With the bad, comes the good. Yes the economy has created a lot of bad problems, but who is actually responsible for most of what took place and is still taking place. Does it have anything to do with greed? We have pushed the limit on just about everything and thought their was no llimit. Butthere was a limit and we have just come to it. Things had to change. Humanity has run amuck. But out of all this, many people have come back to grass root living and have learned to live a more wholesome life. They have sat back long enough to think things out instead of running as fast as they could day in and day out. Families have realized who one another is again. They spend time together. They are realizing their family members and friends are pretty interesting. They realize someone has a brain other than themself. People have woken up to the everything that used to be important to them. Many are realizing what is really important in life. It took our country and the world to have an economical breakdown for us to realize relationships are more important than making money to buy unnecessary things....in fact, things that won't even be appreciated. We've been like rats running as fast as we can in a maze and never going anywhere but back to square one. We've been stressed out for nothing. We've greedily done anything we had to and returned right at the beginning again. Sometimes God doesn't answer our prayers the way we think they should be answered. But he does answer them in a way that will be much more positive than we could ever have dreamed of.

Morally we are responsible for one another. If you see a crime being committed, it is your moral duty to help or report it, as soon as possible, and not to turn away from anyone needing help. It is our job as human beings, neighbors, friends, and relatives to keep an eye on one another. That doesn't mean being nosey. It means if you stay aware of what is going on around you, you can literally save a person's life. Too many people today don't want to get involved, but they are sure to complain that the police, teachers, or government officials aren't doing their job. They can't be everywhere. They need the help of the people to be able to do their job. And isn't it more important to make a phone call and have a situation checked out than to ignore it? Many of our children are being abused right next door to us. It may be the parent, teacher, scout leader, sports coach, or church member. We can't just trust that our children are in the hands of a great humanitarian and they are safe just because they have a title. First, it is up to the parents to teach their children what to do in a bad situation. Teach your children common sense. Ask them if so and so was taking place, what should you do? By teaching a child's mind to think in a common sense way, you can feel your child is safer under almost any condition. Far too often we see on the news that someone we thought was an okay person was very much the opposite type person. Could it possibly be we were so busy with out lives that we paid no attention to what was going on around us. Or could it be we were so glad to pawn our kids off anyone so we had some time to ourself....or didn't have to pay a sitter? Were we turning our back on our children, not even considering our decision might not be the best decision. With the economy being so tight right now a lot of people are being mistreated in the work place. The owner or the supervisors know that no one wants to lose their job and will take a lot more than usual. They push the limits. It may be making that person do the job of two people and giving them no pay adjustment. It may mean sexual overtures on the job. One way or another they are using their power in negative ways. Do you close your eyes to what is going on? I know it's a tough decision whether to take a chance on losing your job and stick up for someone, including yourself, or thinking if you don't make waves your job will be safe. Anytime we close our lives to things going on, we are less of a person. You can always file complaints and if they try to fire you, you are protected by the government. If you have a cell phone, back up what you know with pictures. If you see a piece of paper being thrown away, find a time you can retrieve it so you have proof. All of us can make a difference in our own life, our families, and others. So much of everyones life is blocking out everything around us. It's time to pay attention. Turn all your electronics off and notice what is going on in your world. You will be rewarded ten fold. How long has it been since you've heard a bird sing? Noticed children at play? Seen the love between two people through the looks on their faces? Simple things like this bring back wonderful memories. These things remind us we are not machines, but our human beings.

Does the world seem to jump up and bite you in the you know what? Ever wonder what happened to common courtesy?

