Shaklee’s EARTH DAY SPECIAL!!!

Shaklee’s EARTH DAY SPECIAL!!!

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SHAKLEE WANTS TO HELP 50,000 FAMILIES GET HEALTHIER IN THE NEXT 7 WEEKS!

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Consider this: one family deciding to convert to our non-toxic biodegradable household cleaners keeps the equivalent of 5,000 bottles of conventional "ready-to-use" glass cleaner out of landfills. What would it mean if 50,000 families did the same? A great big thanks from the planet, and from people all over the world who share this wonderful home we call Earth.

If you have been considering becoming a distributor, you can now get more!!!  Contact me for more info.

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Have a great week!

Family Life is a Gift ♥

Family Life is such a wonderful gift.
I love this quote by Laura Ingalls Wilder
"It is the sweet simple things in life, which are the real ones in life."

Capturing those everyday yet special times of joy and contentment is a pleasure to look back on. The small things that we don't usually remember but strengthen  the bond within the family circle.

That is what this post is about....the special times in the everyday, simply captured in images that bring a smile or my face and contentment in my heart.

Daddy giving horsey back rides and Arwen riding Daddy's little horse from when he was a baby.

Just "some secret toast and jam, OK for get the toast just some secret Jam" from a popular Nanny McPhee quote used often in our home.

Moran's Afternoon tea cafe

Playing with the kittens--of course you put them in a bucket.

Our Lenten Altar using my Hand Painted Saints

Our St Patrick's Day book display

Our kittens- Midnight, Buttons, Hammy, Milo, Moppet II

My Wooden people exchange all ready to post

Singing a song they made up very late one night......'Pajama Party'

The girls hang out.....Vellvin, Autumn, Anna-Lisa and Eden

Clover fight with Saxon.....everyone else against him.

Lovin' the Kittens

Bubble beard while washing up

Fresh potatoes straight from the farm

Apricot pie making

Well, we don't know why but this is a very grown up girl......wearing her brothers pajama pants on her head.

 The kittens are very obliging in allowing the children to play with them...Arwen was keen to get all the kittens in the little washing basket and pushing them.

 Our bucket baths due to the water situation in this post

 We have not have had all the bikes working together for some time and so last weekend Stephen fisxed most of them up. It was Myffwyn's first attempt to ride without training wheels for a long time.
She was most keen to have her training wheels back on untill we helped her a little.
Now she is a master at two wheel riding.

Of course bike racing is all the rage now and I think we need to introduce a handicap to allow the younger children a chance at winning.

Hoping al is well and you are enjoying your own family moments as well ♥

Blessings to you and your homes,

How to Organize Your Bill-Paying System

Welcome to Week 7 of our Organize your Life series!

If you are just joining in, please link up your blog here so we can all help motivate each other!

I am reading and using the book called, Organize Now! by Jennifer Ford Berry, to help me organize my life and before we get started today, I would like to share a message form Jennifer! 

Hello everyone!

I have been following along with your posts from House of Grace and I told Bonnie I had to stop in and say hi!  First of all, I am very inspired by all of your great ideas.  Organizing is truly my passion so I love reading how the book is changing lives. I thank each and every one of you for purchasing and sharing your experience with Organize Now!

I have a section on my website for posting Reviews of Organize Now.  Please feel free to email me your favorite post about a chapter in the book and I will post your link to my site.  Just include the name of your blog and the URL in your email.

I am also on Facebook and Twitter and would love to connect with all of you. If you have any questions while reading the book please feel free to contact me.

Happy Organizing!

Jennifer Ford Berry

Thanks Jennifer for that message!  I hope you will all head over to her site and follow her (I do)!  I also hope that when you link up here, you will also head on over to Jennifer’s facebook page leave your link there too! (again, I do!) 

You can buy the book here…

 

 

This week is Organizing Your Bill-Paying System!

 

 

There are a lot of different ways to pay your bills! 

Some people have paper everywhere and hope they paid everything on time and others have a system that works for them.

Having a system, even a simple one, can make your bill paying a lot smoother!

 

GOALS FOR THIS WEEK!

