Do you live to eat or eat to live? You know I used to be the former but now as am aging (well am 26 I don’t know why I keep saying that!) I am slowly trying to be the latter. I have some news for you. If you like to find out all the goodies that are available to eat and how to whip up gourmet cuisine and tell your Olive oils and all that – the upcoming Upper Crust Show is something you shouldn’t give a miss. Its got some awesome events, guest celebs, contests (OOh! I love contests) and much more. Bon appetit!

My Brand New CPMV I Made Today!!!

Hope You Like It…

~Lilbeclil x

I LOVE ALL MY FANS!!!

Thanksgiving day came and went and we are now entering full time to the crazy holiday season, starting with today black Friday where everyone tries to find the best sales of the season I their favorite store so they pack themselves with their credit cards in the hope of finding a great deal. Did you go shopping today? For the record I didn’t I don’t like crowds and my non stressed relaxed life is worth more than any sale I could find, so I am one of those people who by now has most of her Christmas shopping done, and I am only missing a few  gifts and I’m over. I’m just missing just a few children gifts because they keep changing their minds and won’t know what they want until the very day before Christmas but I will try to get ahead of them.

Here you can see and listen to Pink singing Dear Mr President. Enjoy

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…and bake some delicious christmas cookies for your dear friends today!
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Please take the time to watch this video with Dr Wayne W Dyer. Rolf (my husband) has been a big fan of his for many years. Rolf has books, cd´s and yesterday he received this film. I would like to share this with you. Its called The Shift. Enjoy

Here follows an easy recipe with white beans.

• 5 dl large white beans (used 2 cans or soak your dried beans)
• 2 tbsp balsamic
• 1 tbsp of tomato past
• zest of 1 lemon
• 2 tsp of cinnamon
• 1 dl of good olive oil
• salt/pepper
• 1 dl chopped parsley
• 2 garlic gloves (pressed)

Turn gently everything together. Leave to marinade  for 1 hour (not a must). Decorate with some parsley leaves. Enjoy

The truth about Thanksgiving Day is that every year I promise myself that I will get a Royal Holiday reservation and spend Thanksgiving watching the Macy’s parade in New York City I just wish work didn’t pile up on the holiday season and that I could really go to New York on Thanksgiving day, not for the sales, just for the parade from what friends that have been there tell me it is quite a sight. So this year I can only hope to be there next year for Thanksgiving Day. I know I will miss my family dinner but missing one once in a while can actually make you look forward to being there the next year can’t it? So The next thing in the agenda is to make a list of the Christmas present s I have to buy this year and getting them before December 15^th that is my deadline I hate going shopping after that all the crowds and the sales persons are too tired to be nice, so focus on having the shopping done by then.

Today was and is still going on our Thanksgiving dinner, I just came up to have a little me and quiet time and to escape a little form all the aunts and uncles that want to catch up about your life in one evening and one at a time so you have to answer the same question like a thousand time. Of course we all over ate and now we feel like we won’t need another meal for like a week and the next thing you know you are having and extra slice of pie in the middle of the night. By the way the pumpkin pie I made came out just great, so we had a beautiful and delicious dinner but too many people in one single night can turn out to be overwhelming so I just came up a little to unwind and relax. Everybody is talking about all the black Friday’s sales and Christmases office parties and celebrations and we are only in November!!!!

In other pressing matters, tomorrow is thanksgiving and with this long weekend holiday we start the holiday season that ends only after New Year, so I feel today is a great day to think about what we are all Thankful for, those of us who are lucky enough to have jobs should be grateful for that, those of us who have health should be equally thankful, the most simple stuff  internet access, education, light power, knowledge, family , friends, values, we should be thankful we have all these blessings and are privileged over many people who strive to have clean water to drink. Instead of searching for the best turkey recipe or struggling and complaining about tomorrow’s dinner, be grateful you have someone to share it with. Instead of complaining how much you have to cook, worry and share with those who are homeless and have nothing to eat. Happy thanksgiving to you and your Family!

http://www.thanksgiving-day.org/thanksgiving-day-celebration.html

http://www.usathanksgiving.com/

http://www.pilgrimhall.org/f_thanks.htm

Many of Isabel Allende’s books if not all of them are translated to English so you are sure to enjoy her books. I would start with my all times favorite The House of the Spirit which initiates you bin a new genre called magic realism which Allende really masters in this book. If you like Allende then you should follow up with this Catalan author whose main books have been around the world and have been read by many people these books are also translated to English language. I have read them both and found them really interesting; I’m talking about Carlos Riuz Zafron who is the author of The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game both of these books are related but you can read each one of them separately and individually and in the order you choose to. All of these books are great vacation trip company.

