Billy Blanks - Fat Blasting Cardio

Christmas is around the corner and I have been trying to lose weight. I don't have my usual buddy to go walking with me so I had to look for an alternative... which ended up being an old dvd I had with Billy Blanks - Fat Blasting Cardio. It's a 45 minute workout which is really good... I am sweating like a pig and I did not even make it to the end .. I usually do it for 40 minutes and the last 5 minutes I sit on the couch and look at them finish up! Right now I just finished and have sweating just rolling down my face ... feels like I am outside in the rain.

Anyways so just wanted to say if any of you gals and guys too want to lose some weight ... try Billy Blanks... it's a fun workout but it's pretty old so I am sure you up-to-date guys have better workouts... this just happens to be one I enjoy and actually make the effort to do. 


Okay shower time!
Bye
Lee 

St. Jude - Patron Saint of those in need

Back in 2006 a friend in need was going through a very difficult time and needed help so I prayed to St. Jude for help and trust me, he works. I was raised Catholic but I am by no stretch of the imagination a good Catholic - and by that I don't mean my ways and behavior etc., I am referring to me not going to Church as often as I should etc. I do however pray regularly. 


Recently again I had to turn to St. Jude and I thought since I have this blog I can share this prayer with you guys so if anyone is ever feels desperation or hopelessness in their life, they can turn to St. Jude. Or they can pray for a friend in need. The St. Jude Novena is a strong prayer that I sincerely believe works. You can find many prayers to St. Jude "prayers for special intentions" etc., online along with a host of information. I got a very good version of the prayer that I wanted to pray at St. Jude Novena Site and you can check it out for a host of information. 


Okay so one version of the prayer that I particularly like is: 


Oh glorious apostle St. Jude, faithful servant and friend of Jesus, the name of the traitor who delivered thy beloved Master into the hands of His enemies has caused thee to be forgotten by many, but the Church honors and invokes thee universally as the patron of hopeless cases--of things despaired of. Pray for me who am so miserable; make use, I implore thee, of that particular privilege accorded thee of bringing visible and speedy help where help is almost despaired of. Come to my assistance in this great need, that I may receive the consolations and succor of heaven in all my necessities, tribulations and sufferings, particularly (STATE YOUR PETITION HERE/YOUR NEEDS) and that I may bless God with thee and all the elect throughout eternity. I promise thee, O blessed St. Jude, to be ever mindful of this great favor, and I will never cease to honor thee as my special and powerful patron, and to do all in my power to encourage devotion to thee. Amen


For those of you who know the "Our Father", "Hail Mary" and "Glory be" prayers these can also be prayed after the St. Jude Novena. 


This prayer is for when you have a serious need or feel really helpless. Don't go abusing it. And also part of how the prayer works is that you share the message of St. Jude by telling a friend, sending an email or whatever way you see fit. 


I hope I was able to help someone out there. 
Have a great Sunday guys! 

Luv Lee 

Why Parents Drink!

Hello World, 


Hope all is well with you guys. Recently a friend told me she misses my blog - Thanks for saying that MARY - even though I still find it hard to believe :-) You're too sweet. I realized that I should try and stick to this and even though I most likely won't write a blog post every day I am now determined to write something ever so often .. let's see how long that "determination" lasts! 


Another friend of mine sent me an email yesterday - a forward with a joke - and I found it hilarious so I thought I'd share it with you guys .. put you in a good mood. If this was my kid I would want to beat him but you have to admire his ingenuity! Thanks for the joke Trisha B!


So guys enjoy! 

Why Parents Drink

A father passing by his son's bedroom was astonished to see that his bed was nicely made and everything was picked up. Then he saw an

Envelope, propped up prominently on the pillow that was addressed to 'Dad.'

With the worst premonition he opened the envelope

with trembling hands and read the letter.

 

Dear Dad:

It is with great regret and sorrow that I'm writing you. I had to elope with my new girlfriend because I wanted to avoid a scene with Mom and you.

I have been finding real passion with Stacy and she is so nice.

But I knew you would not approve of her because of all her piercing, tattoos, tight motorcycle clothes and the fact that she is much older than I am. But it' s not only the passion...Dad she's pregnant.

Stacy said that we will be very happy.

She owns a trailer in the woods and has a stack of firewood for the whole winter. We share a dream of having many more children.

Stacy has opened my eyes to the fact that marijuana doesn't really hurt anyone.

We'll be growing it for ourselves and trading it with the other people that live nearby for cocaine and ecstasy.

In the meantime we will pray that science will find a cure for AIDS so

Stacy can get better. She deserves it.

Don't worry Dad. I'm 15 and I know how to take care of myself.

Someday I'm sure that we will be back to visit so that you can

get to know your grandchildren.

Love, Your Son John

PS. Dad, none of the above is true. I'm over at Tommy's house.

I Just wanted to remind you that there are worse things in life than a Report card That's in my center desk drawer.

I love you.

Call me when it's safe to come home.

Wasn't it hilarious? Hahahaha! Poor dad! 

Have a great day guys!

Luv Lee 

Another holiday in Brasil

Today is Friday and I am really looking forward to this weekend - it's going to be a four day weekend! Yay!

