Ok... been feeling like a deer in headlights all morning handling mini-crisis after mini-crisis and getting a proposal out the door. But now I'm outta here!!! Off to Belgium for 10 days of relaxing with my girlfriend's family. Deep sigh o' relief....

I finally had a chance to introduce more Winnipeggers to TIG yesterday. A friend of mine asked me to give a talk on "Young Women and Social Entrepreneurship" to her honours sociology course on Women and Society at the University of Winnipeg. She wanted me to talk a bit about my own experiences/background - something I don't do very well. So, I spent as much time as possible talking about other cool young women I admire like Jennifer Correiro, Wendy Kopp, Jennifer Kushell and Suzana Murni. The students seemed very interested in how they could get involved in changing the world - I pointed them to TIG. We'll see how it goes....

A friend of mine (Mark Surman, president of The Commons Group) gave me some great advice yesterday...

I was explaining to him that I had been procrastinating like crazy on a couple of large, interesting projects that scare me to death. His response, "Sometimes you just have to jump into the volcano. You can't just stand on the edge try to dip your toe into it."

Thanks, Mark.

Sometimes realizations crop up in the weirdest places...

It was a gorgeous afternoon in Winnipeg yesterday (sunny and 8 C), so I left work early to head home with my partner to plastic over the screen windows on the porch before winter hits hard. I wasn't sure which to be more stressed about - not getting the plastic up while Linda is in town to help (she's an operations management trainee with the railway and is working in Scarborough for 3 months) or not getting a proposal sent to the G8 Secretariat to collaborate on a Web communications strategy.

At one point, as I was stapling the plastic to the wooden screen frame, I was thinking about the fact that maybe one of the reasons young people make such great activists is because they don't have to stand outside in the freezing cold repairing their house. After all, how am I supposed to change the world if I've got to spend my time hanging the damn plastic?

Then it hit me and I started laughing. Why do we get involved in activism and training and communications? To get people to take action. At the end of the day, it all comes down to SOMEONE having to hang off a ladder to put the plastic on their windows to keep the drafts out and reduce their energy consumption. And I can't really advocate for others things that I'm not willing to do myself. It's good to be reminded of that sometimes.