Set a Pay Billing Schedule!

You should pick a day that you pay your bills whether weekly or bi-weekly AND PUT IT IN YOUR PLANNER!!!  This is important and you don’t want to forget to pay a bill, especially a mortgage payment.  We have a system that works for us.  My husband brings in the mail and I sort it.  I immediately THROW out ALL junk mail.   Then, I place all the incoming mail in a file and the bills in another file.  I pay most of our bills and I actually really like paying them the day we get them.  I know, that is not a real schedule, I will try to pick one day for that!  But we do schedule our mortgage and credit card bills.  My husband is in charge of those biggies.  My husband gets paid bi-weekly and he pays our mortgage after one check and the credit card bill after the other.  That way, we make sure the big one are taken care of!  Our system in a team effort, ha!  This works for us.

 

I showed you HERE, how I file my mail.  I keep my mail “file” box right in my kitchen, where I pay my bills.

 

Set up a bill paying section.

Get all your stamps, envelopes, calculator, address labels, etc together.  I have a drawer in my kitchen where I keep all my stuff together.  But, besides my magazine subscription bills, I can’t remember the last time I sent a check in the mail.  I told you all last week that we do everything online.  I LOVE paying bills online!!!  It saves me time because I don’t have to fill out a check and envelope  (not that it’s hard, it is just one more thing!).  It saves my money because I am not buying envelopes and stamps.   Also, I can trust that my check will not get lost in the mail.  I can also see how much money is in the account.

Write paid.

After you pay your bills, write paid on it!  You don’t want to double pay a bill! To make it easier to pay bills, try to only have one credit card!  The less bills to pay the easier!!

Record your bill.

It is good to keep track of all your expense, so record what you just paid.  This is also a great time to check your balance!

 File.

To keep things organized, FILE your bill after you pay it!  Keep a file for all paid bills.

I keep my paid bills in a file cabinet.  This makes it easy to file and find later if I need to look at it again.

For more tips, please read, Organize Now!  I have been getting a lot of emails from people telling me how much they like this book.  If you are looking for a helpful yet simple book to get your life in order, I highly recommend it!  :)  I am not getting paid to promote this book but if you order through my link, I will get a small percentage. 

Thanks! :)

PAST POSTS!!!

To read the 1st week’s post, on Organizing your Mind, click HERE!

To read the 2nd week’s post, on Organizing your Schedule, click HERE!

To read the 3rd week’s post, on Organizing your Cleaning Schedule, click HERE!

To read the 4th week’s post, on Organizing your Priorities, click HERE!

To read the 5th week’s post, on Organizing your Personal Information, click HERE!

To read the 6th week’s post on Organizing your Finances, click HERE!

Do you have a bill paying system?

How do you organize them?

How has this series helped you?

Please grab a button if you are linking up!

 

<center><a href="http://creatingahouseofgrace.blogspot.com" target="_blank"><img alt="Organize your lif" src="http://i684.photobucket.com/albums/vv204/bonniejane03/organizeyourlifebutton-1.jpg" /></a></center>

Please link up your Bill Paying System BELOW!

Have a great day! :)

 

TODAY IS THE LAST DAY FOR THE CINCH SPECIAL!!!!

Also, don’t forget that you can get a FREE SHAKEE CINCH SAMPLER KIT (over $100 value) with the purchase of a Shaklee membership (a $19.95 one time fee to save you 15% off ALL orders including your first order) or ShakleeDistributorship ($39.95) AND a $70 order at member price (MN).  To get this special,  place the products in your cart, and then it will tell you that you qualify for the free Cinch Sampler Kit at the top.  After that, sign up as a member or distributor. You DO NOT need to place the sampler kit in your cart…it is automatic, just make sure to check if you qualify.   Please note, if you become a Gold Ambassador, you do not need to place an order to get the free kit.  Please email me at donahuewellness@hotmail.com for any questions.  ***Plus, I will let you know of ALL OF MY NEW MEMBER SPECIALS!!!***  You can read about my Cinch results here and my sister’s amazing story here.

Clue

The Spring birdsong is so sweet, I am sure even the birds sing en Francais.

