Alaska

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Faith

My faith is a gift from God. It never leaves me. It is with me at all times, ready to be applied in right ways. By exercising faith, I welcome all that I desire. I say "yes" to God and "yes" to my good.

When I am uncertain about which way to turn, I call upon faith to assist me. Faith surrounds me. It is love unwavering--like the arms of a dear friend embracing me, letting me know, "I am here for you always." My faith allows me to surrender outcomes to Spirit. When I use faith rightly, I actively draw my good to me, bringing forth the visible from the invisible.

I exercise faith and see clearly God's good in me and in my life. I allow the Holy Spirit to work through me, and I am richly blessed.

Massage enhances your mood.

This is a photo of Jillian, our wonderful masseuse.

Few people take adequate care of themselves. Many women are caregivers, looking after children, aging adults, and their own careers or relationships. All of these things can be demanding, so escaping to a spa and getting a massage is a terrific way to step into another world, at least briefly, to enjoy the luxury and comfort. Afterward, you’ll be ready to re-enter the everyday world of stress and strain because you have stepped outside temporarily to take a breather.

Releasing feel-good endorphins into your system, massage creates a sense of well being that can make anyone feel better. It’s hard to stay in a bad mood when a professional masseuse is stroking your body in a way that releases natural substances from the brain that evoke a pleasurable response. Plus, just getting away from the hectic pace of everyday life and enjoying a personal indulgence can give you a calmer, happier frame of mind.

Would you like to speed read?

How I Started Speed Reading

My first introduction to the concept of speed reading was from a book, Breakthrough Rapid Reading. I’ve since moved away from a few of the concepts taught in the book, but the core ideas were transformative. In only a few weeks, my average reading speed went from roughly 450 words per minute, to over 900.

More than just words per minute, speed reading helped instill a new passion for reading. Because I gained more control over my reading abilities, my desire to read went up. That new motivation made me a voracious reader, in one two year period, I had read over 150 books.

Here is a lesson I’ve learned from one year of speed reading:

Use a Pointer

Your eyes don’t actually stay fixed in one spot. They are frequently making brief twitches away from your center of focus to gather more information. These movements are called saccades and they represent the first tool novice readers can use to read faster.

Normally, when your eye twitches away, it must relocate in its previous position. Unfortunately, when you read, this position is constantly moving. Saccades (and just general distractions) cause you to slow down as you must search for your current reading position. The solution is to use a pointer.

The easiest pointer is just the tip of your finger. Simply place your index finger below a line of text and move it as you read. Initially, using a pointer will be slower than regular reading. But after you’re used to the motion, you can read more effectively.

Do Men have shorter attention spans than Women?

He doesn't have a shorter attention span; women are just biologically wired to pay attention to different things than men are, says Kathleen Nadeau, Ph.D., director of the Chesapeake ADHD Center of Maryland, in Annapolis. Researchers have found that male brains tend to be attracted to things that are analytical (sports scores) and visual (Heidi Klum), while female brains focus more on nonverbal and verbal communication (a stimulating conversation).

That said, women deal with attention problems more frequently during their reproductive years because of hormone fluctuations. “New research shows that estrogen impacts brain chemistry and that it’s harder to concentrate when levels are low, like during a premenstrual week, perimenopause, and menopause,” says Nadeau. Pregnancy is more complicated: Estrogen levels are at their peak, so many women experience an increased ability to concentrate. But because pregnancy can also be a time of fatigue and stress, lots of women find it’s harder than ever to focus.

Intention

I fulfill my purpose as I share love with the world.

Mother Teresa once said, "It is not the magnitude of our actions but the amount of love that is put into them that matters." What a beautiful illustration of the power of right intention and the blessing of acting in love.

Discover your Obsession

If you want to be good at something, you have to to be obsessive. You have to do the thing all the time, and when you’re not doing it, you have to be thinking about doing it. Why do you think business people who make millions are so good at it? They’re always doing business. Even when they’re not working, they’re thinking about better ways to do business. Same with the greatest writers and painters. They obsess all the time. Ruby, if you want to be good at writing, you need to be obsessive about it.”

