Tag Archives: inspired

year of kindness challenge: week 51

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Happy Christmas Eve, everyone!

Today I brought some chocolates and cards to the local nursing home in honor of my dear friend Jewell, who passed away in 2011. I miss her every day, but especially at Christmastime. She was one of the most genuinely sweet and kindhearted people I’ve known! I’ve started a tradition of bringing holiday cards to the nursing home every year as a way of remembering her.

me and jewell

To make the cards this year, I upcycled wrapping paper scraps by cutting out holiday designs — Christmas trees, gloves, snowmen, snowflakes — and gluing them down to blank white notecards. Then I wrote holiday messages on the back, such as:

  • Hope your holiday season is filled with joy and laughter!
  • Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
  • A friend is sending you lots of love and blessings this holiday season.

candy for nursing home

upcycled cards

It made my heart happy to think of the residents smiling when they receive the holiday cards.

I finished wrapping all my presents yesterday, so I’m all set to go! The rest of my Christmas Eve was spent visiting with relatives, taking care of my poor brother who is sick, and baking! I made a pumpkin pie and funfetti cookies.

funfetti cookies

Now … on to the kindness challenge! We’re down to our final two weeks, can you believe it?

year of kindness button

Last week’s kindness challenge was to donate a toy or book to a child in need this holiday season, and/or to drop off a donation at a local animal shelter. I dropped off five boxes of new books {donated through my annual Holiday Book Drive} and three new basketballs to the local Boys & Girls Club.

The timing worked out perfectly — the manager told me she was expecting to get a large donation of children’s books from another source, but then didn’t receive nearly as many books as expected so she was left scrambling to pull together enough gifts for all the children. And the holiday party was that very afternoon! I could tell from her tone that she was feeling pretty desperate.

“I was hoping you would come,” she said as she helped me unload the books from the car. “I remember you from last year. You’re our book angel!”

I can’t put into words how joyful and fulfilled the experience made me feel. The universe is magical and things truly work out for a reason!

book drive

The Week 51 Kindness Challenge was inspired by Martha Richards, the Executive Director of the WomenArts Foundation. In a recent newsletter, she wrote: “If you are like me, you are being deluged with funding requests at this time of year. If you are able to make cash gifts to women artists and women’s organizations, I hope you will do so. Most of us {including WomenArts} are working on a shoestring, and your cash gifts will really make a difference.  But I also believe there is a currency of kindness that we can use to lift each other’s spirits whether or not we have any spare cash on hand. I have seen it over and over again at WomenArts and in other parts of my life — you can often give someone the courage to keep working or try something new just by listening to them carefully, acknowledging their hard work, and finding kind, supportive things to say.”

So this week’s kindness challenge is to reach out to an artist whose work touches you and tell him or her what you love about their work.

As always, blog about your experiences and include your links in the comments section below, or feel free to send me an email at dallaswoodburn AT gmail DOT com.

Merry Christmas!
-Dallas

P.S.: Head on over to this Year of Kindness Challenge page to see all the archived posts from the previous 50 weeks!

Questions of the day:

  • What are you doing to celebrate Christmas?
  • What acts of kindness happened in your life this past week?

saving money & time by utilizing my freezer

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One of my goals for this year is to put at least 10% of each paycheck into my savings. I’ve always been a saver — I was the kid who saved up my Chuck E. Cheese ticket winnings visit after visit to eventually spend on the coveted 1,000-Ticket Big Prize — but in the grown-up world saving isn’t always that easy. As a grad student, there are months it seems downright impossible to put aside any of my small paycheck for savings. Yet I know how important it is to save for the future, and I know how fortunate I am to have a job — after all, even a small paycheck is better than no paycheck.

With that mindset — that even small savings deposits are better than no savings! — I am aiming to discover little ways to save money throughout my daily living. Since I hate wasting food, I’ve gotten in the habit of buying small amounts of produce every week — even produce I really like and eat often — because I don’t want anything to go bad and go to waste. Sometimes this caused me to lose out on good weekly deals because, though I knew I would use up a lot of that specific fruit or vegetable, I wasn’t sure if I would eat it quickly enough. This also lead to some situations where it felt like I was racing against the clock to eat up all of the peaches or blackberries or celery before it went bad and into the trash.

freezing produce

Then I came across this post from my blogging buddy Andrea at Simple Organized Living about how she cuts up and freezes her fruits and veggies {and lots of other goodies, too!} … and it really inspired me! It seems so obvious, but it had never occurred to me that I could freeze my fruits and veggies and use them later. It was like a light-bulb went on in my brain!

