Tracking and Sharing Great Press

There is only thing better than getting great press and that is is sharing it with others! Round up all those great on-line comments in a LiveBinder like this one:

PR – Homebedazzle

You will want to use the ‘LiveBinder It’ button on your toolbar so that you are ready at anytime to add your great press to your binder.  Please see LiveBinder It for more information on how to gather links while you browse.

It is great to have everything in one place so that you can send it to others or just read all the positive comments yourself (when you are having one of those days!)

Help for new soccer coaches and team parents

It’s soccer season again and many of you might be first time coaches, assistant coaches or team parents.  Welcome to the club! I’ve included in this blog a couple of binders that you might find very helpful.  The first is a binder on coaching tips – including useful flash and youtube videos to have the kids review on soccer skills.The other is a binder that belongs to one of the soccer teams and you might find it useful as a template for creating your own team binder.   To view the binders just click on the link below – works with latest IE, Firefox and Safari.   

Soccer Coach Binder

 

 

Olympic Marseille girls soccer team

Multiplication worksheets for kids

If you are looking to drill your kids on their multiplication tables this binder has a few sites with printable worksheets. I use flash cards but I also want to have my kids work through the problems on paper. These sites even have division problems and templates for flash cards.

To open the binder click on the link or the icon below. Then you can look at the different websites by clicking on the tabs.

If you want to save this binder onto your desktop – drag the link below to your desktop. Your browser icon will appear on the desktop along with the name of the binder – ‘Multiplication worksheets to print.’

My kids actually look forward to beating their fastest time, so it’s nice to have the binder handy so I can print the worksheets out when they get home.

Multiplication worksheets to print

Pain in the Neck!

I try to set up my computer ergonomically. But sometimes, when I’m working intently on a project, I forget to get up and take a break and move around. The result is a spasm in my neck that generally happens overnight – after a good night’s sleep. My head ends up in a locked position and attempting to move it sends stabbing pains down my shoulder and arm. I’m just lucky that I found Bowen Therapy. This non-invasive therapy works every time! It usually works instantly, but sometimes the first session just helps dramatically and the second session is required to completely eliminate the stiffness.

I put together this binder of great links on Bowen Therapy for my neighbor who suffers from chronic back pain. These websites explain the treatment far better than I ever could. Click on the binder below for a great overview of this amazing treatment, personal success stories (including my own), and listings of practitioners.

Bowen Therapy

Creating Great Presentations

Don’t you just hate sitting through a boring presentation? The only thing worse is being the one standing up there giving the boring presentation!

But creating a great presentation takes knowledge of the target audience, graphics design, and a bit of theater. I’m always scouring the web for good resources on how to create great presentations. In this binder, I have pulled together a group of excellent sites. Click on the binder below to see my collection thus far…

Product Presentations

A quick way to check time zones

If you have family members who travel quite a bit to Europe or Japan, this binder might prove useful.  It has a couple of websites set to different timezones such as London, Paris and Tokyo.  But you can also quickly get to other countries on those websites. It also has the calling codes for different countries. To make it conveniently accessible, you can drag the timezones livebinder onto your desktop.  Simply open the livebinder by clicking on the link or the icon at the bottom of this blog.  Once opened, then grab the website icon on the far left of the address bar in your browser.   Drag the icon/url to your desktop.  It should show the webbrowser icon and the url address on your desktop.  then when you click on that icon/url link from your desktop it will open the binder with the timezone information. Enjoy! 

 

Time Zones and calling codes

Creating Garden Rooms – Spring in Evelyn’s Garden

I live on a hill, so a glance from my deck affords me an excellent view of Evelyn’s garden – and this time of year it is spectacular! Evelyn spent 50 years building her garden. The foundation plants include enormous rhododendrons, fabulous camellias, and one sweet-smelling lilac.

I wish she were here to see it. She passed away five years ago, but I still think of that inspirational landscape as ‘Evelyn’s garden’. Fortunately the new owner hasn’t changed it too much.

Evelyn chiseled her garden out of bedrock – one small area at a time and the result is fascinating. As you climb up and down the hill that was her backyard, you moved from one garden room to the next – each with its own character. Some have fabulous extended views, while others feature an unusual plant as a focal point. You are drawn to stay and enjoy each room, but motivated to explore around the next corner. She created vast variation in the rooms – from ferns to succulents – but kept the foundation plants consistent throughout the yard (large azaleas and camellias). She added stepping stones and benches that made you want to continue the journey but stop and enjoy the scenery – all at the same time.

