Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Time

There are days that just seem to last forever and others go by several days at a time.

Lately I have found that days seem to be leaving with partners. I have several projects going at once and each have this many or that many days to finish. Sometimes I am sure I have used one day and I find that when that day left it apparently took a friend or two because instead of having days left over I am looking a deadline in the eye.

With the new rules that Pres Bush signed into effect this time problem was even more confused this week. Now my computer thinks it is an hour before the actual time. Daylight Saving Time was supposed to end a couple days ago before Pres Bush signed the temporary change of the daylight saving time schedule to see if it would save energy.

Sure, I am interested in saving energy but goodness, at this point I could have saved some of my own time instead of using it chasing the daylight saving time schedule around to find out why my computer remembered and nobody in the neighborhood did.

Well, I figured it out, the time change is going to be starting NEXT weekend. Not last weekend.

Now that I have figured that one out, I need to get back to writing. I have a couple jobs I am working on and I want to start saving for Christmas.

I'll be writing from dawn to dusk for a while. Wish me luck.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

What are we teaching our children?

I stood back listening to a few neighbors talking to one another by the playground a few days ago and I was amazed. These mothers had their children close by listening to them bad mouth just about everyone in their lives.

What made me even more amazed than that was the shock and surprise these women showed when one of the children called another child a foul name (and, no, I am not referring to the word chicken). How did the child hear such a thing? I wanted to shout back at the "ladies" and let them know that what was coming "out of the mouths of babes" was none other than what just came out of their own mouths!

Instead I wrote an article on teaching children hate. You can find it
here.

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

America's obesity problem

I recently started a series on health and weight issues. Here is a portion of the first article in this series...

Obesity has become a major player in the war on America's health. As a whole the nation is suffering from an over abundance of everything we ever wanted. For those of us who do not have hundreds of dollars of toys we often entertain ourselves with food. In fact, we entertain others with food as well. Food has become not only a way for us to sustain our lives; food has become an integral part of our lives. We use food to entertain, we use food to comfort others as well as ourselves, we use food to make us feel better and in the end we have used so much food that it makes us feel bad about ourselves. This love hate relationship we have with food needs to be brought into check if we stand a chance of fighting this war of weight we have been fighting as a nation. Click Here to read the rest of this article.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Dangers of smoking

I haven't had time to sit down and type up what happened yet. On the 29th of August I was sitting at my desk working on a set of articles for a client when a neighbor opened my back door. This in itself was odd since I didn't know this neighbor but her words would not only shake up my day, they saved my family's lives!

She said to me, "There is a fire in the apartment next door and you should get out."

She didn't seem concerned and since the girl next door is quite young I invisioned a grease fire on the stove and a young girl panicking. Within seconds I had told my 11 year old to wake the kids upstairs (of course we were babysitting and not only had my other 3 children upstairs but the neighbor's 2 were up there as well) and all of the sudden this calm neighbor started yelling at me to get out of my house right away.

Still, I didn't smell the smoke and had no idea what danger we were in. I got out of my chair and went upstairs to get the cleeping children. Immediately I knew something was wrong. My smoke detectors weren't going off but the smoke was fililng the upstairs of my apartment and breathing was painful causing a burning feeling in my nose and throat.

I hate to cut a story short, but I'll revisit this story again in a couple days when I have time to put it to words. Let it suffice to say at this point that we made it out and only have holes in our walls from the firemen's axe used to get to the burning insulation in our walls. The neighbor's house only had a couple pit bulls in it along with a smouldering cigarette in the sofa. The people hadn't been home in over 2 hours. She lost everything! The dogs made it out with minor injuries.

Now my 3 year old is terrified of fire and even terrified of policemen and firemen because he soedn't want to have another fire.

I'll write more about the reprecussions of a fire in blogs to come.