Eight months ago, I bought $25 of loan credits through Kiva, a website that offers loans to people in developing countries. I picked a woman in Peru named Antonia to be my loan recipient. Antonia helps promote natural medicines in her home town, and was looking for a small loan to increase her medicine supply. Today she finished repaying her loan, so I get to pick another entrepreneur to support. This time it’s another woman from Peru named Maria Remigia Quispe De Benites. She’s 72 years old and wants to open a restaurant.
You can loan as little as $25, which is what I decided to do. I feel like I’m making a difference, and it’s fun to get the updates and see the progress of the loan repayment.
I’ve come to the conclusion that having two blogs is completely unnecessary, so I’ve merged SuspiriasCloset.com and Shanhale.com and set SuspiriasCloset.com to redirect to Shanhale.com. SO, if you came here looking for Suspiria’s Closet, you really are in the right place.
Since I’m here, and I’m writing, I might as well tell you that I’ve been writing for a website called FightMichigan.com. TJ and I have been going to an awful lot of Mixed Martial Arts Cage Fights, and I’ve decided to start writing about it, so that’s consuming a lot of my free time. It’s a good site, and we have a lot of ideas for it. It’s still in its infancy, but we’re hoping for big things in the future. If you’re in Michigan and interested in MMA, I think you’ll really enjoy it.
I’ve been waiting and waiting for the bananas in the dehydrator to get crispy like store bought dried bananas. It seems like it shouldn’t take three days. So, I started looking around, and I found out that store-bought dehydrated bananas are actualy DEEP FRIED and dried. yuck.
So, I guess my bananas are done. They’re a little spongy like dried apple, but they taste really really good.
The apples turned out good, and the nectarines turned out great. The Nectarines dried the fastest, then the apples, then the bananas. The hot peppers are still going. I probably should have pierced the skin or cut them in half. I’ll try that next time.
I recently worked on a project where I had to edit all the generic ‘dashes’ in the text to conform to some rules about when to use a hyphen, an en-dash, or an em-dash. I wanted to write about them here so they’ll be easier to find the next time I need them.
Hyphen: Used to join words or to separate syllables of a single word when the entire word won’t fit on a single line (most software does this for you). You would also use a hyphen to create a compound noun, verb, or adjective (mother-in-law,eye-opener, awe-inspiring, respectively).
Dashes: The en-dash is called en-dash because it is roughly the width of the letter ‘n.’ It’s used to separate numbers in a range (4–5 pieces), or to describe the relationship between two things (Father–daughter dance, Detroit–Chicago train). There is a keyboard shortcut when using most desktop publishing softwares: hold down ‘control’ and hit the ‘minus’ key. This doesn’t work in Wordpress, though. 
The em-dash is named because it’s roughly the width of the letter ‘m.’ It’s used to emphasize a parenthetical thought, or an interruption in dialogue instead of using an ellipsis. Examples:
- Please use my email address—shanhale at gmail dot com—for any correspondence.
- “I never said I wanted you to—,” she yelled into the phone, but he hung up before she could finish.
Em-dash also has a keyboard shortcut: Control + Alt + Minus.
Grammarbook.com has a nice page showing the differences between en-dash and em-dash.
Last week, I used my credit card reward points to get a food dehyrator. TJ and I planted so many tomatoes and hot peppers that there’s no way we’ll be able to use them all without some sort of preservation. I ended up getting the VegiKiln 6-tray dehydrator after reading a ton of articles and reviews for various dehydrators. I didn’t want one that was round, and I didn’t want one that dehydrated from the top or the bottom. This model dehydrates from the back, so all the trays get dried evenly and at the same time.
I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, because I want to have enough stuff to fill all the trays. I want to try fruits and vegetables. Dehydrate2Store has some really great videos on YouTube about dehydrating food, and she uses only lemon juice to prevent discoloration and to help prevent spoiling. I like that much better than Sodium bisulfite or some other poisonous-sounding chemical.
I can’t wait to try it out!