I Am Somewhere Lovely At The Moment

Can you guess where I am?

Recherche et le developpement.

Simple Pleasures - Water...it's even hot

Today I want to share with everyone the Simple Pleasure of Water.

Now some of you may be asking, How is that a simple pleasure? Well I would like to show you!

As many of you know we live in Australia and some of you may not realise that we are not a country of immense water supply. We have many parts of  our country that are always short of water and we have just come out of a sever drought that has lasted many years.

Even so, many people are town and city dwellers who have not had any real severe water restrictions. Now having been a town dweller all my life and even our property is on the edge of a town I think I can appreciate that most people do not give water a second thought, except when the council imposes water restrictions and therefore gardens tend to suffer and cars can not be washed with a hose.

The difference is for me that I now fully understand and know how water restrictions affect your life.I think I can say I have an  appreciation  for the simple pleasure of water due to the fact that when we built our home we had to put in a bore for water as the town water supply stopped just short of our property.

We have had many opportunities to value  this precious commodity. Because our water is dependent on rain water seeping into the earth and for most of our time in Tasmania it has also been in drought we have had to learn to manage our water usage.
Perhaps this is not a problem for not so large families but for us it has been an effective look at how we use water.

We have in our family adapted strategies to try to deal with the whole use of water situation.
These may not seem like big issues for some, but we have quite a habit with conserving water now, which I believe is a good thing, that even when we have had an excess and our tank over flows we still are quite frugal with our water usage.

1. We really look at our clothes before putting in for a wash: is it smelly is it REALLY dirty and deserve a wash yet. Of course our little children are notorious for finding any patch of dirt/mud etc and getting dirty, so obviously we do not let them go around in filthy clothes. But it is an exercise in discernment.

2. We only shower/bath every second day, for most of us who don't need to have showers daily. Of course we are masters at the so called in our home "bucket bath/sailor bath" that we use on non shower days.
Before you go ....ouch, that is a deprivation, I would like to say that every day showers is not the NORM for everyone in the world and really is a very modern convienience that I think many take for granted and an expexted RIGHT in our society.

3. When we wash up in the sink we use a VERY minimal amount of water and woe be it to anyone I see using too much water.

4. Our dishwasher was, when we bought it the most conservative on water at the time only using 9 liters of water per wash.

5. When washing hands etc I still monitor the use of water as I think that most of us just run water without thinking.

6. Our hot water has been an interesting issue as well, a whole other story but let me say I am very thankful for this other seemingly simple pleasure.

So I hope you have enjoyed and appreciate how blessed most of us are to have the opportunity to have running and mostly abundant water as a SIMPLE PLEASURE in our lives.

Could I just ask also for a quick prayer that even as I type this we have been without water, except what has been in our tank - 2,500 liters, since Saturday.
Today is  Thursday and we have 1000 liters left: we have reduced our consumption by not washing....ouch that is beginning to hurt with piles of clothes needing to be washed and been EXTRA frugal with water.
Please could you pray that our bore man can have our bore man has our bore operational by this afternoon and we have water by tomorrow morning.

Once again I am linking to Dayles Simple Pleasures for this post, and I look forward to visiting you all and viewing your own Simple Pleasure

Blessings to you and your homes,

DEEPWATER HORIZON'S UNCOUNTED VICTIMS

(Killer whales. Photo by Pittman, courtesy NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons.)

A new paper in Conservation Letters calculates that the numbers of whales and dolphins killed in BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster could be 50 times higher than the number of carcasses found. 

The authors—a high-powered list of renowned cetacean researchers from Canada, the US, Australia, and Scotland (including Scott Krause, who I filmed years ago for a documentary about North Atlantic right whales)—write of a general misperception of the Deepwater Horizon impact:

Many media reports have suggested that the spill caused only modest environmental impacts, in part because of a low number of observed wildlife mortalities, especially marine mammals.

(Atlantic spotted dolphins. Photo by Bmatulis, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Compared to the 1989 Exxon Valdez, with its iconic oiled otters and high body counts, the Deepwater Horizon seems, well, not so bad.