May 28, 2010

Eliminate unimportant tasks. Being busy all day does not mean you are doing important stuff. Eliminate every activity that’s not important, and focus on what really matters.

May 27, 2010

Here is a photo of my dear friend Mary from Pittsburgh, PA, who joins me in the Walking off The Pounds class. We enjoy each other's company so much.

I have within me untapped spiritual resources, unused spiritual powers, unexplored realms of being. As I lift my consciousness, I lay hold of and call into expression spiritual qualities and powers that transcend my human understanding.

May 26, 2010

I hope that at the start of your day, you are filled with confidence and energy, ready to experience a day of accomplishment and meaning. I hope that tonight as you lay your head on your pillow, ready for sleep, you have peace about the day that is ending and expectation of good for the new day to come.

Gifts of Spirit

Holding an image in mind of what I can do and the gifts and powers that are available to me opens wide the doors of possibility. In times of challenge, spiritual imagery helps me to recognize and gratefully accept the blessings I have been given.

May 23, 2010

This is a picture of Ed and I at Desolation Sound on Vancouver Island.
We had naturalists on our small ship cruise that had us handling
starfish, etc., etc.

Kindness

I am a kind and loving human being.

When I am kind, I feel connected to my spiritual center, to the light of within. When I am gracious to someone, I help light up the world. Through even the smallest act of kindness, love is expressed through me.

When I offer my time and attention, when I offer a compassionate word or a caring touch, I am saying, "I honor your presence. I acknowledge and value you." In that instant of grace, we each connect.

May 21, 2010

Drivers with car bumper stickers are more aggressive. A study of drivers found that those with cars "personalized" with bumper stickers and ornaments are more likely to act out anger on the road by flashing lights, tailgating and blocking other drivers. The more markers there are on a car, the more likely the driver is to exhibit road rage when feeling provoked -- such as after being cut off. The specific message made no difference -- even when innocuous, such as "baby on board."

Thursday May 20

• Educate yourself until the day you die. – The time and energy you invest in your education will change your life. You are a product of what you know. The more knowledge you acquire, the more control you have over your life.
• Take good care of your body. – Your body is the greatest tool you’ll ever own. It impacts every step you take and every move you make. Nourish it, exercise it, and rest it.
• Spend as much time as possible with the people you love. – Human beings are emotional creatures. Family and close friends makeup the core of your emotional support system. The more you nurture them, the more they will nurture you.
• Be a part of something you believe in. – This could be anything. Some people take an active role in their local city council, some find refuge in religious faith, some join social clubs supporting causes they believe in, and others find passion in their careers. In each case the psychological outcome is the same. They engage themselves in something they strongly believe in. This engagement brings happiness and meaning into their lives.

togetherness

I work with others in harmony and peace.

I am a magnificent creation of God, blessed with physical, mental and emotional abilities that enable me to co-create wonderful moments in life. I live in a world filled with other people who are also wondrous creations, and as I connect with them, my power to co-create multiplies.

May 19, 2010

Ed in his new hat.

May 18, 2010

Whatever receives my attention is magnified. So I ask myself, Where am I putting my attention? When I place my focus on a circumstance or thought, it expands. When I notice a pain or an irritation and give it my attention, my aggravation increases. Likewise, when I hold a thought of the many ways I am blessed, my sense of appreciation builds.

A heron in the back yard

My Favorite Blogs

These are some of the most popular personal development blogs out there, so make sure to add them to your bookmarks.