http://www.carlosruizzafon.co.uk/

Of course I always check Oprah’s book club recommendations on her magazine or in the web page, and some I follow and some I don’t depending on the book’s topic and or author. My other sources of book recommendations are my friends, all of them whether locally or friends I have met on vacations and live abroad in other regions and countries and they have made several times great suggestions that I have followed gladly. Once a friend recommends a great book he is a very good source for great reading material, such is my Mexican friend who has recommended several great book I know will recommend you. First I will start with a great Latin American Author, she lives in the US but was born in Chile and is related with former president Allende, of course she is Isabel Allende.  She has many books, being a prolific author she has written over 20 books.

http://www.oprah.com/entity/oprahsbookclub

http://www.isabelallende.com/

For a more deep and profound reading, I highly recommend catching up on your book reading during your vacation trips. Vacations that are supposed to be relaxing by the pool or the beach are great for reading long interesting books. So I like to call this reading escape my vacation inside the vacations, whenever a family trip is on course or friends are going around you doing things you don’t’ really feel up to doing yourself, then I pick up a book and isolate myself into the world of the story I am reading. I mostly like to read fiction novels unlike my mother who likes to read biographies especially from celebrities. I love to get capture by the plot and be so into the story I can hardly give up reading for any other activity.  I like to have my attention capture right from the start.

Cover of Björk's Homogenic (One Little Indian, 1997); image courtesy of slantmagazine.com

Cover for Björk's Vespertine (One Little Indian, 2001); image courtesy of harmony-korine.com

When I began conceptualizing this blog in the ol’ brainspace, one of the first sections I came up with was “Records That Made Me a Feminist.” I knew Björk was going to get at least one entry. Homogenic and Vespertine each played a vital part of shaping my politics. So, I figured out I’d probably have to write about them together.

Pairing albums for this section of the blog is something I originally wanted to do this when covering Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun, which I started listening to around the same time as PJ Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea. I liked the idea of dialoguing seemingly dissimilar work by female artists with one another, but I feared covering those two albums together would short-shrift the artists who made them. However, talking about two distinct pieces of work by one woman seemed easier. And essential. So here we go.

I must admit that covering Björk’s 1997 and 2000 full-length releases present its own political challenges that makes me think critically about how I understand and practice feminism. Both of these albums made me a feminist largely because of the boys I was preoccupied with at the time.

But while my initial reception and resulting connections to them were tied up with potentially normative feelings around romantic angst and heterosexual coupling, I feel the albums speak to my development at the time as well as transcend it. In other words, Homogenic and Vespertine may remind me of boys I used to date, but they speak to larger, more overtly feminist issues as well.

Of course, being a feminist doesn’t mean you can’t like boys or be hung up on them from time to time, so long as you don’t let them run your life. Which I don’t think Björk endorses in either of these records, even though she herself has an ambivalent relationship with feminism (though not with calling out the music industry’s sexist practices of attributing male engineers and instrumental songwriters).

Importantly, as both albums were prescient to my development, they also went over my head when I first listened to them. Debut and Post were more accessible and, as a result, I liked them almost immediately. It was hard for 10-year-old me not to fall for the girl dancing through New York City on a flatbed in the music video for “Big Time Sensuality.”

But Björk’s next two albums took more time to process. Both albums mark advances in the artist’s production sensibilities, approaches to music-making, and interest in electronic instrumentation. Thus, just as Björk had to evolve as a musician before creating these albums, I had to mature a bit as a person before liking them as a fan.

So, Homogenic came out just as I was starting high school. I don’t exactly remember when I bought it, but I think it was sometime toward the end of junior year. I completely ignored it at the time. Or rather, I listened to it once, went “ooh, so angry!” and put Post back on.

The particulars I’ll keep to myself for the sake of decorum. Suffice it to say that I dated someone for a little while, fell in love, we broke up, and I spent a little over a year trying to get us back together. It didn’t work out. Eventually I got over him and whatever I thought we were, but not without some pain and denial and then serious personal re-evaluation. The healing process involved some righteous anger, loud parties, several bottles of wine and other goodies, and burgeoning feminist development. After a rough start, 19 turned out to be a pretty okay year. Homogenic was its soundtrack.

Now, I have no problem acknowledging that this guy was a total jerk to me. But feminism isn’t only about recognizing and calling out chauvinistic bullshit. It’s also about self-empowerment, personal accountability, and un-learning heteronormativity and patriarchal co-dependence. It isn’t always just the guy’s fault, even when it is.

