Jessica Lunsford Blog

Regardless of what age group we belong to and which cultural background we come from, there is a certain kinship that all of us have developed towards water. Water for us is not merely an ingredient that is substantial for endurance but it is doubtless the spirit power catered to us by nature.

The principle behind the Buddha Fountain is also the same. And here is your prospect to get as close as you can to the doctrine of Tao. That said, we also need to accept the presence of this life strength in our dwellings to make the most of its influential power, and getting a Buddha Fountain for your home is the best way to do this.

Whether you install Buddha fountains in it your garden or terrasse, the effects of it are seen on the whole household. There is a remarkable place to choose and buy tour Buddha fountains - it is known as tabletop fountain store. Carrying a Buddha Fountain at home is beneficial in more than one way, beginning from the serenity it induces in the mood of individuals around it to the Zen Powerhouse it creates in the place where the Buddha fountain is installed; the gains of it are numerous. Log in to Tabletop Fountain Store to get some of the most fabulous options for a Buddha Water Fountain in the market and choose what you want form the vast collection.

So go to tabletop fountain store now and impart your interior with a slice of Tao and hideaway in serenity. Buddha fountains assist as your association with the cosmos and make your dwellings look and feel more cozy, numerous people opt for Buddha fountains to add a touch of spiritual class to their homes and justly so owing to the nature of these fountains. Bergen County Accountants have benefited drastically from dragon figurines.

Numerous men and women display elephant figurines and other art in their dwellings, offices and environments. As legend has it, some think that the simple picture of an elephant projects certain feelings and traits to its surroundings. As it is the biggest land animal on Earth, the elephant symbolizes four really significant traits.

Strength and Power: You don’t have to be the brightest bulb on the tree to acknowledge this one. Because it is the heaviest land beasts on the planet, elephants are strong and tough. When a very giant job must be performed and electric equipment is not usable, the elephant takes in the first phonecall.

Perseverance: In order to achieve great things in life, men and women must besiege themselves with representations of tenacity. Possibly its pigheadedness or trust, but the elephant is unbelievably determined compared to umpteen other animals. To be able to survive in these temperatures and make these missions thousands of kilometers annually, is surely an effort, to say the least. That is one rationality as to why it is so auspicious to store elephant figurines next to a water sourcesuch as a copper fountain.

Patience / Wisdom: If you’re looking for a mighty animal that also utilizes graduated levels of intellect, look no further than this beast. They are incredibly developed in relation to the family unit, community, and relationships.

Dignity: The elephant’s large stature, mixed with millennia of evolution, have extinguished any signs of bashfulness from its psyche. The more massive and more assuming an elephant is, the more it fulfills its fate as the magnificent hulk. There is no bashfullness or disgrace in the elephant. And that is why civilizations, the world over, respect the elephant as 1 of the most proud and dignified animals around.

Throughout time, and in numerous different civilizations, the elephant has methodically depicted Strength, Perseverance, Wisdom, and Dignity. Everyone can harness these powers, at least in residual quantities, by maintaining artistry or photos of elephants in your environment.

Oyster card wallets are the most practical and man-portable marketing tool, with long lasting life and durability. They make very functional personalised item, to put your brand-name in front of your wide audience almost each day of the year and can truly help your line of work to bring home the bacon in a hostile global market. They are a important investment and allow a number of advertisement chances for you and your business enterprise. They are very suitable for your business enterprise identity development and enable you to contend worldwide and also to gain trust and commitment for your business enterprise. These Card holders make quite multipurpose products, for your prospective client, will bar them from being tossed out.

1) Your clients will be able to journey in vogue and protect their precious travel card or ID at the same time and remembering who gave them such an deluxe present. It can be published in full gloss with a diversity of different coatings. By using your business logotype, you can all of a sudden shape this simple object into an irresistible rough-and-ready promotional instrument. This item can assist you to prompt your customers of your company name, again and again.

2) Card holders are outstanding items, insuring upper limit day-by-day brandmark strengthening and campaign longevity. These Oyster card holders can genuinely serve you through your journeying and in the most active rush hour scrum. You can as well employ them as a magnanimous present to hold dear your unique guests. They feel pro and smart and bring fantastic delight to the recipients.

3) It is a fantastic value promotional item for your aimed audience and comes in a large range of assorted colorings and conceptions. It is anti-fade and prepared of wet proof and water repellent materials. Oyster wallets will create a fantastic impact, when passed out to your work colleagues, clients, relatives or even friends on their special occasions.

