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Showing posts from March, 2009

Paper Embroidery & Recycling All In One

I love to do paper embroidery and I love to recycle. This little project is a combination of both. We must have gotten some advertisement from Celebrity cruises with little cards to use for a price reduction of a cruise. I liked the look of the cards and kept them until I could figure out what to do with them. Then one day I looked through my stencils and small patterns and the light went on. I could do some paper embroidery on the cards. I quite like the results. The only problem is tracing the designs. So I found I either print the design the desire size on scrap paper. The place it over the card stock and start punching holes about 1/4" (5mm) apart. If I have a design already cut out, I just punch the holes on the edge of the shape.

Do You Do Daily Exercises?

For the longest time I thought that I did not have time for daily exercises and could just not be bothered. One late fall day I decided that now as it was too cold for my daily gardening, and that I should replace that time with exercise. I bought an exercise ball that came with a DVD. So for that winter I did my daily exercise with the ball in the morning before I started my work. I liked the program, but it was boring doing the same exercise daily. Then one day while out shopping I came across a reduced price yoga DVD and bought it. Now I could alternate between the exercise ball and yoga. I really liked that and then it was warm enough again for gardening and I stopped exercising until I could no longer garden. That's when I realized that I had lost some of my strength and found the exercises hard to get going again. So the next summer and ever since, I garden on the nice days and on the rainy days I do exercises. In the meantime I have added an additional yoga DVD to the mix a

Can You Hurry Up Spring?

Today is the first day of Spring and hubby's birthday, tomorrow will be my youngest daughter's birthday. They are both very much Spring babies. The energies are affecting them. Since the beginning of March I have been trying to figure out a way to hurry up Spring. Then one day on my daily walks I saw that the Forsythia branches were starting to show buds that were swelling. That's when I got the idea of bringing a few small branches indoor and see what would happen. Well, the first branch didn't do much, but the next two chosen more carefully took a bit over a week to develop green buds that then opened into the beautiful yellow flowers in the picture above. So, even though when I look outside there is still snow on the ground, inside Spring has arrived right on time.

Why Free Is So Attractive

This morning I came across a link to a Wired.com article from a year ago called: Free! Why $0.00 Is the Futures of Business. In today's world where jobs are disappearing in the blink of an eye, and marketing seems to have turned into a science that only a few lucky ones truly understand, this article was an eye opener. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift and most of the population is afraid of it. I think we should embrace it and see what fear really is: F alse E vidence A ppearing R eal What if what we hear in the news and see on TV is only what we were meant to hear and see, so that we would stay fearful and be too stunned to stand up for our rights and make changes that could affect those on top drastically. It is time that 'we the people' start to look out for each other and in doing so create an economy that will support every one of us. All our skills are needed, nobody is more valuable than another. Can we say that one color is more important than another? I don&

Edible Creativity

I don't even remember how I came across these yummy cake pictures this morning. I am absolutely stunned by them. I am creative, but the kitchen is one area I just can't show it. That does not mean I don't like cooking, I just don't like being in the kitchen any longer than necessary to create a meal. Any meal I can cook in half an hour is great, any more time becomes a chore. Here are some of my favorite recipes . I guess I got that tendency from my mom. She always said that it was such a shame that you spend hours in the kitchen and then in 10 minutes it is all gone. Well here are the links to those cake pictures from Flickr: Icing on the Cake Andrea's SweetCakes Sweet Sweet's

What Do You See When You Look Into the Mirror?

I came across this very interesting article that got me thinking. Who do I see when I look into the mirror? Is it the person I feel I am deep down? Is it the person other people see? Do I even really see myself or do I see all the things I can't stand about myself? Recently I had some very strange experiences. When I looked into the mirror or even in some photos I looked younger, just for a fleeting moment. What does that mean? How can I capture that moment and make it real? I am not quite sure, but since my discovery of EFT I feel that it is something that is achievable and the website article that triggered this post is just another confirmation and also a reminder to use EFT on everything. The mirror metaphor also reminds me of a segment the Self-Empowerment videos from MyGenie.tv about weightloss . I use the information in that video as a blue print for anything in our lives that we have a hard time accepting that we can use EFT on. The other thing that really jumped out fr

Father & Son = Son & Grandson

I don't usually post pictures of family members. But his one I just could not resist. After I received the picture of my grandson and took a good look at it, it reminded me so much of a picture of my son. So I dug through my pictures and found it. My son is 9 months old in his picture and my grandson is 2 months old in his picture. They probably weigh about the same in the pictures. My son was about half the weight of his son at birth, that's the reason for the age difference in the pictures. I think they resemble each other quite a bit. I know it is still a bit too early to tell who my grandson will take after.

What is Mind Mapping?

Looking through my download file I saw a free program that I had downloaded recently but not yet installed call FreeMind. I vaguely remember that it can be used to create to do lists and brainstorming. After installing the program I had to figure out how to use it and that sent me on an interesting voyage of discovery. There are a number of YouTube videos with tutorials and explanations. The program is Java based and can be used in any OS. Family Tree created with FreeMind Program The first thing I learned is that mind mapping is a great tool for visual learners. I have discovered a long time ago that we don't do and see things in a linear way, but in a relational way of circles that are overlapping. Reading the information about mind mapping just confirmed my observation. In one video mind mapping was explained like this: "a mind map is the swiss army knife of the brain." After creating my first simple map in FreeMind, my family tree, I will have to study the use of the

Do You Backup or Synchronize?

I use an external hard drive to backup, no synchronize with my working hard drive. I never really liked what backup did in Windows. I had to go to another step to get to access my files again and I did not like that at all. Until today, I was not really aware that what I am doing is called synchronizing. All I knew whas that it wasn't easy to find a program that did what I wanted it to do. I had found one called EZBack it up , but it does not seem to be updated any longer and is from 2004. As I am still on an XP it works. Then over the last week my backup hard drive has been acting up and today I just had to look into the problem and it seems to be on its last leg. That got me thinking that there had to be a better way to do what I wanted. So I googled synchronize drives and lo and behold, Microsoft has a free program that does exactly that. It is call SyncToy 2.0 and works both in XP and Vista. It has an easy interface and works well. I did a small test and like it. I even found