Kind of World Do You Want where by clicking on videos you contribute to organizations working to cure autism.

Free Rice is kind of fun. You can work on your vocabulary and donate cups of rice at the same time. I don't do that one daily but it is fun.

Not all my daily visits are noble, though. I was really hooked on Huffington Post for a while - especially when Dennis Kucinich was still running for president and I worked at putting his name into the conversation as often as I could since even the so-called liberal HuffPo participated in the almost total blackout on letting his voice be heard. (Can you tell I'm still really ticked off about that?) Chris Weigant is pretty much the only column I bother to read these days, though I like Bob Cesca and Deepak Chopra posts some good things too. One of the things I like about Weigant - besides his intelligence and his sense of humor - is that he reads the responses to his posts and replies to them.

Then there's Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. I'm determined to win. Despite the fact that they keep giving my money to other people, I will persevere.

Last, but not least among my very favorites is site my niece Cindy alerted me to: The Daily Puppy. Hard to believe there are so many "awwww" producing puppies on the planet, but every day there's another cute one.

Oh, and I almost forgot... Blogs. The list is still relatively small. My niece Cindy's two blogs. Team Wines to see what she and my great niece and great nephew have been up to and then Life in My Noggin to see what Cindy herself is thinking. Then my other niece Diana who has two great blogs and an incredible new website: Hightech Survivor, Vegan Girl, and FoodScout. Then there's Cindy's wonderful friend Linda who pushed me to start (well restart) this blog. And through Linda, I discovered a wonderful witty woman named Dianne, who's blog is called Forks Off the Moment.

Guess that's enough for the moment. Today's picture is my naughty Angel (you'll hear about her in future blogs) at work. Her message (well, Eleanor Roosevelt's message) seemed to fit today's theme. There really IS a lot we can do to change the world in very small ways, not just big dramatic ones.

Happy Clicking. Together we CAN save the world... or at least make it a lot better.