catnip and coffee

Charitable causes. There are ever so many aren’t there? Everyone has in their mind what they prefer in a “good cause.” For me it almost always comes down to children. I also tend to gravitate toward local charities like soup kitchens. It’s a hard thing to look at your own happy, healthy, energetic child and know there are kids just like him in your own community who go to school, or to sleep without any food in their bellies.

Now, look beyond your neighborhood and the bigger picture is such a harsh, overwhelming reality it’s difficult to comprehend. USAtoday ran an article this morning about the rising cost of food around the world this year and the terrible consequences for the World Food Programme.

I heart the World Food Programme. I have for some time now. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of extra cash to send them. I do, however, have downtime in the evenings when I like to blog surf and play computer games. My favorite games are solitaire majong, solitaire scrabble, and freecell. Exciting? Not. Well, they aren’t supposed to be, they’re supposed to relax me and work my brain a bit, you know, to help with my little memory problem…

Enter Free Rice. My newest online addiction. It’s a little word game, and for every word you get right you’re giving grains of rice to the World Food Programme. How cool is that? And seriously, once you start you can’t stop. Go on, learn a few new words and you be surprised how fast the rice grains grow.

edited to add:

For those of you using this post as a portal to get to Free Rice - I’ve made it easier for you by adding it to my links on the left hand side of the main page!