gtowey

With all the funds kiva has returned from the partially completed loans I was able to easily start 8 more and go from 35 to 43.

Well worth the effort of sticking to this and making regular contributions. I think that I’ve committed a more than trivial amount of capital to this project and although sometimes it’s hard to know if you’re really making a difference, I don’t think there are many better ways than by giving people the opportunity to help themselves.

10. Cobra : di Andrew Klavan This is a translation of an english book, it’s one of those true crime stories about an incident that happened around the San Francisco Bay Area, mostly in Berkeley / Oakland. It’s about a renegade gang of bikers and their crime sprees, the wayward daughter of a rich local resident (Honey Graham) who takes up with the gang. The father has aspirations to run for government and can’t have his daughter going around causing scandals so he hires a private investigator who is every bit as rough as the bikers to infiltrate the gang and rescue his daughter. Amid all the drama the twist is that the daughter is playing nearly everyone and is a cold blooded killer. All in all it was entertaining enough, if a bit tawdry.

28. Sofia Sulca Aguirre’s Group (business id=43711)
29. Leonidas Herrera (business id=40619)
30. Rosalba Guadalupe Cuesta Juarez (business id=44014)
31. Juana Quispe Quise’s Group (business id=43745)

never will.

I’ve got a great job now that I’d be crazy to give up, but eventually I want to do some serious wandering—hopping from one crew position to the next.

Sites like these really get me daydreaming, and leave me so impatient but it’ll really be better to take my time getting there. What I really need is a 10 year plan and then stick to it, but I’m not the most organized person in the world.
http://www.crewseekers.net/
http://sailingpoint.com/cc1.shtml
http://sailingclub.tribe.net/thread/20cc39d3-aa13-40a0-a677-d310c353c626

where it’s cold, maybe other places. I want to find something that’s cheap because it’s too remote, or maybe in another country where it’s undervalued.

location will be a big deal—not many good marinas in the south bay area.

Road trips sound great, but with the cost of gas these days they’re no longer the cheap way to travel—going by train keep you on the ground, give you more opportunities and stop at random places along the way. No idea how it costs compared to flying though, but eventually I’d like to explore the train option more.

Oddly enough it seems for European travel the myriad of budget airlines that make short hops seems like it’s making the traditional train travel less appealing.

24. Candelario Izquierdo
Grocery Store, Mexico

25. Rosa Victoria Perez De Palomino’s Group
Restaurant, Peru

9. Niente Vero Tranne Gli Occhidi Giorgio Faletti -
Wow, this took me so long to get through partly because I let this goal go for several months for lack of anything to read. Then I found this at a used book store. It seemed okay, but man was it horrible. It was a mystery/thriller of the lowest common denominator, all the cheesy elements and absurd plot twist commiserate with the genre. It got a little better starting about halfway thought but mostly I just wanted to get it over with. I suppose if you’re a fan of that type of book it would probably be palatable, but that happens to be my least favorite category. It’s also by far the longest I’ve read now weighing in at nearly 500 pages. Truly a slog-fest.

Now only 1 more to go, and I have the final book in hand.

but I’ve been too busy to keep up with logging them here. Just checking in.

So I’ve added stuff to the list, dropped the prices considerably and the bargain hunters have begun to swarm. Hoping I can get rid of the rest of it in the next couple weeks. If not then it’s just going to be free stuff.

I’ve totally accomplished this and I totally love swimming now. Learned a lot considering where I started, and looking back my goal should have really been “learn to swim” because now that I know what actual swimming feels like I see that at the beginning I started with essentially no skill whatsoever.
Now, instead of timidly accepting that the water as a fundamentally hostile environment, I look forward to diving in— that weightless gliding and feeling of peaceful relaxation of being completely immersed. I’ve crossed hurdles that I never thought I would alone, just by practicing it all eventually gets better.
I still have aspirations of improving my swimming, in the bay with the swells and in the ocean’s surf, orders of magnitude in difficulty beyond the clean an comfortable pool swimming I’ve been doing, but that might be a goal for another summer. I think I’ll not push my luck for now and keep enjoying my regular practice and the local pool.

