High-five!

Things Anne and I learned during surfing lessons last weekend:

1. How to catch a party wave. Not much of a party when you aren’t skilled enough to keep the boards from crossing onto each other after about 7 seconds on the wave. More like a party that gets broken up at 10:00pm then an all-night rager.

2. Ocean water forced up your nose at ungodly speeds makes all the food you eat for hours afterward taste like you are eating off of a salt lick.

3. Board shorts stay on when falling off of your board. Bikini bottoms don’t.

4. If you are waist-high in water and everyone around you is in knee-deep water then you are probably going to be swallowed up by a rip tide. Swim parallel to the shore, people!

5. The sting ray shuffle. Our surf instructor immediately negated this safety tip by letting us know he never does the ray-deflecting shuffle. And given how much effort it takes to drag an eight foot board against the waves, we didn’t pay much mind to our footwork.

6. Surf instructors are single-handedly keeping the high-five alive.

Sharing is caring

I saw a story on "60 Minutes" over a year ago that really inspired me. It was about a micro-lending organization called Kiva. The founder was on a trip to an African country, Kenya I believe, when she came up with an idea to help the impoverished communities she was seeing. The idea is simple, loan relatively small amounts of money to people trying to take their businesses to the next level and hopefully that will allow them to move further out of poverty. After thinking about making loans for over a year, I finally decided to log in.

My first two loans went to a jewelry maker in Peru and a photographer and tortilla maker in Nicaragua. Both recipients are hoping to make a better life for their children and hopefully these loans will help them with that worthy goal. Once you loan to a person you can see which other lenders were also moved by that particular story and decided to give to them as wall. Kiva has over $12 million in ended loans with only a 1.6% default rate. Sounds like a safe investment to me.

So if you are wanting to give back to the world but aren't sure how to, check out Kiva's Web site and see if it's for you.