Thus, I also have to own up to being really needy and delusional at the time. I pinned my worth on whoever I was dating without questioning whether being with them was actually good for me. So I projected my own big feelings and insecurities on someone who clearly didn’t want to be with me. I was ignoring the reality of the situation and, as a result, my own well-being. I finally recognized what I was doing when confronted with the lyric “How could I be so immature to think he could replace the missing elements in me — how extremely lazy of me.” 

Kinda appropriate that a break-up record got me over mine, no? Apparently, Björk made the album after breaking up with drum’n'bass musician Goldie while they were working on their own project. Hence lines like “So you left me on my own to complete the mission, but now I’m leaving it all behind.” But it pretty much hit all the right notes of melancholy, indignation, rage, and feisty recovery for me. I’m a quarter Norwegian on my mother’s side, so even the line ”I thought I could organize freedom — how Scandinavian of me” in “Hunter” applied.

Attention must be paid to the album’s sound and how it marked a musical departure for Björk. Post was an eclectic mix that boasted songs like “Army of Me,” “Enjoy,” and “Headphones,” that opened up her sound to include state-of-the-art aggressive digital distortion and serene electronic minimalism.

While this was evident in the production work Tricky and 808 State’s Graham Massey did on Post, it wasn’t the focus. It would come to define the artistic work she began doing with producers like Mark Bell on Homogenic and would continue to do with Matmos on Vespertine. But I’d hedge that most casual listeners just remember Post’s ”It’s Oh So Quiet,” which was produced by Björk’s then-mainstay, Nellee Hooper, the man responsible for all the production on her breakthrough Debut. He was also responsible for “Hyperballad,” which I’d argue suggests the artist’s shift, which is fully evident on her next album.

Man, I wish I could post the music video, but WMG has apparently disabled the audio. All the more reason to check out Michel Gondry’s Directors Label DVD, or any of the other myriad DVD titles that have documented her videography.

So Homogenic marks a transition from being a pop star to an artist who challenges her listeners’ ears and expectations with each release. By 1997, we also heard alternative pop stars like Beck and Radiohead establish themselves similarly with Odelay and OK Computer. We would hear Radiohead do it again in 2000 with the mind-blowing Kid A, where they really demonstrated their love for electronic instrumentation and experimental production techniques.

Björk was already on this path in 1997, but while Radiohead looked outward toward the fallabilities of modern life, Björk looked inward at the seductive pleasures and wobbly peculiarities of domestic life and partnership on her next record, rapturing at her voice’s clicks and finding percussive possibilities out of shuffled decks of cards. I don’t think these innovations went unnoticed when Radiohead went to work on In Rainbows. To me, Vespertine’s influence is all over a song like “Nude,” which was originally an outtake from OK Computer. This is further confirmed by the band’s rendition of Homogenic’s ”Unravel” as a tip of the hat. As if lead singer Thom Yorke’s backing vocals on “Náttúra” aren’t enough.

Hmmm. Maybe at some point, I’ll consider Yorke’s duets with Björk and PJ Harvey. Yorke is one of my favorite vocalists, a fact confirmed by a recent revisit of Hail to the Thief. If one of my friends ran a blog on male masculinity and music culture, I’d pen a guest entry in a second.

But I was afflicted with a troubled mind when Vespertine first came out. In addition to boy heartache, I was going through some considerable familial strife. I was also starting my first semester of college, so a tackier person might blame 9/11.

After seeing the music video for “Hidden Place,” I dutifully bought the album, along with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, another at-the-time inscrutable release, at the Tower Records by campus. I listened to the album a few times, but my head was not in the right place for it. It was too contented and quiet. I couldn’t hear it. And then for a little while all I could hear was Homogenic at full volume.

Stills from the video that convinced me to buy "Vespertine"; image courtesy of unit.bjork.com

To be blunt, Vespertine didn’t really make sense to me until I started having sex. Critics like Ryan Dombal would seem to concur. I remember seeing her performance of ”Cocoon” on Jay Leno and thinking that it was really quiet, but totally not getting how micro-embodied intimacy is the song’s entire purpose. While I had a good understanding of mechanics and had engaged in related activities before going into my first listen, I don’t think a song like “Cocoon” makes sense to a person unless they’ve experienced it, to speak euphemistically, in a corporeal sense.

BTW, yes that is Bill O’Reilly adjusting his tie. If he was actually listening to the song, I’m sure he’d be appalled by how delightfully, defiantly sexual this song is and that it was performed uncensored on network television. Watching it now, I can’t believe I wasn’t really listening. Maybe I should have been leaning into the television.  

