Journal: Faith Communities & Homelessness

Lead by Congressman Keith Ellison, 5th District
More about it, click here...

I need to write more about this later, but this was a very good gathering of people of different faiths, and communities coming together to have more discussion about homelessness.

I don't have time right now to write all I want, but I learned one thing: I need to speak up more in meetings like this.

Journal: Mobile Blog / Threats

An encounter with Mike/Sam this am. Several weeks ago, said to me "I want you dead."

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p.s. This morning I ran into a person who's been threatening, on a regular basis, for a good ten months.  Meaning, this person (goes by 2 names, Mike and/or Sam, waiting to get his full name for legal reasons) was in a bloody fight, in which I was involved in breaking up.  There's much much more to this story, or situation than I'm saying, or want to say here.  Suffice it to say, this person tried to apologize and act friendly this morning in front of a person we both know.  It was completely inadequate given the nature and seriousness of his threatening behavior over the past months and the rage he has directed towards me.

I've kept myself from engaging him to avoid drama, and worse (I do have 6-7 years of martial arts training), and still not act like anything was okay.  I certainly did not accept his attempt at an apology, because it was essentially a lie, convenient, manipulative.

I'm blogging this for a couple of reasons:

1. This kind of stuff is part the process of building CSR Direct Services, and the CSR web development projects.  It's part my story, my experience doing this work.
2. It's also fertile ground for social discussion.  What kinds of situations do you find yourself in, how did you get there, were there ways to avoid it?  But also, do you stand up when the situation warrants it.  Do you know how to stand up or speak up in a difficult situation?  Do you know what to say, but not confident enough to you liking?

These are all very good questions that each of us needs to ask.  Because life is.... life.  Unpredictable, even for the most safety conscious.

This was certainly another opportunity to see how I handle situations like this.  And, for the most part, I feel good about what I've been doing.  It's fairly difficult to know how to handle situations like this until one is in it.  There are too many unforeseen feelings and memories that can and will be triggered, even for the most healthy.  Especially for men.  Yet, society in general does a very poor job of preparing both Men and Women to handle difficult situations.

For me, I'm very glad for the decades of personal work and experience that's prepared me for stuff like this.  I remember deliberately facing my demons and weaknesses, decades ago.  So, I pull from many aspects of my life experiences and skills.

That's all for now, but stay tuned!

*p.s. means that this is an additional entry after posting from my phone, an experience or subject on which I need or want to write more.

Journal: Mobile Post / MOA

Down at the MOA this am. Cold out on this bright Saturday morning. Have yet to break out my winter parka, gonna need it.
Walkers down at the mall.

Journal: Mobile blogging

This is a test cell phone post  (my first)

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As of today, I now have the ability to post short messages on this blog via my cell phone.  It's a simple Sprint Sanyo cell phone, that is actually an older style, but it works just fine.

As I see it now, the best use of this feature is to immediately report or post regarding a current event, and then expand on that topic later.  This will be especially helpful when learning of a new service organization I've not heard of before.

I also foresee posting a note on something that needs to, or would be better researched further before posting a short, cryptic note with no background, or clarity.  Please take this into consideration when

Journal: Priority is Design

Right now, it's still the design that's my priority, my focus, not so much the content.  The purpose of the content to this point has been to help develop the design, which I've been happy with so far.  Although, it has been slow and sometimes arduous.  It seems I get to a certain place where I like how it looks, start going over all the current pages to get them cleaned up and looking right, and I change something on the current page.  Tweak it just a bit more, make it just a bit better.  Then, I have to go back to all the previous pages and tweak them the same way.  As it stands now, I have so many different tweaks on different pages, I need to go over all the pages to match them all up.  So, at this point, I need to pick one page (and not the home page, since it is a bit different) standardize it, maybe even draw out all the different elements in a graph book I have, and us it as a template for the rest of the pages.  It will be very good to be methodical and disciplined about this process.  My creativity needs to be on a leash, otherwise I wind up in the same boat I'm in now.

Currently, the main tweak change or modification has been making the horizontal navigation bar (7 buttons) a lite blue.  And then, the mouse over color would reflect the current subject matter. And, moving the 'bookmark and share' buttons to the middle of the navy blue vertical navigation bar.

Yes, this is a static (a word I don't like using) website, where every page is custom, or can be customized.  That's the nature of this software I'm using and works just fine for my purposes.

• www.csrmpls.info

Now that I've started this blog, I need to prioritize and block my time even more.  At some point I need to create a spreadsheet to keep track of all the pages, and the work or updates that's been done on each of them.