1. Lifehack.org: Check out this site to find tips, how-to’s and insightful articles to help you develop your inner strength, perform better at work, boost your productivity and much more.
2. Zen Habits: Blogger Leo offers his insights into how to live more simply and purposefully in this blog.
3. David Seah: This designer and author blogs about productivity and empowering yourself.
4. Dumb Little Man: Don’t be fooled by the name of this blog, the posts in it are hardly dumb. You’ll find advice on saving money, being productive and finding a happier you.
5. 43 Folders: Productivity expert Merlin Mann gives advice on this blog on all kinds of things tat can help you get more done, from fighting procrastination to changing the way you use technology.
6. Steve Pavlina.com: This well-known blogger has a site full of great articles to help you in your personal development. From making goals to helping yourself to achieve them, you’ll find advice and support every step of the way.
7. LifeHacker: Want to streamline your life? This site provides tips on using technology to save you time as well as some great general ideas for boosting productivity and living healthier.
8. Cultivate Greatness: Follow the tips and advice in this blog to find more satisfaction and success in your life.
9. Personal Development Blog: Gleb Reys chronicles his own personal development in this blog as well as providing tips to others who want to improve themselves.
10. The Positivity Blog: Learn to look on the bright side with this blog. You’ll also learn to improve your communication skills, fight procrastination, and more.
11. Web Worker Daily: Whether you work on the Web for your job or just want to learn how to use it more productively, this site is a great repository of articles.
12. The Lazy Way to Success: Why do more when you can do less? This blog explains how to get more done in less time and leave yourself with time to do the things you really lov

Golf Cart

This is a photo of me in my brand new red electric golf cart.

How To Avoid Being A Toxic Person: 13 Simple Tips

I was driving to town the other day, when, at some point on the highway, I found myself near a huge truck. I don’t know if you know the type: ugly, noisy and… toxic! The exhaustion pipe was left oriented, and since the truck was rolling on my right, even if my windows were closed, I was inhaling huge amounts of gas. Toxic gas.

After a few hundreds meters I went ahead of it and looked to the rear mirror: the driver didn’t seem to have any problem with all that toxic gas he was literally exhaling on the highway. He looked calm and somehow on top of the situation. I could see he had no idea he was a really toxic person to other people.

The day went on as usual but on my way home, around the same place I met the truck, something hit me: we can all be toxic persons to other people, only we don’t realize it. We’re going on and on, relaxed and somehow on top of the situation without even noticing how infectious we can be at times, just like the driver of the morning truck. We can all spread gas on other people cars, so to speak, and the worst thing is we don’t even realize how toxic we are.

Once home, I started to think about what makes us toxic persons. Even more, I tried to identify some simple ways to avoid becoming such a person. What follows is only a short list of what I found. Generally speaking, I was searching for things which can lower your toxic “gas emissions”, making it easier to become an “ecological” citizen. The list is not even near to be complete, so feel free to add your own tips in the comments.

1. Say Thank You

Sometimes you simply forgot to say “thank you’, sometimes you’re in a hurry, or sometimes you just don’t want to say it out loud. But fact is, every time you’re not saying ”thank you“ you leave room for a toxic thought or approach. The simple act of saying ”thank you“ closes an interaction in a completely healthy way, no room left for any potential harmful follow up.

2. Say Only What You Mean

It’s not only about plain lying, although it encompasses this too. It’s about keeping what you’re saying in sync with your mind, goals and attitude. The moment you’re starting saying things you don’t really mean, your communication process becomes heavily ineffective, hence you’re going to emit huge amounts of toxic gas, just like that ugly, noisy truck.

3. Clearly State What You Want

A lot of toxicity exhales from misunderstanding. Small confusions, false impressions or misinterpretations are like glitches in a car engine. Every time you get such a glitch, it’s like having water in your gasoline: the conversation engine will start to cough and before you know it, you’ll get an increased level of toxicity. Just say what you want.

4. Say Something Nice To An Unknown Person

Like it or not, we do live in an emotionally polluted world. Doesn’t matter if this emotional pollution comes, most of the time, from people who don’t even realize they’re toxic, like the driver of that truck. What really counts in this dusty environment is to try lowering this pollution index as much as we can. And saying something nice to a completely unknown person will have exactly this effect: it will act like an air freshener, making the smog disappear at least for a few moments.

5. Don’t Gossip

Talking behind other people’s back is like putting your exhaustion pipe to somebody else door, while pretending you’re looking in a different direction. Even if you’re not talking directly to those people, you’re directing your toxic emissions to their houses. Sooner or later they’ll realize something is wrong and they’ll also identify the source.