The authors point out that "only" 101 dead cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) were found in the Northern Gulf of Mexico as of 7 November 2010. The number's misleading though.

The issue arises when policymakers, legislators, or biologists treat these carcass-recovery counts as though they were complete counts or parameters estimated from some representative sample, when in fact, they are opportunistic observations. Our study suggests that these opportunistic observations should be taken to estimate only the bare minimum number of human-caused mortalities.

(Humpback whale. Photo by Whit Welles Wwelles14, via Wikimedia Commons.)

So how many more whales, dolphins, and porpoises actually died? That problem is tough to figure to begin with and is compounded by a dearth of data in the Gulf—a fact that will work greatly in BP's favor when the time comes to levy fines.

The Gulf of Mexico is a semi-enclosed subtropical sea that forms essentially one ecosystem with many demographically independent cetacean populations. Some of these cetacean populations, such as killer whales (Orcinus orca), false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens), melonheaded whales (Peponocephala electra), and several beaked whale species, appear to be quite small, are poorly studied, or are found in the pelagic realm where they could have been exposed to oil and yet never strand. Small, genetically isolated populations of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) could have experienced substantial losses either inshore or offshore.

(Mother and calf bottlenose dolphins. Photo by M. Herko, courtesy NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons.) 

Two methods of extrapolation could shed light on how many cetaceans BP's disaster killed:

1. Compare abundance before the disaster to abundance after—but since we don't know the population size of whale and dolphins species in the Gulf before hand we're unlikely to notice anything short of "the most catastrophic decline" and maybe not even that.
2. Count the number of carcasses recovered—knowing that many will evade our count, having sunk, decayed, been scavenged, or drifted away. So adjust the counts upward to estimate total mortality. This approach is used to estimate bird deaths at power lines, where, in at least one instance, we now know that bird body counts underestimate total actual deaths by a whopping 32 percent.
   

The authors worked the two methods as best they could and added something more.

Given the magnitude of the spill and complexity of the response, quantifying the ecological impacts will take a long time. To contribute to this effort, we examined historical data from the Northern Gulf of Mexico to evaluate whether cetacean carcass counts in this region have previously been reliable indicators of mortality, and may therefore accurately represent deaths caused by the Deepwater Horizon/BP event.

(Sperm whale. Photo courtesy NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons.) 

Their methods and analysis suggest that an average of 4,474 cetaceans died in the northern Gulf every year between 2003 and 2007 from all causes, human and natural. Yet since an average of only 17 bodies were found in those years, the body count represented only ~0.4 percent of total deaths.
 

Consider, for example, one sperm whale being detected as a carcass, and a necropsy identified oiling as a contributing factor in the whale’s death. If the carcass-detection rate for sperm whales is 3.4%, then it is plausible that 29 sperm whale deaths represents the best estimate of total mortality, given no additional information. If, for example, 101 cetacean carcasses were recovered overall, and all deaths were attributed to oiling, the average-recovery rate (2%) would translate to 5,050 carcasses, given the 101 carcasses detected.

Those are chilling numbers. Period. But also in light of the relatively tiny populations of cetaceans in the Gulf. Especially since most if not all cetaceans are highly social, and since oil and chemical dispersants likely injured, sickened, or killed entire clusters, schools, pods, matrilines, or groups at the same time—and may still be doing so.

The authors describe the near-lethal affect of the Exxon Valdez disaster on one well-known and well-studied pod of killer whales in Alaska.

In the first year after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, the AT1 group of "transient" killer whales experienced a 41% loss; there has been no reproduction since the spill. Although the cause of the apparent sterility is unknown, the lesson serves as an important reminder that immediate death is not the only factor that can lead to long-term loss of population viability.

(Pilot whale mother and calf. Photo by Clark Anderson via Wikimedia Commons.)

The paper:

Rob Williams, Shane Gero, Lars Bejder, John Calambokidis, Scott D. Kraus, David Lusseau, Andrew J. Read, &amp; Jooke Robbins (2011). Underestimating the damage: interpreting cetacean carcass recoveries in the context of the Deepwater Horizon/BP incident Conservation Letters : 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2011.00168.x