Pen Porter

One of the ways I help my community is by supporting efforts to develop small businesses here. I once was the owner of one of the small businesses. I operated Pen Porter, a business communications service, from my home. But for a variety of reasons, I was not successful. That doesn’t mean others who have better ideas than mine cannot be. In attempting to help both myself and others,  I’ve joined two local organizations. The first of these was my local Jurupa Valley Chamber of Commerce, which I joined in 2012. All chambers of commerce work differently. What was and still is great about mine is it provides access to a network of people. Some of them gave my business writing service a try. My target was not the truly small business though. It was the businesses that are too big for the owner to do his or her own marketing, but too small for the owner to hire a marketing service. Even more of these business owners have purchased one or two of the historical fiction novels I have wr...

As promised a few days ago, I am writing this blog post about the Sandals Church Local Outreach Ministry. This is a ministry of Sandals Palm Avenue Church.   Don and I have been involved for about three weeks. We meet Thursday evenings and go to various parts of Riverside to provide food and hygiene items to homeless people. It’s not our first time ministering to homeless people through Sandals Church. From 2005 until 2007 we were involved with a team of Sandalites in the Path of Life Guest Chef program. On Sunday afternoons, before Don and I attended the old Sandals 7 p.m. service, we would go to a shelter for homeless families operated by a non-profit organization called Path of Life. We would prepare a meal for 25 to 50 people, and we would eat this meal with them. But some in our team grew weary of doing this and decided to take the team to the shelter for single men and women instead. Here we had to feed many more people, and the team often couldn’t join in the meal wit...

After doing some very rudimentary market research, I decided this blog will be about my personal experiences – such as they are. My research was to brainstorm different ways I could reactivate this blog with a Christian focus, and then to ask for feedback on Facebook as to which type of blog those who follow me there would like to see. Besides focusing on personal experiences, my ideas were a journalism style blog in which I would give practical and timely information (possibly by interviewing others who know more about a topic than I do), and a blog in which I would take passages of Scripture and show how to apply them to real life. I’ve had three friends respond to the question so far. One is a friend of more than 50 years. His feedback that I “look forward” instead of reflecting on my past. My other two friends are Jurupa Valley residents, and they both said they would read a blog about my life experiences. And they both know I’m still figuring out the direction my life will...

I'm posting for the first time in several years because I've been bitten by blogging fever again. But here's the deal. The only niche this blog is going to fill now is that it will be written from the perspective of a Christian woman. Because what has hit me is that "Christian" and "woman" are the two things that define me more than anything else. Close behind is wife, stepmother and grandmother. But notice I said "step." That means I had a long life (38 years to be specific) where the mommy thing wasn't something that defined me, and when that changed these stepchildren were 17 and 19. Now they are 37 and 38. I've been a fifth grandparent to their children since the first one was born almost nine years ago. No doubt about it there. But motherhood itself has never been my passion the way it is for some Christian mothers and grandmothers in the blogosphere. My own grandmother was still alive then, so that's why I started Grandmot...