Aude Aliquid Dignum ("Dare Something Worthy")

A few weeks ago I wrote about a friend of mine who went to Haiti with a medical relief team in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake. I was inspired to find a way to help and decided to donate my proceeds from my "My Life Is A Soap Opera..." Zazzle products to Doctors Without Borders in her honor.

Since I posted that blog entry I've been tweeting links to those products daily with information about this fund raising effort.

Crystal Chappell was kind enough to show her support by retweeting my links to products featuring her character, Carly Manning, from Days Of Our Lives, one I did for her husband, Michael Sabatino's character, Alan and others. I was also retweeted by Kim Turrisi, Nadia Bjorlin, and other members of Team Venice.

My links were also retweeted by Eden Riegel (ex-Bianca, AMC & new Heather, Y&R), Carolyn Hennessy (Diane, General Hospital), Martha Byrne (ex-Lily, As The World Turns and creator of the webseries Gotham), and Nancy Lee Grahn (Alexis, General Hospital) and then retweeted by people who follow them on Twitter.

Special thanks to soap opera bloggers We Love Soaps, SoapTown USA, and Soap Opera Network for helping to spread the word, too. And a special shout out to Destini of the Big Purple Dreams message board and OutViews.com for her many retweets in support of this project!

My proceeds for "My Life Is A Soap Opera..." products came to a total of $80 and as I tweeted about that last night I began to get tweets from others who wanted contribute, some with matching donations. Within just a couple of hours, the total amount gathered in this fund raising effort came to $415! If you'd like to see what this money can do, read this.

There were many, many individuals who helped spread the word about this fund raiser on Twitter and other places, too, and I couldn't possibly name them all. I hope that you will accept this collective "Thank you!" from the bottom of my heart! My friend who inspired all of this in the first place is currently unavailable for comment but I can't wait till she hears how it all turned out!*

Stay tuned...maybe I'll do another fund raiser someday!



*My thanks to @drcrusher39 for her sacrifice and service and special thanks also to @DrLisaThompson for who helped encourage this effort from the beginning.

ADDENDUM, 3/20/10

I got the following message from my friend, @drcrusher39 on Twitter, who inspired this fund raiser:

@donnadpool thanks for all your efforts! I made a $500 donation to match. Luv u!

She also mentioned that she's back in Haiti for a while "...to help a friend." She took her sisters and their husbands with her this time.

Did I mention that she's an amazing lady?

So, that brings the total for this fund raiser to $915.00! Just a few soap opera fans, trying to make a difference in the world!

Making a Difference ...One Soap Viewer At A Time

Time for my report on my fund raiser for Doctors Without Borders! During the month of February the "My Life Is A Soap Opera..." sales totaled $349.35. Now I only get 10-20% of that, since the rest goes to Zazzle for the cost of producing the products themselves. So the total of my proceeds for the month comes to $62.94. I'm going to round that up to $70.00. This may not sound like much money to some of you, but it's $70.00 more than I would have been able to give without your support! And a little bit can go a long way. According to the Doctors Without Borders website, here are some examples of what even small donations can do:

$35 Two high-energy meals a day to 200 children

$50 Vaccinations for 50 people against meningitis, measles, polio or other deadly epidemics

$70 Two basic suture kits to repair minor shrapnel wounds

$100 Infection-fighting antibiotics to treat nearly 40 wounded children

Because Zazzle offers a 30 day return policy, I have to wait until the end of March before the money for these sales is cleared and comes to me a couple of weeks later. But I don't want to wait that long to send it in. I've decided that once I get my next Zazzle paycheck (which is actually for my December sales), on or before March 15th, I'll go ahead and send the donation on to Doctors Without Borders.

So, as long as we're waiting, I'm going to extend my fund raiser those two extra weeks! My proceeds for any "My Life Is A Soap Opera..." items sold through March 15 will be included in this fund raiser! Also, if you're interested in pledging a matching donation, please let me know!

I've added a lot of new items to my Zazzle shop, more of your favorite soap opera characters for all your favorite shows ... including the men, too... and there are more to come, so please keep shopping! Oh, by the way, I do take requests if there's a character or product you want that's not already in my shop.

And a special thank you to all who retweet my links!! I love you!! Feel free to share them with all your friends on Facebook, soap opera messages boards, any where you like!

