The good guys thread

[kuhio98]

The Daily Treat: Shelter Dog Saves Family 2 Weeks After Adoption

Hunter the dog is more than just an adorable face.

Just two weeks after finding a forever home, the husky-mix puppy thanked his adoptive family by rescuing them right back.

The McLarty family, of the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe Woods, say they were awakened around midnight on March 5. Their new 3-month old dog, Hunter, was whining, and so puppy mom Jill McLarty simply thought he needed to go outside.

"She was surprised that Hunter simply sat outside and continued to whine," read a statement from the Michigan Humane Society, according to CBS Detroit.

When Hunter returned to the family bedroom, the dog refused to let up, even as McLarty and her husband tried to sleep. Finally, she got up after the dog was anxiously running in circles.

The pup then led McLarty into the kitchen, where she discovered a gas burner from the stove had been left on – not enough to light it, but enough to emit dangerous fumes, which the family estimated had been escaping for the nearly six hours that passed since they had prepared dinner the night before.

"When she turned the light on, she saw Hunter sitting next to the stove and noticed that one of the gas stove burners was on low, without a flame," the Humane Society said in a statement.

No surprise here: The dog's family was grateful for their furry hero.

"He is the first dog we ever adopted [from the Michigan Humane Society], and I would recommend it to anybody," proud puppy dad Tim McLarty said. "And as cliché as it sounds, the life you save may save yours."

[Karen]

Good boy, Hunter!

[kuhio98]

Purls of wisdom: A daughter finds relief for grief in knitting

At the end of 2008, the unthinkable happened to C.J. Arabia. Her mother — the healthy one who lived on baked chicken and broccoli and who wouldn’t let her kids use a microwave — was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer and given three months to live.

To ease her through grueling chemotherapy, Arabia’s mother took up knitting. When she passed away at 59, Arabia’s brothers gave her their mother’s leftover yarn to keep, though she had never knitted before. But she absolutely knew that was the yarn’s purpose. “I stared at it in the corner,” she said. “It’s weird how a bag of yarn can give you so many feelings.”

So after several months of waiting to start and when YouTube tutorials didn’t do the trick, she took a local knitting class in Los Angeles and has “kind of been knitting excessively ever since.”

There have been hats, scarves, masks for dogs, mittens — anything that strikes her fancy — and she doesn’t follow patterns when making her artwork. The 44-year-old has documented herself knitting everywhere from the Grand Sumo Tournament in Japan to castles in Europe. Her designs are whimsical (a "Clockwork Orange" ski mask), intricate (multicolored hooded capes) and practical (soft, knitted bookmarks). She has given herself carpal tunnel syndrome from all of the knitting, or maybe it was the purling.

But most of all, she has healed her grieving heart. “For me, knitting is like a meditation. It almost takes me out of my head when I can be sad or stressed or anxious … it helps so much.”

She read somewhere that knitting and meditation light up the same parts of the brain, and though she had always had trouble meditating, she finds that “knitting is a way to just kind of float. You’re floating with the waves, just bobbing up and down. That’s how the stitches are for me. That’s all you can think about.”

Arabia’s family and friends have been the beneficiaries of her habit — “If you know me, you have something knitted from me.”

She gives away almost everything she makes. “People tell me I should sell my stuff — and occasionally I do — but I give the vast majority away,” Arabia said. “For one, nobody wants to pay what a hand-knitted item, made with really good natural fibers, is actually worth.”

Yarn is purchased anywhere from $36 a ball to $60 a ball and up through her travels, though her favorite store is Knitty City on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which she calls her “Vatican.”

“Going into a yarn store for me is like kids walking into a toy store,” Arabia said, adding, “I smell the yarns, sometimes I smell the sheep or llama or alpaca or hay. The more natural the fiber, it has little bits of dirt and hay. To me, they’re lucky and I leave them in.”

No scrap is wasted — she will use colorful odds and ends to create vibrant designs. And knitting has become so natural that Arabia doesn’t have to see what she’s doing. “I can feel in the dark if I have made a mistake,” she said. “I can go back and fix the mistake without looking.”

She does have a following in certain Hollywood circles. Her boyfriend is film and television actor Mather Zickel (of “Rachel Getting Married” and recently Showtime’s “Masters of Sex.”) A longtime friend is Janeane Garofalo. She has other famous friends, not that she’ll drop any names. “I live in L.A.,” she said, “it’s just my friends happen to be celebrities.”

