A HOPEFUL New Year!!!

Despite missing my friends, Dave and I had a sweet New Years.   I was grateful to receive text messages and photos from my friends on New Years.   I missed them and the "paella on the beach" tradition we'd forged together.

I shared with them my hopes to practice more jazz piano songbook tunes on my keyboard, to recommit to healthier life habits and once again I renewed my commitment to develop the web services for the Feel the Joy nonprofit.     Between Susanville and Feel the Joy, it’s been ten years of intentions.   

“The mind of a person plans his way, But the LORD directs his steps”. - Proverbs 16:9 

I saw this rainbow over my community between one of the winter storms we had here the first week of January.  I saw it as a sign of hope for the new year.   

"I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth." - Genesis 9:13

Each of those past ten years have unveiled unknown surprises not so unlike James Stewart in the movie "It's a Wonderful Life".   Each year something has turned out differently than I'd anticipated it would.  I'm sure this year will also have it's surprises.   At some point, I will write all of those twists and turns down; they are why I chose to refer to the "wild goose' in the blog's name.   

This year, I'm moving Feel The Joy to Nevada.

This year, Dave's been teaching me the latest Amazon Web Services features and Jump Boxes in order to enable me to securely develop on Ubuntu instances.  I'm picking Python and Django back up from where I left it off before the pandemic started; I'll be developing the Feel The Joy platform using those tools.  If you have these skills and share my passion to build a community of people who help each other, I invite you to join my Feel The Joy slack community.  Initially, I will simply be building out the capability for people to create an account.  From there, I plan to create a system to enable people to specify the passions they care about and what resources they have to share such as skills, time, food or clothing.  From there, I would match them with either people in need, people who share their passions or nonprofits that have programs directed at those concerns.   

Once the Feel The Joy nonprofit has been reestablished in Nevada, we can once again facilitate financial contributions to nonprofit agencies.