Serendipitously, this week at the grocery store, they were having a great sale on bell peppers, something I use often in my cooking. Normally I would have bought one, maybe two, and made sure to use them up in dishes this week. But now I knew exactly what to do to take full advantage of the sale: use my freezer!

I bought half a dozen bell peppers, used two in recipes this week just like I normally would have, and then took a few extra minutes to chop up the rest. Then all I had to do was put them into ziplock baggies and into the freezer!

bell peppers

I used one small bag per bell pepper, because typically my recipes use one bell pepper at a time. An extra bonus is that cooking with these frozen veggies will be easier than ever because the chopping is already done! Surprisingly, it seemed much faster to get in the zone and chop up four bell peppers in one go than it does chopping them up one at a time.

And I felt so proud putting these babies into the freezer. I pictured a harried, midterm version of my Future Self, hungry and desperate to get dinner on the table, and I thought, “This is my gift to you, Future Self.  You’re welcome!”

Do any of you use your freezer to stock up on produce? I’d love to hear your money-saving tips!

marvelous monday: year of kindness challenge

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In a post a few weeks ago I shared that I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to be a better person and give more to the world around me. Give more, do more, brighten more, serve more. I want to be grateful and I want to be joyful, and in my experiences the best way to do so is to give gratefully and joyfully to others. Case in point: one of my favorite experiences over this past holiday season was taking handmade cards and cookies to the local nursing home. In this next year–and beyond, for the years to come– I want to work on stepping outside myself {my petty grievances, my small problems, my unhelpful worries} and focus on the people and neighbors and global community around me.

Inspiration clicked into action when I came across this amazing post by blogger Becka about her birthday tradition of doing a random act of kindness for every year she has been alive. {I also found a similar and very neat Facebook community, The Birthday Project!} Reading through her deeds and looking at all the smiling photos, I felt energized and filled with hope. I immediately knew I wanted to do the same thing for my birthday this year — and then I thought, my birthday isn’t until May. I don’t want to wait that long! Why wait?

Hence, I present to you my Year of Kindness challenge.

year of kindness button

Here’s how it works:

Each Monday, I’ll present a small act of kindness “challenge” for that week, and the following Monday I’ll let you know how I did and then present a new challenge for that week. I would LOVE if you would join in on my year of kindness and blog about your experiences, then add a link to your post below. It would also be wonderful if you would share the photo button above with your followers — on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, your blog, wherever! If you don’t have a blog, you can of course email me at <dallaswoodburn AT gmail DOT com> with any stories or photos you have from doing acts of kindness, and I will gladly share them with blog readers!

Let’s make this a powerful “pay it forward” year of kindness!

Here’s the challenge for this week:

Go through your closets and cupboards and pull out things you no longer use but are still in good shape. Then, donate them to others who will be thrilled to have these items. The goal is to give at least one thing away for each day of the week, for a total of seven items.

Have a marvelous day! Can’t wait to hear how the week goes! 🙂

Blog about completing the Year of Kindness, Week 1 Challenge and add your link below!


goals for the week of 11/18

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Hi everyone! Welcome to our new domain name, daybydaymasterpiece.com! I’m so excited and am delighted to have you join us. Thanks for taking the time to stop by! 🙂

As I mentioned in my earlier post, something I want to start doing on here is posting some goals at the beginning of each week that I’ll be focusing on that week. {I got this idea from Crystal Paine, the Money-Saving Mom, whose goals always inspire me at the beginning of every week when she posts them on her blog.} I’m hoping you will be inspired to share your goals, too, and in this way the blog can become a goal-setting community of encouragement and motivation!

Here are my goals for this week:

  • get up to 200 pages written of my thesis
  • start reading The Happiness Project for PBF Book Club
  • write Thanksgiving cards for loved ones
  • clean bathroom & vacuum
  • finish grading student work
  • enjoy time with Mike’s family
  • finish knitting scarf for Mike during car ride
  • post announcement for winter writing camp