My Time Escape I have a secret. I have a hobby. No one sees my hobby but me. I've always wanted to be an artist but God didn't seem to think I needed the tools to become one. Imagination is missing. I don't have an artistic bone in my body. But do I ever love to sit and paint. I can paint anything I want to and no one cares. It can be horrible and no one cares. But to me, the time I spend painting is “my time” and the place I “escape” to. Believe me, I can come up with the silliest colors. I see one thing but when I try to mix colors I come up with something very different. I study and study a picture before I start to paint what I hope will come out looking similar. It never does, but it's okay. I could paint purple cows if I wanted to. I could paint a house upside down and no one would care. The thing is it sort of reminds me of when I was a child. I had a clubhouse. Even though it was visible to anyone, once inside I thought I was the only one in the world. It was my place of serenity. I was totally contented. Every time I pick up a paint brush I feel like that child in the clubhouse again. I block out the world. How wonderful on a cold, blustery winter day to escape into a world I can paint any way I want. First I need summer colors and a canvas. I pull out the very used brushes and create my very own version of a landscape. Maybe a beach today and an old farm tomorrow. As I don't have an imagination, I have to rely on places I've actually been to. Of course, the older I get, the foggier my memory so what used to be blue may be red today. And instead of a milk cow in the barn, it might be a donkey pulling a cart. Even memories don't matter in my little world. And a trip to the library can be very helpful. I come back with all types of books on painting. Even though I spend days reading and looking at pictures I want to try and paint. I have to paint it before the book is due because my memory gets shorter every day. Painting is the one place I can make mistake after mistake and no one cares. Not even me. Try it. It's better than a bubble bath.

It's easy to find fault in our President but who else do you think could carry such a load and make as many changes in such a short amount of time. It's easy to find fault with the way our parents raised us, but most parents did the best with what they had to work with. Maybe they had unsolved issues that kept them from being who they really are. Or maybe no one ever taught them life skills and they are flailing every step of the way. It's not our job to brow beat those we think should be doing better. Instead offer to help or accept the fact they are doing the best they can. Offer to take up some of the slack. Every day we hear in the news how people have broken the law. It could have been as easy as someone donating a little time to help them as a child or young adult. After the fact, we don't have a problem with shaking our heads in disgust, but where were you when they needed someone. We have children living within a matter of feet or yards from us and we totally ignore them unless it's to make comment about their bad behavior. Many of our country's children hold a lot of anger and disappointment within them. We could help change their life before they are adults in trouble. Many children today only have one parent and that parent is so busy trying to earn a living they forget about the needs of the child. Why not offer to teach a child, take a child to the park and throw the ball back and forth. Why not ask the parent if you could take them fishing or camping. Prove to them that they are important and not alone. How many times have we heard on the news someone killed a bunch of people and the news people or police ask the friends and neighbors if they noticed anything about the person that could have led them to believe they were capable of such. The majority of people look stunned they were being asked such a question. The look on their faces says they never took the time to pay attention to their best friend or their loved one. It shows they never really knew the person at all. Could they have kept this horrible thing from happening? Probably so if they would have paid attention to the person in the first place and helped them. It's easy.....for you to build a website or create an awesome resume. Maybe your neighbor has a struggling business that could use a website to promote it or your neighbor lost his job and needs someone to help him look as great as he is on his resume. Why not offer to help those who need your expertise? You could probably do in in an hour and give them a real fighting chance. Your community needs you. It's easy for you to say “no” and go on with your life. But if you gave of yourself, you'd be surprised at how good it feels to help out. You could sit on a board of a non-profit, run for office, or work with groups for the betterment of the community. And in the process you get to meet people, enjoy the time working together, and help create something fantastic. You don't have to be a professional counselor to listen to those who are lonely and need someone to guide them You can change a person's whole day just by listening. You can keep someone from committing suicide by just showing them you care. Loneliness depletes people of hope. It robs them of feeling them they have a reason to go on. No one is so busy they can't take time out to help others. It's easy. Just put one foot in front of the other.