4) Your clients will be able to journey in style and protect their valuable oyster card or identification at the same time and thinking of who gave them such an exquisite present. It can be printed in full colour with a variety of unique coatings. By employing your party logo, you can suddenly shape this plain object into an fascinating rough-and-ready promotional tool. This item can aid you to prompt your clients of your company brand, time and again.

5) They are graceful and cost effective items, and are available in a great range of colorings and sizings. Their brilliant colourings will make it favourable for you to find them in your purse or breif-case. They also have a logotype mounted on the cover. They are one of the most favorite promotional items and provide a outstanding means of maximizing your merchandising budget.

You might have read the term “web banner” used a lot on the internet. This word identifies 2 varieties of graphical imagery. The first variety is the traditional advertising banner, commonly used as a method to advertise a site, as a click on the banner takes one to the advertised website. The other kind of banner is found at the very top of a typical site - the website header. This location usually ushers in a person to the site with a title, possibly a secondary strapline, and some imagery to aid in theming the website. Both types of banner serve fundamental purposes in both delivering traffic to a site, and helping make a site keep each visitor for a longer period of time on the site - by instructing them simply with the primary purpose of the site, and tempting them to peruse the site further, utilizing persuasive imagery / strapline text.

So how does one go about producing web banners? There are numerous online services which can serve you with this project. Also many give you hosting too. Just enter some words like banner for website into a search engine and you’ll locate a number of online services.

So what to put in your banner? Well, if you are selling items, it’s a good plan to arrange the payment gateways your website utilizes for processing payments, as it leaves individuals a visual clue that you are selling products as well as letting the visitor know how they can pay. Place some images of the items you are selling too, as this is yet another visible hint as to what types of items you sell. The strapline text is primary as well. Ensure the strapline distinctly and briefly posits what the site is about in just four to eight words.

As obvious as all this sounds, a slip many sites make is to assume every visitor knows instinctively what the website is about before visiting it. We can’t take for granted that each visitor what your site is about beforehand, so one needs to hold every visitant’s hand in those crucial first couple of seconds upon arriving at your website.

Back then it was simple - you take the picture, you print it and put it in your family album. But now you have a digital camera. So do your cousins, uncles, aunts and grandpa Joe. What are you going to do with thousands of digital photos to pass them onto the future generations? Read our advice.

What you need is a digital photo album. Here are some good ones so you know what to start with.

InAlbum

InAlbum is a fun and easy to use software to turn your digital photos into a stunning photo slideshow. Start with ready to use templates or custom templates which let you mix & match background animations, buttons, photo frames and transition effects. Decorate with animated clipart, speech bubbles, sounds, MP3 music and your own voices. InAlbum gives you more output options than any other slideshow softwares. Create video CDs that are playable on TVs using standard VCD / DVD player. Build screensavers for yourself or others. Make self-contained executable slideshows. Write autorun CDs that automatically play when inserted into a PC. Print photos and make wallpaper. Share via email and host your shows online for free.

Trial Version: http://www.deprice.com/inalbum.htm

PicaJet FX

PicaJet FX is a photo organizer that offers direct import from your camera, image sharing via email or web gallery, automatic photo enhancement, personal ratings and categories, as well as printing features and more. The photo organizer allows you to view your images by rating, keyword or date/timeline and you can easily categorize your images by simple drag and drop. In addition, it offers convenient editing features to correct red-eye, cropping, image sharpening, level adjustment and more. Additional features include direct CD/DVD burning, an image search engine with support for EXIF data, slideshow maker and an easy to use tool to generate a web gallery from perfect templates.

Trial Version: http://www.deprice.com/picajetfx.htm

Pics Print

Pics Print is a Windows application that makes it simple to format and print high-quality photos, greeting cards, contact sheets, and family albums. Using wizards and templates, you can quickly grab images from digital cameras, scanners or disk, make color corrections and add style to them, resize and annotate them, and print them using your printer’s highest quality settings. Pics Print’s folder browser lets you find images fast. With an intuitive Explorer-like folder tree and high-quality thumbnails of all of the images in that folder, identifying the right picture is quick and easy. You can retrieve photos directly from any digital camera, and create a contact sheet with a single click. Using standard drag-and-drop techniques, you can move the thumbnail images to the final document, resize them, add text, and print them for friends and family. The program includes WYSIWYG printing. The print preview screen lets you move, resize, and rotate images, so you’ll never waste time or ink on pages that aren’t exactly what you expect. Pics Print has a built-in photo editor that lets you crop, resize, rotate, and color-correct images. Users who enjoy adding artistic effects to their photos can blur, emboss, and sharpen the images, add borders, and produce an unlimited variety of creative touches. There is even a red-eye remover that takes out the red circles that the camera’s flash often adds to portraits.

