Updates on Some Old Friends

The weather has been pretty spastic the last couple of days. Yesterday we had serious downpours all day, which turned into snow sometime in the overnight hours. The Weather Channel website, in its infinite wisdom, kept emailing me every two hours to say that it was raining and we were in a flood watch...yet when my buddy Jess checked our zip code on the site last night, it was "partly cloudy." Bear in mind that this "partly cloudy" report came while she and I were driving home from the mall where we both work, making our way through driving rain and diminished visibility.

But I digress. What I really came here to talk about today are some updates I've received from friends of this blog -- that is, organizations and people who have been profiled in past posts. Because hey, don't you hate when something gets mentioned once and then never shows up again? That annoys me in a story and it would annoy me in my blog too. So let's see what's new with a few of the past subjects.

Let's briefly check in with Katie, the adorable little girl who, last fall, became the standard bearer for the united front of geekdom. Her school had rallied and organized a "Proud to Be Yourself" day, when everyone was encouraged to be honest about things they like. She seems to be doing well. Meanwhile, the experience of the matter has inspired Katie's mom to write a book about bullying. Check out this post in Carrie's blog to see if you might be able to assist with her research.

In December I told you all about FreeKibble and its feline counterpart, FreeKibbleKats. As I mentioned in that post, these sites -- where you can click on daily trivia questions to donate free food to shelter animals -- were founded by a girl named Mimi. Since the founding of the site, Mimi's been getting a lot of mail from other kids who want to know how they can make a difference too. To that end, in January she started her own blog where she posts all kinds of interesting stuff. Visit Mimi's blog to win the monthly contest for a donation to your local animal shelter, to find recipes for dog treats, to read about shelters and and shelter animals, and to view pictures of ridiculously adorable baby animals -- among other things. She's on a roll and picking up steam; let's encourage her on the way.

On a final note: back in January, I wrote a post about Operation Beautiful, an ongoing campaign to encourage people to ignore the media and instead see themselves for how beautiful they really are. I've since been following the founder, Caitlin, over on her Twitter account.

Today, Caitlin shared with us all a video produced by a guy named Peter. Covering Lady Gaga's "Born This Way," he promotes both the actual Operation Beautiful campaign and the spirit of the project. So I'm going to leave you all with the embedded video. If you have your own blog, LiveJournal account, Twitter feed, Facebook, or anything where you can pass this on, please do. It's funny, it's fun, Peter's a great singer, and the message is a good one.