Just as a farmer prepares the soil for planting a seed, we have to prepare our life for the miracles for them to come our way. If a farmer just threw the seeds on top of the hard crusted soil, nothing would grow. He would have wasted his time and the cost of the seed. But by preparing the soil through hard work and applying fertilizer, he can sit back with total confidence that each seed will produce far more than each seed he planted. He doesn't have to worry; he knows he did all he could do to insure productivity. Now it's up to God. Just like in our lives, we do all we can do to insure a better future and then sit back and wait for it to happen. But, if we don't do the prep work, we have no right to expect everything will work out okay for us. All those who go day in and day out not doing anything to insure a better future will get exactly what they put into it.....nothing. Sitting around feeling sorry for ourself, depressed, and feeling our lives will never change reaps nothing. We all have to remind ourself that everything in life takes work. Education insures a better job, being a dependable employee gets us a raise and pride in what we are doing. Raising our children with love and dedication creates well-rounded loved children who in turn raise their children the same. Children that are not taught how to survive in this world struggle their whole life looking for answers and making mistakes. Some of those mistakes can change their entire entire life. We need to teach them to plant their seed and grow to make the very best out of their life. Anything else would mean we failed at being a good parent. Plant your seed and grow in business. While you are at it, plant your seed and grow as a volunteer helping those who need a helping hand. Each time we give someone a hands up, they in turn can help someone too. We are planting a seed that continues to grow and produce in amazing amounts in time. At the same time you are growing as a human being.

First, you decide what type of website you want. Do you need a site to make money....a business venture or an informative website? What do you expect to accomplish with your website? Who do you expect to visit your website? No matter what type of website you want, make sure whoever you get your hosting from is dependable. There is nothing worse than someone going to your site and they can't bring it up. Who will design your website and market it? How much money do you want to invest in this site? These are all questions you need to think about and then commit to before you do anything else. If it's going to be a business site, how many items are you going to promote and where are you going to get photos, graphs, and the information? What do you want your site to look like? Think about the design and color. How often will you have to update your site and how much time will you have to spend maintaining the site? How much of it can be automated? Learn to change with changing times and needs. Keep up with the news on your particular type of site. The market changes fat and your website has to change too. Act like a sponge always bringing in new information. Don't steal from other websites. Believe in yourself and your own abilities. How many times have you been searching websites and you'd almost swear the same person wrote all of them? The same words and ideas are on one website after another. How boring. It's the person with the website that has a fresh, exciting looking website, and interesting ideas to hold one's attention that get the customers. If your writing is boring, hire someone to write for you. It's worth it! Ease of access to read and search your website is important. And not everyone that visits your website is an IT or has a PHD. You want everyone to be able to make sense of your website. Just because you understand where you are going with a subject doesn't mean everyone will be able to follow the trail Keep it simple, but informative. Surfers get bored quickly and you need to hold their attention if you expect your website to be a success. And if you don't update your site often, you won't have repeat customers. When I say often, I don't mean once every six months. You need to spend at least an hour every week checking out how your website is working and how many people have visited your site. It'sd important to study which pages they visited and if they went to other pages too or if they just came and went in a matter of a minute or two. Bargainers love the rush they get a special deal. Satisfy their need and they won't be able to help themselves tell everyone they know what a great deal they got on your website. What great FREE advertising. Forget fluff on your website and give them hard-hitting and to the point information. Many websites have satisfied customers write a sentence or two about the website or a product they purchased. The owner of the site may have written it themselves and put different names on them. Have you ever noticed both first and last name are not added so you can't contact them and see for yourself how they felt. Or maybe they were all relatives and friends that did it as a favor. Don't always believe what you read. So why even take up space on your page? It is estimated that 85 % of people employ a search engine and only 1 site out of 15 brings results. The search engines are set up to look for certain keywords for ranking. If you use your own words, your website may never see the light of day.

