My friend Emmy and I have been “working” from my apartment this week. Emmy is newly unemployed and is missing what I like to call the “coworker experience”. I discovered I also miss that experience and I get a lot more done when I have a friend to hang out with in my home “office”. Emme has started to call us the Micheal Scott Paper Company (if you are an Office fan you know what we are referring to if not catch up here) because of our goofy antics and questionable work ethic. We also take long breaks (Emmy refers to these moments as our Cafe Disco time) and make pancakes (not paper shaped).  We have also succumbed to a nap or two during the work day (ok just once but we’ve only been doing it for a week).  We have yet to make a delivery (again an Office reference) but we think with enough work (no naps) we may be able to pull a client or two from the competition. We’ll keep you posted!

Cruising the Internet for new ways to incorporate vegetables into my diet, specifically beets, I came across a post on a small blog, we will call Power Trip Girl‘s site. That’s not the name of the blog. The actual name is something cuter, meaning: not at all the type of thing I would be interested in reading anyway. But hey, I was looking for recipes! PTG’s blog post included a recipe for beet muffins and a photo of the muffin. Thinking my readers might find it interesting fat chance, I mentioned it briefly, posted a link to her blog and included her image of the muffin.

A couple days later we receive this snip little comment below:

I hope you will give beet a second chance thanks to this recipe, but please do not use my image without my permission. I work really hard on my photographs and to have my copyrighted photos republished without my permission is not fair to me as an artist. Please either take remove the photo or have it link directly to my Flickr image. Please talk to any artist before re-publishing their photographs, linking to recipes is ok.

PTG

Seriously?  Artist? Come on people! Listen. First, a picture of a beet muffin is not art. I’m sorry to tell you this but it just isn’t. You will never, ever, in our lifetime see a show debuting at the Guggenheim entitled- “Beet Study: The Muffin Series”. If you read the post below, it really wasn’t about beet muffins. Rather, an ode to a childhood memory. F*ck beets! I wasn’t talking about beets here!

I understand people who do not want their printed content copied word for word on the Internet. And if it were my photo of, oh I don’t know, let’s say, something IMPORTANT,  I might take offense if it were being used by some d-bag with far right leaning thoughts and theories. Then and only then, I might ask them to take the photo down (but probably not since I know the controversy would drive more people to my site).

And no offense to PTG but it’s not my first spin around the blogosphere.

A recent article announcing,  there are now over 2 million pro bloggers in the United States, has made once humble people, hungry with power. For years jotting down their thoughts in private, they now splay them out on the Internet for any old bugger to read. And that thought, the thought of another person caring about what you have to say, is every shy nerds wet dream.

People want to be adored. Having spent the better part of the 90′s in Seattle playing rock so I could have some of that adoration, I understand completely. You just want someone to care about what you are doing. Even if it’s sitting in your small mid western kitchen making casseroles.

But it’s time for a reality check.

Brace yourself, I’ll do it band-aid quick.

Get over yourself! You’re not special.

Listen people, it’s a blog not rocket science. Your blog post about getting up in the morning and “it looks like  good day” is not going to be the big bang that rocks the planet.

Yes, it’s fun to be a blogger. You get invited to all sorts of cool stuff and people treat you like a “blog god“. However, if your traffic includes a few relatives and your best friend from high school- you need to bring it down a notch. Check the ego at the keyboard.

Blogging used to be about sharing links and content, and pictures! But the times they are a changin’ and now that every suburban housewife can keep us abreast of her day to day cleaning schedule, nobody’s special anymore.   Everyone is a blogger. Now, I am not saying my blogs are “must reads” either. My posts on the latest vulgar design is not going to solve problems in the middle east. I know this. I like to keep things in perspective. Blogs are entertainment. When it comes down to it, the most you can hope for, is the pleasure writing it. Most blogs will never be read or make money and most bloggers will never appear as  a judge on Miss America.  The best your little blog can hope for is a few thousand views before it drifts out into the open sea of abandoned content.