6. No Regrets

Even if you don’t realize, when you regret stuff for yourself you’re affecting the reality of others too. Even if your regrets have nothing to do, directly, with their reality. The mere act of keeping strings attached to the past will make you be that driver who’s going ten miles per hour on a speed lane. This apparently small inconvenient of not letting others go faster will soon become toxic for them.

7. Pay Attention To People Around You

For starters, just look around and realize there are other people around you, that would be enough. A lot of toxicity arise from ignorance. If the driver of that huge truck would have look at me he could have seen that I was a little bit upset because of all this gas. But he just assumed that everything was ok, without checking. Most of the time we do the same.

8. Help Somebody Around

If ”saying something nice to an unknown person“ will act like an air freshener, helping somebody around will be equivalent to a full repair of a damaged exhaustion pipe. Helping other people will lower not only their existent toxicity but it will also drastically reduce the odds of an uncontrolled increase. If you help somebody out, you will in fact create a fresher environment for yourself.

9. Give Your Time To What’s Important

If you’re drifting away from task to task, without focusing on what’s really important all you’re going to do is to create an awfully crowded traffic. It’s like driving in circles on the same roads again and again, without doing anything from what you intended to. The only problem with that is that you’re becoming a problem too. If you can’t focus, move away from the road and let others reach their goals.

10. Let Go Of The Unneeded

Clutter is bad. Period. Loading yourself with tons of unneeded gadgets or beliefs will make you move slower and slower. Be elastic, be slim. Adjust instantly to new environments. If you can’t do that, you’ll be like a 4×4 car carrying away a huge truck. Not only your mileage will sky rocket, but your overall performance will go down. You will become toxic by immobility.

11. Avoid Procrastination

How many times you went in circles in a public parking waiting for a free spot? Well, if you procrastinate, you’re one of the guys keeping a parking spot for ever. And that’s pretty frustrating. Procrastination is not only an individual choice, it will affect your interaction with other people too. If you’re not doing your job, you’re infecting others with your behavior.

12 Don’t Talk Bad About Yourself

It’s contagious. Other people can borrow this attitude pretty easily and that would create some sort of an epidemic. Not to mention the fact that talking bad about yourself it’s like scratching your own car, because you think it “deserves” that. Yeah, if we’re talking about a car it’s kinda funny, right? How can one scratch his own car? But at the same time we keep talking bad about ourselves. Try to visualize yourself walking around with a lot of scars for your own punches…

13. Don’t Enter A Fight

Fighting – as in verbal fighting – it’s such a waste of time. Have you ever noticed those drivers fighting when someone blunders in traffic? They spend minutes and minutes blocking the road just to tell how smarter and skilled they are, and how stupid the other guy is. Meanwhile, the road is blocked, everybody is delayed and the toxic gas from the immobilized cars is slowly replacing the oxygen.

May 1, 2010

Here is a photo showing our new Sylvester palm in our front yard. Many trees and shrubs were hit with frost damage and had to be replaced.

Company from Dayton, Ohio - April 29, 2010

Wednesday, Gerry and Steve came to visit us. The first photo is in our dining room. The second and third photos are of a pool in one of the open houses we viewed. We relaxed a lot and are planning on the men going golfing and the women touring the Spanish Springs side of The Villages.

Butchart Gardens, Victoria, British Columbia 9/09 cruise

Location of Buchard Gardens in British Columbia

The Ross Fountain

Robert Pim Butchart (1856–1943) began manufacturing Portland cement in 1888 near his birthplace of Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada. He and his wife Jennie Butchart (1866–1950) came to the west coast of Canada because of rich limestone deposits necessary for cement production.

In 1904, they established their home near his quarry on Tod Inlet at the base of the Saanich Peninsula on Vancouver Island. They equipped it with an indoor salt water pool, a bowling alley, a panelled billiard room, tennis courts and a 16-rank roll-playing pipe organ. ^[1] The baroque organ in Roskilde Cathedral, Denmark The pipe organ is a musical instrument that produces sound by forcing pressurized air (referred to as wind) through a series of pipes. ...