Again, the particulars here aren’t really important. I was a week or so into being 20 and, frankly,  didn’t want to be a virgin anymore. The guy was someone willing, it was fun, and didn’t last very long.

In short, the romanticism and emotional connectedness that is often built into such an experience was not there, nor do I regret that it wasn’t. I would find that later, which would make my understanding of those aspects of Vespertine more profound and further develop my feminist principles.

I bring sex into the discussion because I, to borrow briefly from Arrested Development’s George Michael Bluth, find Vespertine’s complex eroticism one of its most key contributions to what made me a feminist. Though perhaps a stretch and certainly not without its own distinctions, I tend to think of this album in accord with Audre Lorde’s wonderful essay “Uses of the erotic: the erotic as power.”

And while I don’t know if this entry’s subject has read the essay, something tells me that the same woman who identifies as bisexual and recognizes the erotic potential in mundane activities would concur with much of the theorist’s thesis.

Of course, feminists must also have the wherewithal to recognize that eroticism, even ephemeral evidence like orgasms, are luxuries to some women and girls. Not everyone is given a space, a country, or a political system that allows them the safety and freedom to enjoy and explore these possibilities.

But eroticism isn’t about cataloging who did what to whom for Björk. As David Fricke gestured toward in his review of the album for Rolling Stone, it might be everywhere, at once tangible and theoretical.

This is where I think it’s important to consider the album’s production sensibilities and Björk’s particular uses of her voice. In addition to non-conventional practices like sampling and turning seemingly non-musical domestic items into instruments, the singer’s voice is the album’s real focus. Because of how closely she’s miked, you can hear every tic, breath, whispered turn of phrase, and any other sound coming out of her mouth. As a result, her voice becomes a varied and vital instrument, an idea she has continued to develop and that has continued to stay with me.

As we enter the holiday season, don’t forget there are many low cost and free opportunities to spend quality time with family and friends. The key is to become engaged. Get out and enjoy all that Boynton Beach has to offer.

According to the National Recreation and Parks Association…
…Citizens who have better access to parks, visit parks more frequently and engage in physically active park behaviors make fewer visits to their doctor.
…Active users of public parks have a lower body mass index (BMI).
…People who visit parks for longer periods of time (one hour or more) have significantly lower systolic blood pressures.
…Park users who are more physically active and who make frequent contact with friends during their leisure are less likely to report feeling depressed.

The Boynton Beach Recreation and Parks Department affords you the opportunity to benefit from all of the above. Get more information by visiting our website at http://tr.im/FMR9.

Posted here on LifeToolkit.net.

Don’t worry, this post is not about shooting rabbits. Although Daffy would really want that.

In this very funny classic cartoon, Bugs Bunny asks Elmer Fudd: “Would you like to shoot me now or wait till you get home?” while

Daffy Duck yells: “Shoot’im NOW! Shoot’im NOW!”
Unfortunately Daffy always ends up being shot himself.

This post is about the “NOW”.

The Marshmallow Test

Do you remember the Marshmallow Test? I read about it first in Daniel Goleman’s “Emotional Intelligence”. Dragos Roua writes here about it, on his blog (and does an excellent new perspective on it).

Here’s my take:

A bunch of kids were given a marshmallow, and were told that if they resist NOT EATING IT NOW, they would be given another one in a few minutes. And the kids who succeeded in NOT eating the first marshmallow were the ones who were successful in life later on. It’s called the principle of deferred gratification.

And I say, isn’t this just the way we were educated?
“Do your lessons, so that you can enter a good college.”
“Learn well now, and you will know how to have an interesting conversation and people will like you.”
“Work hard now and you’ll have money for a house when you retire.”

I’ll have to wait until I retire

My boss told me something that startled me a few weeks ago. He was talking about his oldest son graduating highschool and going to college. Then he mentioned he can’t wait for his daughter to do this as well, so that both his kids would be on their own and start their life. Then he could retire and do what he wanted.
Whoa! Do you have to wait 10 years to do that?

What about me? I’m 27 now. Do I have to wait until I have all the money/raise my kids/spend my life to do what I want? That’s gonna be ages!!

Life around the world

Here’s an empowering example. A Romanian family (but the idea belongs to a French family) sold their house, bought a caravan, and together with their kids roamed the world. Kids were learning about the Magellan Strait while they were sailing it. How’s that as a perspective?

Their full story (in Romanian, French and Spanish) here.