While Arabia is a Web engineer by day, she has turned knitting into a way to give back and help others. She has knitted with residents at a local nursing home, many of whom speak languages other than English. “What they all spoke was knitting,” she said. “I could help them with their stitches and it didn’t matter what they spoke.”

In addition, she visits area cancer patients and knits for them. “I can’t cure cancer,” she said. “I can’t cure the pain that my mom was going through. But I can make someone who is suffering a hat and talk to them about colors for a day.”

She creates blankets and beds for shelter cats and dogs through SnugglesProject.org. And she’ll teach anyone who wants to learn how to knit — as long as they show up on time.

“People come up to me when I’m knitting in public and ask me about it. They tell me stories of their grandmas who taught them to knit but they haven’t done it since they were a kid but always think of getting back into it.

“I always encourage them to get back into it and tell them how I learned,” she said. “It’s always a good idea to get back into knitting, and it’s never too late.”

But really, Arabia said, her “knititation” has been therapeutic.

“It can be an escape from sadness, anxiety, fear, or just beating yourself up in your own head, or rehearsing and re-rehearsing old conversations and situations,” she said. “These are things my brain does sometimes, and I’m so grateful to my mom and to all the knitters who have come and gone before for passing this down through the generations. It’s such a beautiful craft.”

[kuhio98]

California child falling from window saved by stranger, box spring mattress

Los Angeles (CNN) -- It's the stuff you might expect only to see on TV or in movies -- the upbeat kind with happy endings.

Thankfully, that is just what happened in Burbank, California -- the Southern California city that's home to Warner Brothers and Walt Disney studios -- as a toddler fell from three stories up into a stranger's arms and onto a box spring mattress.

"It feels like I watched a TV show, like it didn't happen to me," Konrad Lightner, who identified himself as the man who caught the child and fell with him, told CNN affiliate KABC.

Sunday was moving day for Lightner and wife Jennifer, a typically exhausting if not momentous endeavor.

Until, that is, they spied a youngster hanging out of a third-story window of an apartment building and called 911.

According to Burbank fire Capt. Peter Hendrickson, calls for help came shortly after 5:30 p.m. (8:30 p.m. ET), after witnesses saw the child crawling out of the window.

Enter the box spring.

It was placed under the window, and although Hendrickson did not name the Good Samaritans, the Lightners said it was their mattress and Konrad Lightner's arms that came to the rescue.

The toddler fell only to be caught, and together the toddler and the catcher fell onto the box spring.

Jennifer Lightner told KABC that the whole episode "didn't seem real until he was hanging from (a) chord, because there was no way he was going to get back." It was then, she added, that the couple threw down their box spring mattress.

"It (was) now up to Konrad to catch him," Jennifer Lightner added.

That's exactly what Konrad Lightner said he did, putting his arms around the falling child "and lower(ing) him real fast to the box spring."

Photos taken a short time later and posted on MyBurbank.com showed a man -- clad in a T-shirt, shorts and no shoes -- cradling what appeared to be his child on the box spring. Another shows the same man carrying the child, surrounded by toys like Minnie Mouse and SpongeBob SquarePants dolls and as Jennifer Lightner holds the box spring upright.

The youngster appeared to be dressed in footsie pajamas, with no signs of trauma or obvious injuries.

The child was transported to Children's Hospital Los Angeles, said Hendrickson of the Burbank fire department.

Another photo shows a firefighter helping the Lightners carry away their box spring, and one pictures Konrad Lightner being thanked by a firefighter.

Jennifer Lightner described the happening as "very surreal," all the more so considering the couple resumed the mundane task of moving not long after.

"I'm not a hero," her husband told KABC. "I just walked by and just tried to help. Just something happened and were there.

"We were lucky to be there."

[kuhio98]

Couple who met in a homeless shelter pay it forward, help others transform lives

Homeless for three years, Ressurrection Graves vividly remembers the week she slept in her car, waiting for beds to become available at a Washington, D.C., homeless shelter. It was the week of Aug. 23, 2011, when a 5.8 earthquake shook the Virginia area and Hurricane Irene battered the East Coast with wind and rain.

“I prayed and was asking God how this could end,” she told TODAY.com. “It was like, 'Make it stop!'"