I’m so excited that I get to make more loans with credit, the first ones I chose were pretty short term, and it’s surprising that it’s been 6 months already.

12. ALICIA PERZ GOMEZ – She wants to use the loan to get her own shop so that she can display her products there. She belongs to the Francelia 3 group along with dona Martha Navarro Diaz (grocery store) and dona Guadalupe Navarro Diaz (grocery store). They’ll combine the loan and buy merchandise at wholesale that they’ll then divide up to stock their stores.

13. Jose Hector is a 64 year old widower who has eight children. Jose is requesting a loan of US $650 to purchase additional merchandise to stock his store and meet his customers’ demand.

14. Martina Isabel Medina Carreon Martina does catering for special events and she has been asked to cater a wedding. She is asking for a loan of US $250 to buy the ingredients and supplies she will need to meet this order.

10. Taqueria los amigos – to buy a refrigerator and a new motor for the van where they sell their delicious tacos every morning. Can’t go wrong with tacos!

11. Sofia Ibarra Gomez – to buy seasonal groceries in order to increase the variety of products that she offers to improve service quality.

As of now, both loans are still in need!

8. Ti Con Zerodi Italo Calvino -
If I have to give a clever, concise review I’d say something like “This is an existential journey through time and being that challenges our perceptions of reality with fantastic accounts, and deep discussions of precise moments etched in time.”

It’s just plain weird. The main character’s name is Qfwfq and then it gets weirder. Moons made of soft marshmallow like substance, the origin of birds where continents drift like a raft on the sea, and then the final section of stories all involve moments in time, the author’s t0.

7. Il GGG di Rolad Dahl – This is another tranlation of the popular book for kids. Originally “The BFG” or the Big Friendly Giant, it becomes “Il Grande Gigante Gentile”. For anyone who hasn’t read it already when they were a wee one, it a charming story of an orphan girl who meets the only friendly giant, all the others are nasty brutes who eat people nightly. She and the gentile giant hatch a plan to stop them that involves going to the Queen of England. They succeed in trapping the 9 terrible giants in a hole and the protagonists become heroes to the world!

Well really just fun, I learned this a long time ago and I’ve actually had it come in usefull on occasion. I think I wanted to learn mostly because it’s one of those things you hear about or see in movies but wonder what it’s really like. So I looked up some resources on the Internet and found it was suprisingly simple. Once you understand how the locks work, then the technique is pretty obvious and it just takes a little practice to get the feel for it. I’ve even used it when accidently locking my keys in the house.
As far as tools, I only ever needed paperclips and saftey pins (though contrary to movies, hair clips would never work).

At least for me it has been. I got a book on swimming which has been fantastic. (haha yeah I know what a dork) It provides a slow progression of steps from holding your breath underwater to back and prone floating, then kicking etc. leading up to the first basic crawl stroke. At first I thought it was overkill but going slow has FINALY taught me to stop getting water up my nose in just about any position and on the times it does happen it’s not enough to throw off whatever I was doing. This is huge and it didn’t even take that long. So now every time I start practicing I start with those exercises to get comfortable in the water. The more I do it the better it gets.
Now my actual crawl stroke is horrible. I might have to go to a teacher for that because I’m just not quite getting the coordination of all the pieces. I mean I swim from one side of the pool to the other, but that’s because I can do that without really having to breathe much, fitting the breathing in so I can keep going is hard.

I took a CPR / AED / First aid course through the Red Cross. I was really expecting more, depth to the class— The CPR stuff was straightforward and usefull to know, but the first aid section was mostly just common sense methods and a whole lot of “call 911 immediately” In fact it really felt like the “how to call 911 class”. I was expecting to learn about how to treat serious injuries, something more than “wrap it in gauze and call the medics” That’s what I’d do anyway now. The AED (automatic defibullator) were interesting to see, but they’re basically idiot proof so it specifically does not take any special training to use one.
I asked the teacher about how to find more info and he recomended trying the “wilderness fist aid” which was about what to do when help is not a phone call away.
In any case, the test was painfully easy and I have my certification. The moral of my experience is to go take the CPR course they offer, but skip first aid. It’s nothing most people don’t know anyway.