How Gratitude Manifests

Lately, I have been very much focused on gratitude. Despite all that is going on with pandemic and dysfunctional society, I know I live a very blessed life.

I am in the process of going through all my old blog posts since 2007, all 2000+ of the them. There is so much that I have forgotten of my life even just a decade ago! It makes me sad I didn't do a diary during my earlier years.

I am in 2011. I have been reading all these posts of epic hikes and epic cooking! Like this one. For a moment I was melancholy. I thought how we no longer would do anything like that now for a whole variety of reasons. But then I remembered that when our cooking/entertaining life ended, our travel life began. And now that we are prohibited from that, I thought of the incredible blessing that has come from working with the women of the Theodora Project.

Truly my life has been blessed with passion. The objects of passion change. But the commitment to and fulfillment from a passion continues.

Substitution

It sunk in a few weeks ago that I wasn't going anywhere for quite some time. As the United States as combined entity has decided to conduct a mass experiment on how to respond to a pandemic by basically doing the opposite of what science says is correct (But damn it in the name of personal freedom!), our passport has essentially become the Black Mark on our forehead as far as getting the hell out of here.

While the #2 clan was here, I took advantage of 2B's love of wine. We drank a lot of my inventory. Which allowed me to buy more 😊. Buying wine. Drinking wine. It was all good. Until, of course, the sad day when the Pulishan Hordes departed.

I took stock of my wine inventory with the black hole known as 2B now in another Galaxy and noted that even with all the buying it was low. Well that was okay. For I think I have noted I probably like buying wine even more than I do drinking it.

I am sure I have also mentioned in the past that I make use of two e-commerce wine merchants exclusively for my purchases. I have a buying strategy based on certain geographies and wines from those geographies that I like. I have found the choice selections from these two sources to be so incredibly well matched with my own tastes that I just wait for an offer at a price I like. The problem is they send literally 10 to 20 of these a day (between the two).

What I realized since 2B left is that I had already filled my inventory quite well but was still buying. I justified the buying by because I was still short of whites and I didn't have enough Bordeaux and I was lacking completely in Spanish Rioja. No what has happened is that as I cannot travel I am letting my wine buying addiction fill the void.

Well as I made that last buy of said Rioja today, I have made a vow of no more buying until I can see a substantial opening of slots in the storage racks. So if any of you happen to be in Albuquerque and have a hankering for a glass or six of fine wine in our Covid-19 open/socially distant compliant space, just give me a call.

Breakthrough!

It happened exactly how I imagined it would.

Wife came in after getting the mail.

She said, "de-I, guess what came in the mail?"

I could tell from the look on her face it was what we had been waiting for since we initiated it a year ago July.

"Our 501.c.3 designation?"

"Yes!" she said with a smile as big as a full sunshine day.

This is no small deal. If you are running a charitable venture, it can make or break you. If you have it, you have a seal of legitimacy. You can access all kinds of grants and foundations. Without it...well you can't.

We had been put through the wringer to get it. Got some bureaucrat who had it in for us for some reason. We had three interrogatories (lists of questions sent to us) when two is the norm. And each of them got more and more inane and detailed. Upon receiving the third in mid-May I was dispairing. But thank the Lord for daughter #2 who as a bureaucrat herself and one who has fought the system, again and again, had great advice. She told me the key to fighting the bureaucrat was overwhelming them with information when they ask silly questions. So in response to their 10 questions in the third request, I sent back 50 pages of written response.

So thanks big time #2!

It was interesting that after the initial elation what I felt was exhaustion. I think the worry about this has been weighing on me more than I thought. Well, it is done and over. It's game on. Now #3 who has taken over Theodora's development work has the tool she needs most to go after many folks who have expressed interest.

Joy And Gratitude

A lot of my time...a lot...is being spent helping to get the Theodora Ghana project off the ground. Here is a quick review for those who might not remember or are unfamiliar.

• Theodora Ghana is a venture that is helping women in a developing country (Ghana West Africa) who end up living using sex work (because of a lack of jobs and an abusive culture towards women) to get out of that trap by turning them into virtual personal assistants selling services in the United States.
• This venture went from just an idea in June 2019 to being funded and actually training women and providing services to business owners in June 2020.
• For some reason, God has seen me be his/her vehicle to make this all happen. Because I have no background that would lead one to believe I would be the likely facilitator of all this.
• And despite the program nearly dying before we even started due to the coronavirus pandemic, somehow we are off the ground and making things happen.

One of the immediate results of this is that I spend a lot of time with our women. I work with them on what daughter #3 and development head calls our angel clients - people who will hire our women knowing they are rough and need training but still expect to get something positive for their businesses.

It is coaching and teaching in the most intense and personal manner. It requires spending a lot of time with each individual showing them what they did wrong and in a way that motivates them, not beats them down. 

We have progressed way beyond what I thought they could do to the point where our venture is in serious need of business organization. So today we had the first of what will be a number of business planning sessions. Who would have believed last February when I left, that I would be having a conversation with the women about business planning, about the right way to posture ourselves via internet presence? Not me for sure. I was pretty blown away by how many of the major principles of business the women had a familiarity with. It was a very uplifting and productive session.

I have found this group to be the most rewarding people I have ever coached. They are going to succeed and it will be a blessing that I have had a hand in helping them.  I may be locked up at home. But I have found that working with this group of women has been as uplifting and exciting as anything I have ever done.

And forgive me for being crass...we are still looking to raise donor money to keep the program sound. So if you have anything for donations, you will not just be helping these women but building a program that will help many others escape the trap of sex work.

Thirteen Years And Counting

It started because we are thinking of having some images painted on the walls of our backyard. So the task was to go look through past blog posts for various images from our travels that might be candidates. Somehow this has morphed into my beginning to go through the entire work of my blog posts.

According to Blogger, I am at 2051 posts and climbing. So far over the first week, I have gotten through 2007 and 2008.  This covers our first significant international trip to a locale different from the comfortable France zone - our Danube trip to Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Austria - the kidney donation saga, the crash and bad times of 2008 and start of the building of the Tower.

I am struck by a couple of things. Gad I cooked an incredible amount and variety of food back then. And my business travel life was even crazier than I remember it.

Perspective

For all of you who feel we are at the end of days, I wrote this post in 2008 when people were freaking totally out. It is just as true today.

Time To Leave

That's how I feel about the United States right now. That it is time to leave. Time to go somewhere and not be engaged in any political activity.

I never, ever thought I would have thoughts like this. I know the incredible blessing it has been to have been born in a country like the U.S. especially now that I have traveled so much of the world, now that I am working with people directly who did not win the birth lottery. So it is with a heavy heart that I have these feelings. But the level of insane partisanship here is leaving me feeling there is no happy outcome for this country of mine.

I mean a significant proportion of our people are making a political statement about wearing face masks? They are threatening to kill people over it? Really? As Wife pointed out if a store can have a rule that says, 'no shirt, no shoes, no service,' and that is not considered taking one's civil rights away, why is requiring a mast doing so?

And then on the other side, we have people in leadership who with a straight face say, "Hey you people who just want to have a normal life, you are horrible human beings for not social distancing. But you people who are demonstrating for a cause and not social distancing, you get a free pass because you are the good ones." What hypocrisy. Either we need to socially distant or we don't. The reason is not relevant.

I am not likely to act on this feeling because I am too committed to my Ghana project and helping those women. That's real. I can see the change it is causing in lives right before my eyes. And that project requires me to be here. So here I will stay. But don't expect me to engage in any meaningful way with our social or political engagement. Because I think it is all a nuthouse.