When beds finally became available at the shelter, Ressurrection checked in. And there she met Deven Graves, the “kind” man with whom she would leave homelessness behind and start an organization that is helping people caught in a cycle of poverty, including more than 75 homeless individuals so far this year.

“I had this guy staring at me,” Ressurrection recalled of her first encounter with Deven. “It felt like he was looking into my soul. It’s certainly not what you’re expecting in the environment I was in.”

In an interview with TODAY's Lester Holt on Saturday, Graves added to the story and said she "certainly did not go to a shelter to look for a man," but the pair had an instant connection that she called "magical."

Deven, a veteran, had a difficult time making the transition from military to civilian life. That and the death of a family member left him feeling “a little bit lost,” Ressurrection said. He was living at the shelter while working construction jobs and looking for something more permanent.

Deven wooed her over a game of chess, and asked if she would edit his resume. As an entrepreneurial-minded mother who owned her own massage business before she fell on hard times, Ressurrection was impressed. But she didn’t want to get serious until they were out of the shelter.

It didn’t take long. After a month, Ressurrection and Deven saved up enough money from their jobs to move out. Their first date was “romantic and affordable,” a picnic at a park near the water.

Five months later, Deven proposed. They decided to hold a wedding ceremony on a day of special significance: the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech.

So on Aug. 28, 2013, two years to the date after Ressurrection and Deven played their first game of chess, the couple exchanged vows on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial as they heard President Obama's voice echoing across the water during his speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

“I felt nothing but peace and joy,” Deven said. “It was a blessing.”

They celebrated the union by giving back to the homeless community. After the ceremony, the wedding party handed out sandwiches to homeless people who frequented two nearby parks. Everyone prayed together, cried together and hugged each other.

“Some of our guests had no idea what we really went through or what our experiences were,” Ressurrection said. “That outreach gave them a way to see inside our experience a little bit.”

The couple's giving didn’t end with sandwiches. They co-founded Glory Soldiers Global, a nonprofit dedicated to ending homelessness and poverty. One of their programs provides counseling and, when funds are available, financial resources to help the homeless find a place to live. Another organizes community “housewarming” parties that provide renters with essentials like cooking utensils and bathroom supplies through donations.

They want to give people the means to undergo “a total transformation." And in that spirit, Ressurrection is also a source of emotional support for community members as a mentor for victims of child sexual abuse.

“While I was homeless I realized that there was a correlation between child sexual abuse and adult homelessness,” Ressurrection said. “Both of those things have happened to me in my lifetime, and I didn’t realize how they were interconnected.”

Ressurrection speaks at colleges around the country, and the couple's efforts have been featured in several publications, most recently in FOX5’s pay it forward column. A memoir penned by Ressurrection about her experience will be re-released next month. (It was originally published in 2011.)

On top of all that, Ressurrection has been participating in a common parent ritual: college applications. Her daughter, now 18, has already been accepted to two universities.

Life is stable again — though it took some time for the couple to reach that point. They live in a house together, and Deven has a full-time job that provides for his family. Special financial programs for veterans also have proved helpful, and the couple encourage other veterans to explore such options.

“It was a blessing to have Ressurection come in my life,” Deven said, adding that he's relishing his new role helping others who haven’t overcome homelessness yet.

“People can feel rejected, or they feel a sense that no one cares or understands,” he said. “It’s a wonderful feeling for me to help them see that people really do care and other people have compassion. That’s one thing we need more of in this world, compassion.”

[Karen]

What a lovely story, and a fabulous wedding picture to share, too! Too many veterans end up homeless because of what they have been through, and getting back to regular life is a struggle.

[kuhio98]

Wilmington woman starts college fund for homeless teen

WILMINGTON, NC (WECT) – A woman from Wilmington is doing all she can to help a teen in need by starting a college fund for a homeless teen from South Carolina.

Kendal Benjamin is a 17-year-old who says homelessness is his reality, but not his label. He lives in a shelter and became homeless after his mother lost her job.

Emily Wetzel saw Kendal's story on our website, and said she was inspired and wanted to help.

"There's so many people that need help and we feel bad and we walk by them, and we don't do anything about it," Wetzel said. "You never know what could happen and you would want someone to do the same for you."

Wetzel started a college fund for Kendal last week. She says she raised almost $500 in the first two hours and is looking to raise a total of $5000 for him.

You can make a donation to the fund at http://www.gofundme.com/7d94go.