Seasoned bloggers realize the benefits of linkage and try to reciprocate. It’s all about exposure. Their concern is page views, not if their muffin receives it’s 15 minutes of fame. The good news is most new bloggers abandon their “works of art” within 6 months. Kind of like nature’s way of thinning the herd.

Choose an Entrepreneur, Lend, Get Repaid

1) Lenders like you browse profiles of entrepreneurs in need, and choose someone to lend to. When they lend, using PayPal or their credit cards, Kiva collects the funds and then passes them along to one of our micro-finance partners worldwide.

2) Kiva’s micro-finance partners distribute the loan funds to the selected entrepreneur. Often, our partners also provide training and other assistance to maximize the entrepreneur’s chances of success.

3) Over time, the entrepreneur repays their loan. Repayment and other updates are posted on Kiva and emailed to lenders who wish to receive them.

4) When lenders get their money back, they can re-lend to someone else in need, donate their funds to Kiva (to cover operational expenses), or withdraw their funds.

You can lend as little as $25. Basically people like me choose to loan whatever they choose to give, the money is pooled together and distributed to the individual (or group of individuals) so they can begin their business ventures and start enriching their lives.

These are the people I helped:

The group is called the Manos Juntas (Hands Together) Rumichaca Alta. There are 14  members that live in the District of Rumichaca in Peru. They applied for a loan through Kivaso they could buy supplies for agriculture (seeds, corn, barley) and animal husbandry (young guinea pigs, poultry, cattle) and raw materials for those engaged in hand crafts (clay, machinery and such).  When I went to the site and started researching entrepreneurs to lend to I saw they were just $25 away from receiving their loan. I decided I wanted to be that person who donated that last $25. It was exciting to think that the group would be receiving news the next day that their loan had come through and I had a part in making that happen! The next day I received an update, the group had been notified and the money was in the process of being distributed. I know tiems are tough for a lot of people but compared to these folks I was living in a lap of luxury. Could I have used that $25? Sure! But to me $25 is a couple subway rides or a meal out, $25 means a lot more to these Peruvians than it does to me. I encourage you to check out Kiva and read what it is about. Trust me, it feels great to know who you are helping and how much it means to them.

I spoke with my mom yesterday and she informed me that although she liked my blog, she did find it a bit racy at times. Racy? I was shocked! I have tried to keep it clean, realizing that the random relative might drop by for an occasional visit. I couldn’t for the life of me remember writing anything sexually explicit. So I looked back at some of the posts I had written, asking my mom exactly what she found racy about them? She said she didn’t care for the language. Seems dropping the F-bomb is considered racy in mom’s book. :I So I have decided to put a disclaimer on the next post because although I do respect that my mom wants to read a clean blog, she should know by now that her daughter enjoys living life on the fringe.

Well we had our first real snow storm this week. And I know I am a little jaded since I come from Colorado but I have to say it was pretty pathetic. It snowed very lightly  for about 24 hours and the picture you see above is all we have to show for it. Ironically, I live right next to a ski shop

But I do have to say the weather has been fairly mild. I was expecting a lot more rain during the winter. And I have seen more of the sun then I thought I would. I suppose it rains more during the spring and fall. Unfortunately, I will miss Spring here in Denmark since I will be back to the States by then. But I hope to catch a good part of the Danish Summer!

So if anyone is reading (Hi Mom and Dad!) you may have noticed my blog’s new look. Since I have moved to Copenhagen I have been obsessed with how many swans they have here! It’s their national bird and you see them everywhere. My friend Camilla officially put me in “Swan Rehab” the first week I was here after an overdose of swan picture taking. But now I am out and like any addict worth their salt I am back on the (swan) stuff.

You can see how many of them there are. I’m not talking about a few swans here and there, I am talking about swans everywhere! And they are huge, massive creatures. You can see their long swany heads from a kilometer away. And when they come in for a landing-watch out! They make a huge splash when they hit the water.  They are not only beautiful but they are mesmerizing to me. In America you may see one or two on a lake and that is something special but here, there are so many of them people hardly give them a second glance. I am sure you can see why I am so fascinated by them. Oh no, I think they call this a relapse, back to swan rehab for me. :>