Who says watching soap operas doesn't make a difference in the world?!


Edited on 3/16/10 to add:

My total now comes to $80! As soon as I tweeted this news, I got another matching pledge to go along with the one you see in the comments here. Then another one came in. And then somebody pledged 10% of the final amount, too! More donations are still coming! I'll continue to tweet about this tonight and in the morning I'll post a new blog entry with the final total!

How about that... just a bunch of soap opera fans, buying some fun stuff about their favorite characters, and Doctors Without Borders is getting over $400...so far!

(To read my original post about this fund raiser and get the whole story, click here.

New Horizons In Technology

I am nothing if not cutting edge. I come by it honestly, too. When I was a little girl my dad started a new business and turned half of our garage into an office. I'd come in from school and help him sort punch cards for his database of subscribers and operate a mechanical collator to help with his mailings. He had a wonderful gadget for dictating letters that would record his voice to thin plastic disk just like those single 78s you'd get at the record store only a little thinner and kind of floppy.

That was cutting edge in 1965!

I've always been curious about what's new in technology. I'll read up on the latest gadgets and all their features and figure out which ones would be right for me. That way I'll know exactly what to buy when my Publisher's Clearinghouse check comes in.

Hey, it could happen.

My husband and I bought the very first Apple Macintosh computer in 1984 with its whopping 128k of RAM and its single 400k floppy drive. Who needs a hard drive anyway? We had matching Palm IIIe PDAs before most of our friends had anything like that. We could often be seen beaming important contact information or documents back and forth to each other.

That's not to say we've ever made a habit out of buying the first and the best new items on the market. Except for the Macintosh, which we knew would last us for years. And we did, indeed, use it for years, long after upgrades and newer models had passed us by.

Now I've given up the Palm Zire 72 I've been using for years and I'm getting used to the Palm TX that once belonged to my husband (he graduated to an Ipod Touch he got for Christmas). The Palm TX has a faster processor, larger screen, and more memory. One thing I'm really enjoying about it is the portable bluetooth keyboard my husband had for this. Now I can sit in my rocking chair, put my feet up on my footstool and write my blog entries (like this one) much more comfortably than sitting at my desktop computer. It doesn't matter if it's not cutting edge, as long as it gets the job done.


Who knows, maybe I'll be inclined to write more often. I might even get started on one of those books I've still got tucked away in my head....

Hey, it could happen!

Blizzard of '10 Part 3

I don't know how many more inches of snow we got during the blizzard that blew through here Tuesday and Wednesday. It was impossible to take a simple measurement because of the winds and drifting snow. Here's how it went (click on the photos to see them full size)....

On Tuesday, 2/09/10, the day started like this:

By 10:00pm it looked like this:

And it ended like this, around midnight:

We slept late Wednesday morning and as I walked to the front door around 11:00 to look out the window here's what I saw:

Outside that door, the world looked like this:

At about 1:30, after a few more hours of heavy snow and wind gusts of up to 40 mph here's what it looked like:

And at 3:30:

Here's a view of our townhouse community's parking lot... notice the icicle on the right. The snowdrift was as high as our window.

We were pleasantly surprised to see that our evening paper had been delivered by late afternoon. But with snow still blowing in 30-40 mph winds, you have to ask yourself, "How badly do I want to read that paper...and how long will it take me to dig it out later...?"

The snow had stopped by 9:00pm and the winds had died down so my husband decided to start looking for our front walk and that newspaper:

The snowdrifts to the left and right of our door:

To give you a better feel for the storm, the blowing snow, the high winds, here's a video montage of it all, shot from my windows, front & back, downstairs and upstairs...

Blizzard of '10 Part 2

I took a little walk out in front of my house yesterday afternoon with my daughter. My camera's battery was recharging (gotta remember to get a spare someday!) but I took these with my phone. Keep in mine that my daughter is about 5ft 10in tall, so that will put things in perspective for you. Oh, by the way, they're predicting more snow for tomorrow. They say we could get as much as 10 inches. Oh boy.

Blizzard of '10

This is one we'll be telling the next generations about.

It started snowing at my house near Annapolis, Maryland at around 11am on Friday, February 5, 2010. It didn't stop snowing until after 10pm Saturday night.