Trial Version: http://www.deprice.com/picsprint.htm

John Deprice is a big fan of digital photography. He shares his tips on picking the right software at http://www.deprice.com/design.htm

I’m an amateur poet. Have written probably a total of 100 good poems in my life that still would not make it to any of the major national poetry magazines. (Not that I haven’t tried, trust me…)

However, I was very honored about six months to get accepted to a poetry writing Master Class conducted by a bona fide and famous poet who heads the creative writing program in a major university in my area.

This is a man whose poems I’ve admired greatly and have just finished a collection of his recently published works.

My first reaction to the news was to call back my writer’s center and make sure that it wasn’t a joke or anything.

No, it was true. I was indeed accepted to the Master Class of only 12 budding poets and the selection was made on the basis of our sample poems by none other than The Master himself.

Wow! I was floored. What an honor. What a delight.

But the next emotion was one of absolute dread and fear!

It was one thing reading my poems to my wife and loved ones.

But it would be a whole another kind of experience to expose them to the eagle-like scrutiny of a nationally renown poet and actually a “hero” of mine.

Jeeez, what the heck was I getting myself into?!

Once the workshop got underway I was really amazed at the quality of writing in that small group of ours.

We were all unknown poets, some of us, like me, never even published. But those lines, absolutely haunting, winding, exquisite lines, reminded me once again why I loved poetry so much in the first place.

However, although we were all evidently qualified in linguistic pyrotechnics, that meant nothing for our Master. It didn’t mean anything for him at all.

He was after something else, something more than just a flash in the pan. Hmmm, I was getting curious about that…

At that point I started to talk less and listen more, my ears wide open like radio-astronomy dishes scanning the heavens.

I’ve soon realized the crucial ingredient that was lacking in my poems and what made HIS poems that hard-hitting, that breath taking.

It was a simple word that I had not thought about within the context of poetry until that time - HONESTY.

Let me explain.

We were all both stepping on the gas and the brakes at the same time.

We were all trying to say something very dear and important to us by choosing poetry as a platform.

Yet when we reached the end of the road, we were all refusing to let it go, flap our wings and fly off the precipice of our daily over-structured mental landscape.

There was a lot of resistance in each of us to tell the truth and nothing else but the whole truth. Instead, we were falling back on the easy defense mechanisms of linguistic acrobatics and clever phrases and metaphors. Obviously to be clever and tricky was not what poetry was all about.

HONESTY is one word that I’ve left that workshop with and I’ll be forever grateful to him for showing me the source problem with every bad poem.

Whether I’ll have the courage or not to write poems in the future that will honor that crucial principle is something else.

But at least now I know what to do to write poems that reveal not only my own small personal facts (who cares?) but great universal truths as well (what a service to humanity!).

I survived the quake of the Master Class and now I don’t have any excuses to write bad poems any more.

Is that why I haven’t written any poems at all since that date?

———————————————————

Guesthouse,
in Babenhausen

The girl in the guesthouse

Is not as lovely as she was,

This year has worn against her.

She does not serve me so willingly;

Yes, she had a child, turned mother

And the glitter of youth that she shed

About the bar, as she

Brought me my beer, is spread

Too thin to be noticed.

She’s young, but looks middle aged.

Note: I was in Germany twice, once for 10-months, the second time for 44-months; during the second period, I knew the young lady at the guesthouse, a pretty German, her father owned the place, and her and her older sister helped with it. I had left the area for a year or so, and returned, and started drinking again, at that location, which was a bar on the highway between Babenhausen, and the Military Compound, nearby. But I hardly recognized her the second time. She was with child, and then I saw her before I left again, and that is when I saw the drastic change to her skin, her youthful beauty. I do feel, all this drinking and smoking and bar life takes the most out of a person, and of course it was a hangout for GI’s. Her skin was rich and vibrant; she was perhaps 19-years old when I met her, and 22-when I left. I of course back in 1976 was much older than her, I was 29-years old then. #1263 3/3/06

The Devil’s Sack

“Devil, O Devil! what have we here

is your sack filled with cow-dung

and fear?

“Perhaps, pale souls, you stole?

from temples, far and near?”

[The Devil says:]

“Why was Christ a loving Son? a mission!

a mission, my impudent human, He came

down from heaven (like I)

to save everyone, and die.

His Mission, contrary to mine.