In 1906, Jennie created a Japanese garden there with the help of designer Isaburo Kishida. In 1909, when the quarry was exhausted, Jennie set about turning the eyesore into a sunken garden, which was completed in 1921. They named their home "Benvenuto" ("welcome" in Italian), and began to receive boat-loads of visitors to their gardens. In 1926, they replaced their tennis courts with an Italian garden, and in 1929 they replaced their kitchen vegetable garden with a large rose garden to the design of Butler Sturtevant of Seattle.

In 1939, the Butcharts gave the Gardens to their grandson Ian Ross (1918–1997) on his 21st birthday. Ross was involved in the operation and promotion of the gardens until his death 58 years later.

In 1953, miles of underground wiring was laid to provide night illumination, to mark the 50th anniversary of The Gardens. In 1964, the ever-changing Ross Fountain was installed in the lower reservoir to celebrate the 60th anniversary. In 1994, the Canadian Heraldic Authority granted a coat of arms to the Butchart Gardens. In 2004, two 30-foot totem poles were installed to mark the 100th anniversary, and The Gardens was designated as a national historic site.

Ownership of the Gardens remains within the Butchart family; the owner and managing director since 2001 is the Butchart's great-granddaughter Robin-Lee Clarke. ^[2]

Sites from Vancouver, British Columbia

These are photos from our small ship cruise. The Endeavor out of Seattle, WA. The passenger count was 89 people with 2 naturalists on board. This trip was taken early Sept of 2009.

April 23 weekend in Pensacola

Here are a few photos of our Circle of Awareness social in Pensacola Floria. We had so much fun and saw another beautiful part of Florida. Nancy and Ken, Ed and I, Laura and Burt plus our
rented house.

Yesterday, Tuesday April 21, 2010

Here is a picture of my next door neighbor, Sig and Marjorie who hosted Ed and I and their college friends for a wonderful dinner and cards last evening. We played the women against the men in Triple Play/Hand Foot and Knee and the women stomped the men by 13,000 points, which is outstanding. Our hats of to you two for showing us how to entertain and have a relaxing and fun evening. And, no, we did not dress up for the occasion. This photo was taken on a Mexican cruise last November.

April 20, 2010

In September, 2009, we took a small ship cruise to British Columbia. This trip started with a reunion with my niece, Zanne and her daughter, Izzy in Seattle, Washington. They took us on a tour of Pike's Market and West Seattle. Ed and I went to the Space Needle for our evening meal.

April19, 2009 Friends from The Villages

My 6-day a week exercise is Walking Off The Pounds with Leslie Sansone.
The first photo is of 3 of my friends from walking aerobics. The second photo is my friends from Digital Scrapbooking.

There are 1500 clubs to choose interests from. Everyone needs daily exercise plus activities throughout your day to stay healthy.

April 18, 2010 - Sunday

Here are a few photos of the surroundings of our home in The Villages. There is a view of three of us chatting in our pool, the golf course one street over and the birdcage on a house by the pool.

The average high temperature for January is 70, the average low is 48. Number of homes in 2009 was 40,000. Sales of 400 homes a month was a high but in 2009 it averaged 200 a month.

80% of resident trips are made inside The Villages by golf carts. It covers 26,000 acres/40 square miles, has 80 restaurants, 40 recreation centers and 34 roundabouts. It began in the 1970's as a manufactured home park.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

The first two photos are of our Life Long Learning College, where I have volunteered to help people pick a class of their liking.

Today, I took pilates and yoga and had so many giggles with this exercise ball. It is too funny to watch 67+ age people bouncing up and down on the ball to just let their little kid out.

The 2nd photo is of my two week old haircut that has changed me into a boy/man. It is anywhere between 3/4" to 1.5" all the way around. Ed highlighted it and now it appears gray to me but, life goes on.

March 23, 2010 - San Diego Zoo

Ed and I stayed over one extra day in San Diego before heading home to Florida. We spent a few hours at the San Diego Zoo, walked and also took the Tram. It was a beautiful experience I will never forget.