In conclusion

Don’t wait until you’re old.
Do what you dreamed of NOW.

You might never get a second marshmallow.

So after you finish your light reading the kind you can just leave for a moment and then come back to it without you having to reread the entire article again, you can come back to your reading anytime. The magazines have another advantage for the pool or the beach, they can get wet and you can continue to read them and then you just throw them away, so for a great vacation light reading go buy a couple of your favorite magazines and take them with you, the spa treatments the before bedtime the beach and pool time will be filled with interesting facts and not so useful as fun information about different topics. All the reading time in a vacation trip can´t be taken up by magazine reading , vacations are also for reading more serious stuff, and it is also fun to bring it along with you.

under the sheets- ellie goulding (remix by pariah).

i am in love with this song. instant contact high just by listening.

enjoy :O)

“You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes”
– Winnie the Pooh –

Is everyone born with the ability to ‘go get em’? Or do some people get a slightly larger helping when the fall from the Tree of Life? Either way, its a little bit if a conundrum… the propulsion to head steadily towards formulated plans, without hesitation or diversion, that some people seem pretty good at (say the Richard Branson’s of the world), compared to those that falter so much more in achieving what they want. What makes them so different from the Average Joe who finds it that little bit harder to keep plodding on in the face of adversity?

 Me, I wonder if sometimes a slightly larger fuel injection wouldn’t go amiss? Or perhaps a pair of blinkers that might just aid my on my way. Funnily enough, I recently read that as well as the popular association with blinkers in the horse world, they are also ’small bright intensity enhancements’. How apt really - that by focusing on our intended goal it will also become brighter, more intense, until hopefully one day we’re smack bang on top of it and we’re blinded by where we’ve finally got to.

I find it hard to trace back the point at which the confidence took a bit of a battering, and when I started to be just that bit more reserved in what I hoped for, and what I thought I could achieve. I recognise now that a few setbacks and rejections can build, even though you push them to oneside. And thats when the rot can set in if your not careful, that borderline indifference where you realise you’re not entirely happily with the state of things, but seem powerless to alter things. So you just saunter alone for a few more weeks. Then months…..

At this point it is even more important to push through those feelings, and remind yourself that you’re not done yet. No way near. I started to ignore the niggle, that question about whether I could really do the things I wanted to do next. I started to focus instead on what I enjoyed doing admist hard times at work, and wrote down 3 things I wanted to get done by the end of the month outside of work stuff, regardless of how inconsequential they might be,  and put them somewhere I could be reminded of where I was headed. No way was this going to be my lot.

I love the example of George Dantzig, google him if you’ve time, who entering a lecture late at university copied down two maths problems from the board he incorrectly believed to be homework which he then went on to solve and submit. In fact, they were formerly unproved maths theorems being used simply to illustrate a point. The power of knowing no limits – imagine where we could end up with just a little more belief in ourselves.

I realised my energy would be better spent, not questioning why so many hurdles seemed to appear at times, but in figuring out a way round them. And my conclusion? It didn’t matter that I was still worried – that I hadn’t got it all figured out, I just needed to put my energy into doing it anyway. Looking towards those people that manage to seemingly make something out of nothing, I wonder what pushes them forward?

Psychologists and research would suggest several key characteristics. Given different names, but these seem to be a definite vision and belief about where they are headed supported by a realistic plan of how they’re going to get there- the building blocks. Next a sense of determiniation – they are passionate about where they are heading- the ability to surge forward despite knock backs, and a committment to pursuing what they want. Within that an ability to be flexible and creative- to find other ways around hurdles. The balance between being able to get on with others but not back down. And lastly support from those around them. Sounds so simple! Yet clearly not everyone has such an entrpreneural spirit, regardless though that doesn’t mean I can’t beg borrow a steal a little bit of that zeal!

In the words of Winnie the Pooh, don’t expect it to come to you, sometimes you have to chase after what you want. You have to be relentless, know that you deserve to spend time doing the things you are passionate about, and that this doesn’t have to be it.

December 6th&7th …. Over the past century, few entertainers have achieved the legendary status of Bill Cosby. His successes span five decades and virtually all media, remarkable accomplishments for a kid who emerged from humble beginnings in a Philly project. In the 1960s, his stand-up act was a coast-to-coast sensation, spawning a string of hilarious, best-selling comedy albums, which went on to win eight Gold Records, five Platinum records and five Grammy Awards. Experience Bill Cosby and his stand-up act at the Tennessee Theater and enjoy a great night of commedy! Get your tickets now and bring the whole family! For more information, visit the Knoxville Destination Guide.