We’ve been hacked into. Again… No worries, our site is safe for you to visit. But in order to secure it, we had to restore every.single.freekin.file. Thanks to my web master extraordinaire, Matt Rochow, the restoration process is almost complete.
So, please pardon our appearance as tweaks and retrieval of files  is still going on. A few pages and functions are still looking rickety in the process.
Thanks for your patience!

Dearest Readers,
Thanks so much for sticking with me. The last 6 weeks have been consumed by a cross-state move of home and business that has taken all my attention. The family is now – sloooowly – recovering and getting settled in our new ‘hood of Chicago’s North Shore. We chose to self-relocate to this destination, following a four year Q & A exercise that involved Excel spreadsheets (with weighted averages on each considered city’s quality of life and cost of living attributes), on-site reconnaissance tours and loads of reading, including Richard Florida’s instrumental “Who’s Your City” book:
Where we [...]

What an overly obvious statement it is to say that we are all concerned by the current economic crisis. I always try to look at the potentially good outcome that can arise from negative or traumatic events (see my last post on how, just maybe, this crisis might lead to some positive behavioral changes). But I can’t wait to see what Margaret Atwood, one of Canada’s best know author’s has to say about it. Margaret Atwood is also a feminist and activist and the winner of several awards. Love her! Her latest book is “Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side [...]

Yep, I really do believe that, in a very un-empathetic, this economic crunch can be good for us. How dare I even think something like that when people are – at this very moment – losing their jobs and homes all over the nation? I do have great sympathy for that. And there will be thousands of tragic and harrowing stories of survival to be told before this has passed. I’m looking at it from another angle. So when I say that “this economy is good for us”, I’m considering that this might bring us all toward more conscious-living, force [...]

Just had to post this. Because James Howard Kunstler has such a “poetic” way of telling of the pain so many of us are feeling, living in manufactured suburbia…

Enjoy & let me know what you think…

I’ve blogged about this before ( here and here among some of the posts) and it appears that there is no end in sight with this subject, the heartbreaking and wasteful use of water bottles. This latest campaign is highly visual. You might not be able to read the copy that says “Last year 14 million gallons of oil were consumed to make plastic water bottles”.

What bothers me more than having a hard time reading the copy (and having to think that NO ONE but a two year old drinks out of a water bottle with such spill results),  is [...]

via Telegraph.co.uk
Vivienne Westwood. I love her! Not just because she is still so sassy and provocative and sexy at age 66 years young, but also because – and this is so totally counter-intuitive to anyone who is in the high consumerist world of fashion – she has the courage to say what’s right and what, incidentally, has been on my mind for some time.
“Dame Vivienne Westwood thinks we should all stop shopping for clothes. “If you ask me what I think people should be getting next season,” she says in that softly bossy northern accent of hers. “I’ll tell [...]

Reminiscent of the Dove commercial where the “plain Jane” young girl becomes transformed, through the good work of innumerable beauty stylists and Photoshop experts, this particular clip tells of the ubiquity of the photo retouching tool. So, what you see probably ain’t what you gonna get! Tragic! Except that these Photoshop scammers are pretty good! Hey, I should retouch my photo. Can someone fix that droop, lift the eyes, plump the lips?

I capture this last month as we were on our way out of Bryce Canyon and entering the historic little town of Panguitch, UT.
No verbiage needed here. These little road signs say it all…

From Marianne Williamson’s book, “A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles”.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.  Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.   It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us.  We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?  Actually, who are you NOT to be?  Your playing small does not serve the world.  There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won’t feel unsure around you.  We were born to make manifest the glory of God that [...]