I miss Evelyn. I wish she were here to provide me with advice on my own backyard. I also wish she were here so that she could see that she was right about the princess flower I planted in my front yard. She really gave me a hard time for planting it in a very central location. I had liked the idea of the blue petals falling over the path to the front door. But the plant became completely unwieldy – exactly as she had predicted.

Since I don’t have Evelyn anymore to lend me advice, I searched the web for resources on how to create ‘garden rooms’. Click this binder to see what I found, though I’m sure my eighty year-old neighbor perfected it to an art that few others could master!

Outdoor Rooms

Safe websites for kids

There are some really fun and educational sites on the web for kids in elementary school. If you are trying to make a few choices among hundreds start here with this very well thought out and resourceful binder.

Websites for Kids

Alzheimer’s Disease FYI

If you’ve just discovered that a loved one has Alzheimer’s disease, then you are probably spending some amount of time on the Web researching where to go to get support and care. There is so much information on the internet that you may become overwhelmed. The following binder was put together by a friend of ours who is a director at the Salem Lutheran Home in Oakland. Her links could get you started in the right direction.

The Terrace at Salem Lutheran Home

Severe Joint Pain

My husband was only in his mid-thirties when he started suffering from debilitating joint pain – primarily in his knees and ankles. He would wake up in the morning almost unable to walk. He started taking aspirin, but soon that wasn’t enough.

I had read a little about the dangers of aspartame (NutraSweet) and asked him to try giving up his beloved diet cokes for a couple of days. He said that he probably couldn’t live without them, but he would try. After only a couple of days without the diet cokes he was pain free. But he thought that meant he could start drinking diet cokes again. It only took one diet coke before he was in agony again.

It turns out that it wasn’t easy to give up the diet cokes. It also is almost impossible to avoid aspartame. The other night he ordered a margarita and there must have been aspartame in the margarita mix because he could hardly walk the next day.

On days that he can avoid aspartame though, he is pain free. I’m so glad that we made this discovery before starting down a long path of pain killers and arthritis medication!

The binder below contains some of the resources that I found on aspartame, though I’m sure there are more. This digital binder has some interesting links with scientific data, write-ups from doctors, personal stories, and even one horrifying ‘home experiment’ with aspartame.

Stick to Sugar

Just for fun

If – and that’s a big if – you ever have time to kill online – feel free to use this binder to take a look at some of the more popular blog gossip sites and a few of the popular gossip magazine sites like people.com and e!online. If you’d like to use this binder in the future – just drag the link at the top of the browser to your desktop.

It’s never a dull moment…

Gossip blogs

Google: Minor Mistake or Major Privacy Issue?

I received an email yesterday from a product manager at Google. I am one of  Google’s advertisers and they wanted me to fill out a survey. However, this product manager was not well versed in email marketing 101 and put about 350 the Google advertiser’s email address in the ‘to:’ line. I have had several people already take advantage of this and spam me. This was a minor mistake on the product manager’s part, but the implications are huge. Doesn’t Google have protections in place to keep this from happening? I wonder how many more spams I will need to endure?Everyone who sends out mass email needs to be versed in the basics of email marketing. So Google, I dedicated this binder to you!

Basics of Email Marketing

City politics

The city in my neighborhood bought a little triagluar empty lot in hopes of making it a park someday. There are not many parks in my neighborhood, so the neighbors have all been waiting to see what would happen on this tiny corner lot. But waiting for something to happen from a government entity is a tedious process.

Recently we have decided to drive this process instead of wait. I have never been involved in city politics. (Though I do have experience in working with schools and corporate politics so I should have had a clue!) What I have learned is that that the noisier you are, the more people listen. (Gee, you think I would have understood that!) Just by organizing the neighbors and putting together a plan, we realized that we could ‘help’ the city prioritize the funding for this park.

We put together a Yahoo group and a LiveBinder to keep the neighbors informed. Then we made flyers and organized meetings where all the neighbors could get together and share their vision.

Next week is the annual prioritization meeting for parks and rec. funds. This week we have organized an email campaign to show the city council just how much our neighborhood wants this park. I kicked off the email campaign on Monday with my own email and was thoroughly impressed to get a follow-up phone call from one of the city council members who is also our former mayor.

One surprising thing to me about this process, was just how hard it was to find the parks and rec. meeting minutes on the city’s website. They are there, but you really need to dig to find them. After spending quite of bit of time unearthing them, I put the relevant pages in the LiveBinder for all the neighbors to read:

Semeria Park

We will see where we stand after the meeting on Tuesday!

Training for a Triathlon

If you live in the East Bay and are training for a triathlon, it would be useful to know where there are places you can swim, courses you can bike and trails you can run. One of our users put together this very nice binder. click on the link below to see if it can make your training life easier.

Triathlon