Like yesterday, today I am really tired and just want to go home and cuddle up in bed and sleep!

Have a great weekend guys and just wanted to share this with you - came across it from a link a friend had
posted on gmail.

Lee

The Sky's the Limit

My last post was a couple of weeks ago and for that I once again apologize! I know soon you guys will be like damn this girl only posts on her blog now and then! Well I am really busy now .... I'm teaching now and I'm loving it! So when I come home I only have time to do some house work and then relax etc. I have not been on webanswers in ages and my google adsense earnings are starting to be affected. Even my facebook profile is suffering! Can't remember the last time I played that Family Feud game I was so addicted to and ask for Scrapbooking and uploading photos .... my, my, my! I did start working on a movie with pictures from the Houston Zoo and Sea Aquarium which I visited in July 2010 and well I love scrapbooking and making movies using Windows Movie Maker. I have a video on facebook that I worked on and got some great comments.

So tv series season is back! Yep that means I get to enjoy Dexter that awesome serial killer, Simon Baker in the Mentalist, White Collar (only because it's okay and I like Neal Caffery and Mozzie), How I Met Your Mother and my absolute favourite - Gossip Girl! It's on this season of gossip girl that I heard Jason's Derulo song "The Sky's the Limit" and liked it.... You can check it out below but I could not find a good video on youtube of it. But it's a cool song nonetheless. Anyways so I'm happy CHUCK BASS is back!! Can't wait to see episode 3 which I am getting at this moment cause in Brasil ....it doesn't play as the same time as the USA. So I'm late .. but no spoilers please people :-) 


Well I hope all is well with the world. I saw recently that the Eiffel Tower had to be evacuated. Just in case you didn't know - I love Paris and I one day hope my husband gets sent there for work so I can live there! Anyways when I read that article on www.cnn.com I was like OH NO! What about those people who are visiting the Eiffel Tower for the first time and have to leave Paris the next day so that's there last chance...very unfair.. oh and also the fact that a bomb scare is a scary thing off course. 


Okay so right now I am reading Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" which I have my English class reading and so far it's going good but I think it's taking it's merry old time to talk about the trial etc. I know it's a classic book and you guys out there most likely read it so feel free to share your thoughts on the book with me. I also have my class watching the movie on it as well but only after they've read the book! 

Well have a great day WORLD!
Lee 


ENJOY!

Heart of Gratitude

This is another email I got - so I don't have the source but I like the message and wanted to share it with you guys. Sorry for the copying and pasting but the message is a good one... I promise.

Heart of Gratitude!!! 

A blind boy sat on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet. He held up a sign which said: "I am blind, please help." There were only a few coins in the hat.

A man was walking by. He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat. He then took the sign, turned it around, and wrote some words. He put the sign back so that everyone who walked by would see the new words. 

Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy. That afternoon the man who had changed the sign came to see how things were. The boy recognized his footsteps and asked, "Were you the one who changed my sign this morning? What did you write?"

The man said, "I only wrote the truth. I said what you said but in a different way."

I wrote: "Today is a beautiful day but I cannot see it."

Both signs told people that the boy was blind. But the first sign simply said the boy was blind. The second sign told people that they were so lucky that they were not blind. Should we be surprised that the second sign was more effective?

Moral of the Story: Be thankful for what you have.. Be creative. Be innovative. Think differently and positively. 

When life gives you a 100 reasons to cry, show life that you have 1000 reasons to smile Face your past without regret. Handle your present with confidence. Prepare for the future without fear. Keep the faith and drop the fear.

The most beautiful thing is to see a person smiling… And even more beautiful is, knowing that you are the reason behind it!!! Enjoy your day with a heart of gratitude .

How long again?

I received this article in my email from a cousin of mine and thought I'd share it. Read it... very interesting and the headline kind of gives you hope but you will need to read to see what the real outcome is. It was a very interesting story and shows you how data is analyzed .... the different things that can be represented and not just one conclusion drawn. It's all about the "apples-to-apples" comparisons! 

Are Young Women Earning More Than Their Boyfriends?

Yes, but only because they're better educated.

By Heather Boushey
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2010, at 1:27 PM ET

Note - Sorry I don't have a link to the article so I just copied and pasted it from the email. It was written by Heather Boushey as noted above. 

---

The news last week was that if you're a young woman without children, you have a shot at making more money than your boyfriend. "Young, single, childless women out-earn male counterparts," says USA Today; "Workplace Salaries: At Last, Women on Top" says Time.

I always enjoy it when the media rediscover a trend: Equality is here! But digging a bit deeper into the data tells a more nuanced tale. Even if you can make more than the cute guy you saw at the bar last weekend, you may not out-earn the colleague sitting in the next cubicle. And, alas, it's the second comparison that really matters.

There are two ways to look at the gender pay gap. The first way is to ask whether equally skilled men and women in comparable jobs are paid the same. That's the way to gauge workplace fairness. Do women with similar credentials in similar jobs earn as much as the men they work with? It's in this context that the answer remains no.

