A Wake Up Call + Blogging 101 + Asymmetrical Hemlines

Hey bloggers, it's MONDAY! Aren't you excited? Not really? Me either.

So first off I'd like to share with you a little "wake up call" that I experienced this morning.

I got in to work this morning and got a call from Joey who had been doing collections for his company all morning. He works for a plumbing company that also provides portable toilets to customers. His job today was to collect on past-due accounts and/or repossess the portable toilets if the customers couldn't pay him right away. These customers are usually small businesses or construction companies who need portable toilets on site.

Anyway, Joey called because he was pretty upset about one particular account this morning. He said he drove to an address of a customer to reclaim one of the portable toilets but he couldn't go through with it. He told me that he drove into a dirt road and found a makeshift house - it was basically a canopy tarp tied to a few trees. Now it's not uncommon on Guam for people to build these makeshift structures in the jungle but what really bothered Joey was that there were little tents around the structure as well. Children's tents - the ones we'd get our kids as a playhouse. There were little children there, about the age of our own kids, who were living in those tents. Joey said it looked as if these tents served as their rooms. I literally started crying when I heard this. I'm tearing now just trying to type it.

The customer on the account was the father of these children and the portable toilet was the only bathroom that they had. The man told Joey that his mother was the one paying for the toilet and that he would call her and ask her to get current with their account so that they could keep the toilet. Joey was supposed to reclaim it anyway, and in any other circumstance he would have - but he just couldn't do it for the sake of those children.

It hurts me to think of what that family has to go through just to get by. The fact that they have to rent a portable toilet is really heartbreaking for me and it is obviously hard for them to keep up with the payments. But because they have no sewage system, that is their only option right now. I wish I could give them a permanent toilet and a stable and secure home but I have my own family to take care of. I do plan to donate some items to that particular family in order to make their lives and their lifestyle a little more comfortable, especially for the children there. It may not be a lot, but hopefully it will mean something to them.

Thanks for listening to that little story, I just really had to share that because it affected me so much.

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Day 4 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenges us to analyze a top blog. This challenge is a good way to see how other blogs operate. It is best to choose a blog that relates to your own. When you analyze this blog, take everything into consideration.

What does the blog design look like? What kind of other pages does the blog offer? Is there one author or are there different contributors? How often is the blog updated? How accessible is the author? What is their average use of photos and images? Do they do series posts (fill in the blanks, tutorials, outfits, etc.)? Take a few notes to get inspiration from this blog and try to incorporate some of these points into your own blog.

*******EDIT*******

So I've decided to add another topic to today's post, that being: asymmetrical hemlines. This topic was inspired by Rach at So, hi.'s opinion post on asymmetrical skirts (here). I love asymmetrical hemlines on dresses and skirts but sometimes the way it is cut can be oh so unflattering to certain body types.

If you don't know what an asymmetrical hemline on a dress/skirt looks like, here are some examples of asymmetrical skirts/dresses:

I'll be doing another post later this week (probably tomorrow) on how to wear an asymmetrical dress/skirt, so stay tuned!