Automation Here we are in a messed up economy and people losing their jobs right and left. And no matter who you call, the phone is automatically answered instead of people who need jobs. Once the phone is answered, you spend the next five minutes listening to recordings about everything except what you called for. You push one button after the other and if you are lucky, the very first call you get to talk to a real person. The problem is most of those people don't know their jobs or care that their negligence in following procedure probably causes you to call again and again. In case of a service call, no repairman shows up. You call back and say the person you talked to last didn't schedule it even though she told you to “hold please” why I schedule that for you. She comes back on to tell you that sometime within an eight hour stretch, the repairman will be there. So you wait eight hours, canceling everything else you had to do, and no one shows up. You're stressed out again, but you call back. They charge you for the service call and you have to call back again to tell them no one showed up. They tell you, but it shows right here it was scheduled. Do they pay you for all the time and inconvenience. Absolutely not. Junk mail is rarely appreciated, yet we are unindated with it every single day. Even if you call to cancel any junk mail from being delivered, you get an automated response. Here we go again. There was no button to push for the reason you called and no real person to talk to. You continue to gt the junk mail and every single time it makes you angry. It takes months before it dawns on you....change what you can and accept the rest. Oh well, it's just another fifty steps to the dumpster and it's good exercise....even during a blizzard or thunderstorm. Have you been to a customer care desk of late? Service isn't their first name or their middle name. It isn't even their last name. They are grouchy, make you feel like you are interrupting their perfect day. It used to be that bosses made their employees bend over backwards to help customers. Not anymore. An employee can be downright rude and keep their job. Maybe those who hate their job so much should make room for the unemployed who would be grateful for a paycheck and therefore, give better service. On the other hand, customers used to treat employees much better than they do today. They also have gotten mouthy, take their stress out on those who are trying to help, and don't do anything positive to make the situation they came about any better. They walk out feeling the person behind the desk is an idiot or worse. Maybe what went around, came around. I for one would like to see people back to work and more machines given a green slip. New conveniences aren't always the best way to go. We have outsourced families and the betterment of all by allowing companies to take over the jobs of the people by installing machines. How many products do you purchase that don't work right? They were made by automated machines and not checked out by a human being who can find the defects better. Therefore, you purchase something and drive all the way home, put it together, and find out it doesn't work. You have to get in the car, stand in a line of people to get to the return desk where you are treated like scum for bringing it back and causing them paperwork. You say to yourself you wouldn't shop there again...but it's so close to your home compared to a store with better products....so you go back again and again. I needn't say the name of the store, but they have driven all the little family stores out of business with their cheap prices. Of course, they are getting their products from countries where people make a dollar for 16 hours of work. It's great that people in other countries are making money, but it outsourced Americans. How did all of this happen? We didn't stand up for our rights when it came time to vote. We either didn't study up on what we were voting for or we didn't show up at the polls. Oh....and how many companies give you worse service, but are allowed to raise the prices many times with the help of the government passing laws that never should be passed.

Where does our ethical obligations start and end? We all have certain rights to life. That doesn't mean we should sit back and expect to be taken care of. There are billions of people in the U.S. Alone that are doing just that. Or they work as hard as they would at a job trying to figure out how to get everything for free. They spend every waking hour going to non-profits that will help pay their bills for free or give them free food at the food pantries. Then they start thinking about who they can go to and sponge off them. In fact, they think about where they should be to get a free meal, who would give in and take them where they need to go, or use them in other ways. They whine and have self-pity personalities. Most of all, they are down right lazy. The other side of that coin are the people who are down on their luck and feel so beaten down they don't know what to do to get out of the situation they are in. Those are the people we should reach out and try to help. They are more than willing to listen and to change. And they are honestly grateful for any type of help they can get. Ethics used to play a lot larger place in health care. Now the bottom dollar line is taking over the question of ethics. Whether it is the doctors who are paying outrageous bills and create problems for both the health care system and their patients. It seems you never leave a doctors office without having to have tests done. Those tests are very expensive. People are having radical surgeries that are not necessary. Mistakes are made at hospitals and no one will stand up and admit it to the patients due to so many people suing both hospitals and doctors. What happened to their ethics and what happened to patients realizing doctors are human and do make mistakes. What happened to saying, “I'm sorry” and your apology being accepted without a lawsuit. What happened to the idea you could trust every cop and every clergyman? Today you trust no one including the government. Why is this? The ethics of many of these people we used to trust wholeheartedly has changed. They can't be counted on like they used to be. We have to look out for ourselves and question everything in our life and every one who crosses our path. Business' used to have a lot higher ethics than they do today. If they made a mistake by overcharging you, they would let you know and send you the money. Or if you over paid, they would make an adjustment and notify you. Or what about the business' that have hidden charges you don't find out about until after you have signed on the dotted line. Managers of apartment complexes find ways to charge you extra. And they charge outrageous deposits and then figure out how to keep from paying it back to you. What is ethical about all of this? What are the ethical obligations within families? Parents are divorcing right and left. What happened to the vows they took? What about their obligations to the children they brought into the world. They promise even though there is a divorce that things will not change between the parent and child and then the promises are broken. Parents don't pay child support. What's ethical about that? What's ethical about breaking every commandment and then going to church and acting like you are religious? You're not only lying to yourself, but far worse, you are lying to God, as well as every person in the congregation. No....no one is perfect and we all make mistakes. But there is a big difference in making a mistake and trying to cover it up. Most of the time a person's title such as doctor, lawyer, minister, or boy scout leader used to mean you could trust that person completely. That isn't so anymore. Wouldn't you expect to find a child molester wherever there are children they could get to easily? And if you find someone has molested your child, do you do the right thing and turn them in or try and hide the fact it ever happened by using the excuse you don't want your child to relive it. Believe me they will relive it the rest of their life. But you can put your own discomfort aside and help diffuse the pain the child is reliving. It is your ethical obligation. Today's world is far different than generations before and ethics have gone out the door to the majority of people. It is so easy to talk ourselves into or out of something we don't want to deal with. And where people felt more guilt in the past, guilt has taken on a whole new way. Many people have very low levels of feeling guilt. Others feel guilt to an excess.