How do we know that? To understand workplace fairness, economists analyze how much of the overall gender pay gap—women still earn 78 cents on the $1 of what men earn—can be explained by the characteristics of workers and the jobs they hold and how much cannot be explained by anything except the person's gender. In other words, they compare workers of the same educational attainment holding the same kinds of jobs—male college-educated electrical engineers and female college-educated electrical engineers. The American Association of University Women tackled the pay gap question this way and found that for college-educated women, the gap emerges as soon as they graduate. Their research shows that a woman earns 5 percent less the first year out of school than a man who goes to the same college, gets the same grades, has the same major, takes the same kind of job with similar workplace flexibility perks, and has the same personal characteristics, such as marital status, race, and number of children. Ten years later, even if she keeps working on par with the men around her—that is, continues to have the same level of on-the-job experience—the AAUW found that she'll earn 12 percent less.

The new headlines claiming that women outearn men come from Reach Advisors, a marketing research firm, which did not publicly release the numbers behind its claim. But from the media reports, it's clear that the analysis compared the median earnings of women and men aged 22 to 30 working full-time who do not have children and who live in the largest cities in the United States. Reach Advisors did not address whether the men and women in the sample had similar skills or experience, or held the same kinds of jobs. They asked: If you're a young, childless woman, do you earn as much as a young, childless man? With the question framed this way, the answer was yes. In fact, Time reports, Reach Advisors found that "in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group."

But young women are earning more than young men because young women are acquiring more skills than the men are. Good for them. But this doesn't mean that they're being treated the same way in the workplace. When you do the apples-to-apples comparison that the AAUW did, young women still earn less than comparably skilled men. What has changed is that there are more women with higher levels of education. Among women aged 22 to 30, a third (34 percent) have some college education and a third (35 percent) have a college degree or more. Among men in that age group, less than a third (30 percent) spent some time in college, and just over a quarter (28 percent) have a college degree. If one group (women) has more workers with more education, then they should outearn the other group. That's what the Reach Advisors study shows—that because there are more young women with college degrees, women now outearn young men.

Which brings us back to that cute guy at the bar. He is less likely than the woman sitting next to him to have been to or completed college. So yes, now we know that if he lives in a big city, he probably earns less than she does. Though Reach Advisors looked only at young workers without kids, down the line, the findings may have implications for how families use their time or for shifting the balance of power within the home. When mothers outearn fathers, it may make more sense for the dads to take off work to pick up a sick child. And higher-earning moms may have more say over household decisions than lower-earning ones.

At the same time, research has shown that discrimination against mothers remains widespread. And let's not forget that the fact that better-educated young women outearn less-educated young men doesn't mean that we've achieved workplace or gender equity. Until women with exactly the same skills and qualifications match their male peers in earnings, there's plenty of work left for all of us.

New "Job"

Everyone kept saying... so how are you enjoying Brasil? What do you do all day? Are you going to work over there? Why don't you look for a job? .... and also stuff like "It's good to get out of the house" "It will keep you occupied" etc. Mind you I was perfectly happy at home doing my own thing, only venturing out into the sun when I wanted to and I was happy like pappy. But needless to say I decided to get off my ass and find something that might be a bit more constructive than my usual daily activities that I grew to love. So I found something and well things over here tend to take a while to organize and get going so after a few months (which I did not mind) I finally started my new "job" on Wednesday. 


So I think I would enjoy my new responsibilities even though I am a bit nervous about it. And based on the last two days - when I go home I am absolutely tired ... so no more time for my internet activities that I enjoy so much - webanswers, hubpages and even my horrible attempts at blogging. I guess once I get accustomed I can start back doing bit by bit....by for the last two days - first day I went home with a headache....something to do with noisy kids and then the next day I reached home after 8pm! Hard worker right? :-) 


So today I'm heading home normal time, hopefully minus the headache, but I have lots to do this weekend including all the housework I've ignored this week and cleaning out the fridge, taking the time to cook a decent meal and oh yeah planning lessons for the upcoming week of 'work'. So there you go blog readers out there - I've definitely found something to fill my time!! :-( Let's hope I enjoy it - so far so good! Okay so enough with the questions that I mentioned above cause if anyone asks me anything like that again I'm going to have a mouthful of things to say :-) So BEWARE!!!! 


Have a great weekend guys.
Lee 

Finally I'm finished TESOL

Okay so you know that course I've blogged about several times already - the one I'm doing with ITTT - the TESOL course.. well I just submitted the final unit - Unit 20. Gosh seems like a long time that I started this course but thank goodness I finished with two days to the deadline! Yay me! Now I get a free course as part of the package but I am not feeling to start on that one just yet. Tomorrow is a holiday in Brazil but I have a very long early morning trip to the airport to do .... then I'll relax and exciting news - I start a new job on Wednesday. I really am terrible at this blogging thing so I am not sure anyone even reads my posts anymore :-( A good blog to follow though guys is The Frugal Buzz   - that one is full of great advice and is updated regularly and written by a pretty great gal! 


Okay so I'm off to go catch up on some television and wait to hear back from my tutor saying hopefully that I passed and the certificate will be in the mail :-) 

Have a great Monday.
Lee 

Elephant Parade London 2010 Elephant Petition Animation