Support4Change Blog

January 23, 2007

Category: Q-and-A Club

By Arlene Harder, MA, MFT
 

It’s done. I’ve finally uploaded the first weekly question for the Q-and-A Club. To learn more about this new feature of Support4Change, take a look at The Q-and-A Club: Community of the Curious and Courageous.

I hope you will choose to join what I am sure will be a growing number of people around the world who are willing to ask questions of themselves and others. No cost required. Just curiosity.

The first question arose last week when I was sorting pictures from a recent trip to New Zealand and couldn’t tell if the animal I had seen was a llama or an alpaca. All I knew is that both these animals provide lovely wool. Had to look it up on the Internet. What I learned is that of the genus lama there are four kinds: alpaca, guanaco, vicuna and the llama. Llamas are gentle, inquisitive (as are members of the Q-and-A Club), intelligent (ditto), and they want to please, which makes them good domestic pets or stock. Also learned that their offspring are called “cria,” a word I hadn’t heard before. I had heard of kittens, puppies, ducklings, lambs, calfs, gosslings, chicks, piglets, and dozens of other young animals. But never a cria.

This gave me an idea of a question, although I’ll acknowledge that it’s not an earth-shattering topic. I could probably live without knowing about crias. But my life is enriched because I know something I didn’t know before. And my animal horizons have expanded at least a little because of my curiosity.

[See introduction in Q-and-A Club question for Jan. 21 to Jan. 27.] 

Category: Expanding Your Horizons

NO END TO ANIMAL FACTS

To add to your knowledge of the animal kingdom, what animal would you like to learn more about, including the name of the offspring? What is it about that particular animal that would make it interesting to study, or about which you’d like to learn at least one or two facts?

Action Question: Will you take the time to learn about an animal this week? Why? [Note: In answering this question, you needn’t spend hours or get a degree in animal husbandry. You only need to learn something you didn’t know before.] 

If you want to get the Q-and-A Club questions sent to you in a monthly newsletter, subscribe to the free e-newsletter on Support4Change. I hope you find the Q-and-A Club as interesting to use as I have had fun creating it.

If you want to communicate with me other than by simply adding your comments to this blog, use the Contact Us page on Support4Change. 

[Incidentally, if you read this when I first wrote the entry on January 23, you would have found a more ambitious project. By reading the entry from January 30, you’ll see that I’ve cut back a little on the number of questions that will appear each week. Initially I thought I could handle three questions a week. Now see that is a bit much.]