Gather Little by Little

Photo by: Gio JL

I started Gather Little by Little on July 1st of this year after having written various personal finance articles on a very simple blogger.com blog. I had no readers other than my family, but enjoyed writing and sharing my ideas immensely. Being new to blogging, I really didn’t have any set goals nor did I really know where I wanted my blog to go. I was just writing about two things that were having a major positive influence in my life: my faith and getting control of my finances.

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See you on Wednesday the 26th!

Photo by: cmatulewicz

My favorite Christmas song of all time is Breath of Heaven by Amy Grant from her CD Home for Christmas. The music and lyrics truly make you feel the emotions felt by Mary as she walked the path towards the birth of our savior Jesus Christ. You’ll find the powerful lyrics below and here’s a link a short YouTube video featuring the song.

I have traveled many moonless nights,
Cold and weary with a babe inside,
And I wonder what I’ve done.
Holy father you have come,
And chosen me now to carry your son.

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Photo by: My Wife

I am really enjoying my vacation from my “real job”. I’m getting some time with my family and my kids and gaining additional appreciation for what my wife does and deals with while I’m at work. The real fun starts today at 3:00 when the kids come home and start their Christmas vacation.

I’ve also had some time knocking out a few items on the ever growing to-do list for Gather Little by Little. Some various changes I’ve made in the past few days you may notice are:

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Photo by: brykmantra

Ever since I rolled out my new theme, I’ve noticed that my RSS subscriber count seemed to flatline. I’ve been wracking my brain for weeks trying to figure out why, explaining it away to the holidays, normal feedburner fluctuations, etc.

I finally decided to ask my M-Network buddies for their help and plonkee found the problem immediately. Seems my fancy new RSS graphic wasn’t working in Internet Explorer 6 and readers couldn’t subscribe! That would explain it huh? I knew from one of readers (Rob) that the subscription count wasn’t displaying correctly in IE6, but had no idea clicking on the RSS graphic did nothing. I’ve changed the RSS graphic to a more standard format until I can figure out why IE6 doesn’t like my more fancy version.

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Photo by j / f / photos

A reader named bmhumphries made the an interesting comment and asked a great question recently on my How to make paying your year end property taxes painless:

I have a question for you and your readers. How many separate accounts do you have in you on-line banks? I had to call ING recently and asked the customer service if I had too many. (I have 8). He said the most he has seen is 30!). It makes sense though to have a separate one for each non-monthly expense. I have one lumped into “Future Liabilities” and keep a spreadsheet. That has 9 annual expenses in the one ING sub account. I have often wondered if I should split them out into their own sub account in ING. It would make it easier to track, no spreadsheet work to do.

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The first time I heard MercyMe was on our local Christian radio station. The station was playing their first big hit, I can only imagine. The song is powerful, and both Bart’s voice and the band’s sound was unique. They quickly become my favorite band. Not only were they incredibly good, they seemed to somehow escape that non-professional sound I was used to. MercyMe seemed to be the first band to actually sound as good in quality as popular secular bands.My personal favorite song by MercyMe is Homesick found on their Undo CD released in April of 2004. Here are the lyrics:

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Once again, this year just seems to be flying by. It will soon by Christmas day soon following by the start of 2008.

Top 10 commentators for November:

1. Justin
2. Mrs. Micah
3. Lynnae @ Being Frugal
4. Pinyo
5. plonkee
6. Patrick
7. Minimum Wage
8. LC
9. Laura
10. editec

For those of you with blogs, I’ll stumble a post or two from your blogs to say thanks for being a top-commentator!

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Top Referrers for November:

1. The Simple Dollar
2. Being Frugal
3. I’ve Paid Twice For This Already…
4. Moolanomy
5. The Digerati Life

Picture by eugene

Just a quick post to wish all of you a Happy Thanksgiving. I won’t be posting an article today as I’ll be spending time with my family and eating way too much. I sincerely hope you have a wonderful and blessed day. I would encourage you to spend some time with your families sharing the things you are thankful for in your life. Oh, and keep a few Pepcid ACs handy ;-)

Here are a few Bible verses for Thanksgiving:

Psalm 107:1 – “Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.”

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I finally bit the bullet and established a profile on Facebook. I’m still learning the ins and outs, and not exactly sure just what to do with it yet. Here’s a link to my facebook profile if you would be interested in adding me as a friend.  So, maybe I’ll see you on there and hopefully you facebook gurus out there can teach me a thing or two about it!