“And away I fly, ever-so joyful, around

the globe…the world, doing mine!

“It’s what I feel, I was created to do. Of

course we all say that don’t we?

“Anyhow, in this sack, lapped across

my back are little gnats from hell,

prideful they are!

“They take these stones, cobwebs of

bones and sprinkle them

all over kingdomcome…

that’s my mission~!…son.

#1255 3/1/06

See Dennis’ web site: http://dennissiluk.tripod.com

Half the fun of collecting comic books is hunting for rare editions on sale. This can be pretty challenging if want to buy editions that are very rare and harder to locate. On the other hand, you may just want the newest editions of your favorite comics. Here are some tactics to get you started.

New comic books for sale

Your nearest neighborhood comic book store probably has all the recent comic book issues you want at regular prices. You can also get new comics at toy stores, bookstores and even some corner markets. But, it you want to buy comic books in large quantities and at wholesale prices, try going straight to the source - the publishers themselves.

Older comic books for sale

Finding older comic books can be difficult, but with some persistence (and a willingness to extend your budget), you can find rare comic books in no time at all.

You’ll be surprised at the number of back issues comic bookstores carry - so don’t be afraid to ask the sales attendant for help. The Internet is a good source. Go to auction sites and search f to find the comic book titles and editions that you are interested in.

You can also join comic book fairs where a lot of comic book enthusiasts buy, sell or exchange older comic books. Trade fairs are a great way to meet comic book fans, and you can eventually exchange, buy and sell with the folks you meet.

Anyone selling their rare collection of comic books has a hard time deciding whether to sell or not, but you sometimes have to do it in order to stock in order to enhance your collection.

If you are in a hurry, try offering your comic book to a comic book shop. Just remember that they need to make a profit, and they will never offer you what your comics are actually worth.

If you are willing to wait a little longer, you can sell your comic books on auction sites. Carefully study the payment and shipment rules to protect yourself from scam buyers.

One of the most popular party favors is a framed picture of the party guest taken at your kids party. He or she could be showing off a silly hat or party costume, performing an outrageous party game stunt, or wearing a face full of frosting and ice cream.

Having party guests create their own make-and-take frame to display this memorable photo makes it an even greater treasure for the memory box.

Start with a plain square of cardboard with an opening the size of your picture. When the decorating is done, simply glue picture to the back of the frame.

Here’s a brainstorm of frame ideas and decorating materials kids can use:

*Cut your photo into a circle and glue to the center of a nice shiny CD. Decorate with star stickers.

*Cut frames from different colored craft foam. Layer the foam squares for a unique effect. Decorative foam pieces in many unique shapes and themes are available at your craft store.

*Make a simple craft stick frame and decorate it with faux gems, sequins, sparkles, or stickers.

*Fashion a frame with craft clay.

*Use faux craft fur to make a really “wild” looking frame. Great for a jungle themed party.

*Tie one end of a long length of colorful yarn to your cardboard square. Wrap the yarn around and around the square until it is completely covered.

*Glue tiny Barbie doll accessories such as combs, brushes, sunglasses, and purses. Ideal for a Barbie party or little girl’s dress up party.

*Brush a square of cardboard with white craft glue. Sprinkle craft sand onto the glue in different colors and patterns. Shake excess sand onto newspapers and let dry.

*Use outdoor treasures such as tiny pine cones, leaves, and small stones to make a nature frame. Perfect for a garden party or bug party.

*Colorful buttons in various sizes and shapes can be laid out in an interesting design.

*Apply geometrical shapes of felt in a creative pattern.

*Cover your frame with pretty fabric.

*Apply colored clay shapes to your cardboard square.

*Hard edible sugar decorations for cakes come in a variety of themes. These can be used to decorate your frame.

*Different shapes of macaroni make interesting frame decorations. Try elbows, wheels, bowties, and fusilli.

*Tiny colored pompoms make a cute soft frame. Apply complementary colors in rows.

*Tear off one inch pieces of multi-colored tissue paper. Pinch between fingers, dip in glue and apply to your frame.

*Small dried beans or peas laid out in intricate patterns make a unique frame.

Kids will love the hands-on party activity and parents will enjoy their child’s picture displayed in their own uniquely creative frame.

Copyright 2005 Kids Party Paradise All Rights Reserved

Patricia B. Jensen is a mother of three and kids party enthusiast. She is the webmaster and owner of Kids-Party-Paradise.com - a complete resource for kids party ideas including invitations, cakes, decorations, games, costumes, favors, and food.

For all the latest party news, read her
Kids Party Blog.