Another Year Older, And What Have I Done?

Ok, so I know that the title of this post (sorta) comes from a Christmas song.  However, this post is not about Christmas.  It's more like an update/holiday post.  "What holiday" you ask?  Only the best holiday ever!  Established 27 years ago and occurring annually...it's MY BIRTHDAY!  I know I share it with like nine million other people, but that just means we are having one huge, global party baby!  So, let's get this started.

One of the children from Sarah's Covenant Homes, India.

First, my update.  You may remember my 12 by 2012 list that I posted back in October.  I am proud to say that I accomplished quite a few things on my list.  The one item on my list that I was incredibly excited to do was to plan a mission trip.  You can read about it here.  I decided that I wanted to go to India and I registered with Adventures In Missions.  Unfortunately, the trip I wanted to go on, which was scheduled for April of this year, got cancelled.  This turned out to be a blessing though.  I am no where near my fundraising goal, and the money would have been due by this coming Wednesday.  With the holidays and some unfortunate family events, I got a bit side tracked.  There is a bright side to this story, however.  There is another trip to India in August of this year that I am registering for.  I need to be fully funded by June.  I believe this is absolutely possible and I am incredibly excited!  I am still selling prints of some of my photographs to help raise money for my trip.  If you want some neat art prints and to help me reach my goal, you can visit my store here.  I'm also toying with the idea of designing t-shirts to sell also.  More on that as it develops.

Now, about my holiday.  I've got two projects in the works to celebrate another year in my life.  The first, and the one I am most excited about:  I have decided to establish a new tradition.  Each year on my birthday starting with this year, I am going to perform a number of random acts of kindness equal to my age.  So this year, on my birthday, I intend to perform 27 random acts of kindness.  They can be small or they can be grand.  I can't wait to start showing love and kindness to complete strangers!  The second project, which is kind of a big undertaking, will be to take a photo a day to chronicle 1 year in my life.  So from my birthday this year until my birthday next year, I plan to take one picture of anything that captures the essence of that day in my life.  Soon, I'll start a gallery and post a link to it on my blog.  This year is gonna be spectacular...I can feel it!