All throughout our lives, we go from one fad to another. We mature and we still fall for all the marketing hype. We see a new fad and we just have to run to the store and get whatever it is that is new. Price doesn't matter. We have to be “in” along with everyone else. Colors we never thought we would buy are now decorating our homes and hanging in our closets. Styles we use to hate are now a part of our every day life. Yet as we get older, we look back on some of the fads and remember them with a fondness we never forget. They were such a large part of our life, at a particular time in our life. It may trigger other things we were doing during that time period....such as our first love, graduation, a particularly exciting vacation. Fads touch every part of our life. Look at all the collectors of Elvis memorabilia. And don't forget the poodle skirt or combing your hair like Elvis or the Fonz. As kids most of us had a hoola hoop or a skateboard. Now everyone is into electronics and every new thing that comes out somehow ends up in our home or our pocket. In decorating our homes we have gone from country, contemporary, modern, Italian or African. We throw out the old and buy new all due to advertising. That can mean new paint, new curtains, a particular type of furniture, and then all the items to bring it all together. Remember seeing sunflowers, pigs, cows, and chickens everywhere you looked. It all started with a marketing idea at the trade shows. Buyers would see something and buy in bulk. Soon it would be on the shelves and in every advertisement. And off to the store we all go to spend, spend, spend. For health reasons we have bought walking shoes, vitamins, health foods etc. because we heard on the news it would change our lives and help us to live a long life. Women want to try every new product on the market to help you look younger, enhance your hair style, and we buy cosmetics whether we like wearing it or not. We buy t-shirts and other clothing with names printed on them to prove we can afford them (whether we can or not) and they make a lot of money off us. What happened to individuality? Each generation teaches the other by buying all this for our kids. They grow up thinking we should all be more like each other and own everything everyone else says is “in”. Heaven forbid we dress the way we feel or wear a color or style even though it isn't “in” anymore. We clean our closets out every time there is a new fad. The other clothes aren't even worn out and we toss them aside never to be worn again. We have allowed advertising to send us right into the poor house. Our credit cards may be maxed out and we still find a way to go shopping. Now what's smart about that? We don't even think for ourselves anymore. We can't even leave the house without a cell phone anymore. Instead of enjoying life, we answer every call we get no matter where we are or what we are doing. Relationships have taken the back seat to a bunch of jabbering on a cell phone. Unless there is an emergency, I see no need for them. How did we ever get along before cell phones were invented? As we drive down the road, we miss out on how beautiful the flowers in bloom are. We aren't talking to others in the vehicle. Instead we ignore them and make them feel unimportant.....how rude. Fads come and go on purpose. How can companies make money, if we think before we fall for all the hype. Every single season colors and styles change. Thats 4 times a year we go crazy and spend money foolishly. How smart are you? Do you fall for it all?