Here are two photos taken from my front door and my back door a little before 2:00pm on Friday:

At some point Friday afternoon my husband shoveled about 4 inches of snow off our deck. Here are photos from about 5:00pm on Friday:

This was a little before 10:00pm:

I took more pictures just before I went to bed a little after midnight:

I woke up around 3:30am and took these pictures:

Here's what I saw when I woke up Saturday morning, about 7:30am:

About 1:00pm Saturday he decided he'd better try to clear the deck so the weight of the snow didn't damage it. We measured 24 inches of snow.

Then he tackled the front walk:

The last light of day, Saturday, February 6, 2010:

My husband did a little calculating, based on the size of our deck, the depth of the snow and the average weight of wet snow like this was and figured out that he had shoveled 2.5 tons of snow from our deck. It had to go somewhere (note the height of the lawn mower handle on the left):

Let me encourage you to read my husband's blog entry, "Little Townhouse on the Peninsula" for today, . He has some photos of his own and some wise words to share.

It's Only a Soap Opera ...for Haiti

I have a friend, a doctor, who has been working with the relief efforts in Haiti the past few weeks. I've actually never met her in person. We met on Twitter because of our common interest in a soap opera. Over the past few months we've shared laughs and observations on parenting and seen each other through the illness and death of loved ones. If anyone says that online friends aren't real friends, I beg to differ.

My friend will be leaving Haiti in a matter of hours and others will take up the work there as it will surely continue for the foreseeable future. I was thinking of what I could possibly do to help the cause. I’m not a doctor and I’m never going to have much spare cash to give to relief efforts, either. But I think I’ve come up with something that could make a difference and at the same time honor my friend and the work she’s been doing with Doctors Without Borders.

I came up with a series of designs a few months ago that I’ve expanded into a full line of products in my Zazzle shop. It started with the phrase “My life is a soap opera…What would Erica Do?” That’s referring, of course, to Erica Kane, the character on All My Children, played so beautifully by Susan Lucci for the past 40 years. I came up with some other phrases, all beginning with “My life is a soap opera…”, adding other characters from Guiding Light, One Life to Live, General Hospital, and the Young & the Restless.

Recently when Crystal Chappell (Carly Manning/DOOL, Olivia Spencer/GL) was on The Bonnie Hunt Show, Bonnie did a comedy bit during the opening of the show, playing her own evil twin who was aghast at the awful things Crystal’s character had done on Days of Our Lives. Crystal picked up on that during her interview, too, and they had a good laugh. (You can see a clip of the interview here.)

The next day when Crystal was on Twitter I sent her the link to this mug:

My Life is a Soap Opera #2 Mug by donnapool

Crystal saw it and tweeted back, “Hilarious! I love it!” Apparently quite a few people took a look at my Twitter profile page to see what I’d said to her that was so hilarious and clicked on that link, too, because that mug was among the Top 10 Most Viewed Mugs on Zazzle that day!

My conclusions... you can reach a lot of people through Twitter and there are a lot of soap opera fans out there.

So, here’s what I’ve decided to do. From now through the end of February, I will be tweeting links to all my Zazzle products in the “My Life Is A Soap Opera…” line and hopefully my fellow soap opera fans will be retweeting them. I will keep track of all the sales of those items and send all my proceeds to Doctors Without Borders to be used in their relief efforts in Haiti.

I know that every dollar makes a difference in Haiti right now. Using these designs for a fund-raising project like this makes sense because so many soap opera stars go out of their way to get involved in charity projects. For example, recently, Nancy Lee Grahn got on the phone and gathered several of her soap star friends on very short notice to meet fans in person at the Rose Bowl and take donations for Haiti. (I have a “…What Would Alexis Do?” design in my Zazzle shop for the character she plays on General Hospital.)

And who knows, maybe I’ll find some other soap fans out there who will offer to match the amount I bring in and Doctors Without Borders will benefit even more.

So look for me on Twitter… I’m DonnaDPool …and if you see my tweets with these links, please take a look, and if you like what you see and want to buy it, know that all of my earnings from each sale (above Zazzle’s cost for producing the item) will be going to help the people of Haiti. I’ll be adding new items throughout the month. Oh, and I do take requests so if your favorite soap character isn’t represented, just leave a comment here.

I’ll be sure to keep you updated here on this blog.

Thank you.