I am indeed.  I'm also out of sMerits and I'm waiting with bated breath till the day I get topped up. 

I'm far down on this list, but I definitely support newbies IF they make good posts.  I've been hunting outside of Meta lately, looking for good ones by lower-ranked members (not just Newbies) and they are hard to find--and then there's the issue of having to check for plagiarism before giving someone merit.  I got burned once on this and almost got burned a couple of times, and it's annoying to say the least.

Getting new members here posting in the English section who can actually write well is so rare.  And it's rare when someone actually writes something that's interesting.  There are so many generic posts being written that I can't bring myself to merit them even if they make sense.  The newbies I actually sent merit to didn't write outstanding posts necessarily, but they were very good relative to the other ones in the threads they were posted in.

Note:  I don't think any of the newbies I merited were for posts in Meta in the last 3 days.  I haven't checked but I'm pretty sure.