Helping Haiti

The blogosphere and traditional news are full of appeals and information about how to give money to help Haiti. We have given money to two of our favorite charities: Doctors Without Borders and Heifer International. It is important to make sure that the charities you give to will use your money wisely, not just now in a time of crisis, but on a regular basis. There are several places online that you can go that evaluate charities. My favorite is Charity Navigator. From their website:

Charity Navigator's rating system examines two broad areas of a charity's financial health -- how responsibly it functions day to day as well as how well positioned it is to sustain its programs over time. Each charity is then awarded an overall rating, ranging from zero to four stars. To help donors avoid becoming victims of mailing-list appeals, each charity's commitment to keeping donors' personal information confidential is assessed.

This information includes the CEO pay, how much money goes to fund-raising and operational costs, versus how much goes to actually doing their charitable work.

The Better Business Bureau also has a database with information about charities for donors.

Moving is Hell

This week is crazy at work. The State Library is in the process of moving from one building to another, and let me tell you, moving a library is no fun. We didn't have to move the books, thank goodness, but that still left a lot of, well, stuff, for us to deal with. The actual moving process is almost complete; now comes the reorganization and the re-configuring. Sigh.

On the plus side, the new building (really an old one that was retrofitted) is nice and shiny. And my commute is about 5 minutes shorter each way.

Woolly Hollow Hike

On New Year's Day, we set out on our first hike of 2010. It was a spontaneous decision - the sun was out, our colds were in retreat, and Benjamin needed to get out of the house to avoid going stir crazy. Because we hadn't really planned to go away for the day, we needed a hike that wasn't too far away from home. And because I was still suffering from my head cold, I didn't want to have to do a lot of up and down hiking, which ruled out Pinnacle Mountain. We have been to Woolly Hollow before, right after we moved to Arkansas, but we never did the 3.5 mile loop around the lake. It is about an hour's drive away from Maumelle, up north, outside of Greenbrier. It is a state park, and is named after an early settler family, the Woollys. Our Tim Ernst guidebook says that the woods are lovely in the spring, with many patches of wildflowers. No wildflowers in January, but the woods were still lovely. The abundant sunshine didn't hurt one bit.

We had a tag-along guest on the hike - a stray dog we nicknamed Ralph. Another hiker who was leaving as we started the hike said that he had followed her on the trail around the lake, and that he was friendly. After some initial sniffing, Miikka decided that Ralph was far less interesting than the trail. They played a bit when we stopped to take pictures, but otherwise, Miikka pretty much ignored him. That was something of a relief, because a distracted Miikka is almost impossible to walk. When I told Ralph to stay behind me and out of the way, he did. He was very well-mannered and friendly.

Since he didn't have a collar, we assumed that he was a stray, or a dumped pet. I began to worry that I would have to take him home, because despite the sun, it was cold, and I hate seeing animals suffer. He was in good shape, however, and seemed only to want to go for a walk with us. As soon as we got to the end of the trail, he ran off to find someone new to go hiking with. I can only hope that the park employees were looking after him, or that he was someone's pet who just happened to be good at losing collars.