Thursday, November 24, 2016

Does Your Soap Get Smushy?


Since I became a homemade "soaper" I've begun to notice soaps and their condition more closely.

Too much soap gets wasted and thrown away for ONE SIMPLE reason!
The reason is that people allow the soap they have just used to sit on wet counters or on a wet tub rim!

When homemade soaps ....and most commercial soaps too, sit in water too long, they absorb that water and get SMUSHY and useless...and the owners usually throw them out because they just don't know what to do.

So, as I love to putter around like a pioneer woman, I grabbed some scrap pieces of wood and  a couple plain rubber bands and Voila! I invented a rustic "soap saver" to rest my homemade soaps on after using.

Now, when I use my homemade soaps they dry up quickly after using and last MUCH MUCH LONGER!

Would you like to try to make your own "soap saver"?

All you need is:

1/ four pieces of scrap wood that are free of splinters and are close to the same size. If you can't find four pieces to make a square "soap saver" then just use two equal pieces and then another two matching longer pieces to make a rectangular shaped "soap saver".

2/Hammer the pieces together, but don't let the nail heads touch the bottom surface. You don't want the possibility of the metal nails to touch a wet counter top or tub rim and cause rust.

3/ Use some sand paper to sand down any rough edges that remain. You want your "soap saver" to be safe to touch even with wet hands.

3/ Take a couple of plain ole rubber bands, the kind that come from around the local newspaper that is delivered to your door and wrap them around the wooden frame. Criss cross the design until the grid is small enough that a bar of small soap won't fall through the holes made between the rubber bands.

That's it you're done!

D.I.Y. heaven :)
Peaceful productivity,
Carla.



Saturday, November 12, 2016

Best Gluten Free Margarine

Always on the hunt, my friends for more gluten free foods that are affordable and tasty.
So today's winner for gluten free margarine is.....drum rolll.......

Mirage Margarine by Golden Gate. The local bakery where I buy it charges less than $3 per tub, so that's even better!

Here's their company website for photos and recipes.

Mirage

Give it a try...it's creamy and easy to use on gluten free toast and crackers and performs well for cooking/stir frying too.
Let me know if you like it too.

By the way, if you really don't like the thought of buying margarine that has a long-ish list of ingredients than consider the simple answer.....go back to butter...it's always gluten free ")


Peace,
Carla

Buy my new book Life in the Gluten Free Zone on Amazon today!


Disclaimer: This blog post is intended for conversational purposes only. The blog's author and publisher does not accept any liability for any of the ideas discussed in this post or any other post on this blog. Always obtain medical advice from a licensed medical practitioner.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Monitored, Controlled and Designed by YOU

Tony Robbins has a powerful teaching called "Changing State".

How do we know when we need a "change of state"?
Well, we don't need a doctor to recognize the signs:


  • miserable countenance
  • circular ( getting nowhere) style of thinking
  • funky emotional state
  • uninspired spiritual state
  • unpleasant social interactions
  • being too hasty to react to circumstances beyond your control
  • lethargy
  • feeling physically undisciplined
  • sluggish mentality
  • losing sight of your most precious goals


So.......here's the great part....this part is 100% designed and controlled and monitored by YOU!
No one else is going to tell you how to change your state. You are going to discover or uncover the
simple magic ticket that will allow you personally to change your state!

So, here's the cool part. Just answer these very few questions to uncover your own personal
state changing magic ticket.

1/ Which activity is most accessible to you? Pick one that you can handle and isn't too far from reach.
   such as walking ( treadmill or round the block/track), swimming, dancing, biking ( on a stationary or on a real bike on a real road ")

2/ Ok, now that you've chosen the activity...and begun to do it.....start to become aware of yourself. You will most certainly discover precisely when your change of state will occur. You will start feeling good !
Your sense of well being will rise.
  For example: For ME, I only need to do 41 minutes of walking on a treadmill and I begin to sense my state change by minute number 26. Yes, I continue to do the whole 41 minutes, but the change of state begins to occurr already by minute number 26.

3/ Then write down that number. Share it with someone. Writing it down is going to make it more concrete for you to repeat.

4/ Lather, rinse, repeat. It really is as easy as shampooing your hair. You find what "product" works best for your personality and then you repeat it as necessary. Whenever, you begin to feel the doldrums set in, or your notice that you haven't taken any baby steps lately towards your most precious goals, then, it's time for you to repeat your own "self-prescribed" state changing strategy. Use it as often as necessary.
Allow it to prevent burnout, both emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

Use your strategy to help you retain a more disciplined emotional life and it will also permit you to regain more control over your physical state.

I'd love to hear what you works for you, when you design a strategy to change your state.

Peacefully yours,
Carla

Agriculture at the Speed of Thought

Pluck it and plant it....that's my goal.....or semi-realistic agricultural fantasy.

I've always been an acorn snatcher and pine cone gatherer.....
What would it take to simply grow whatever seed pods I can forage from my whereabouts?

As a kid, we would gather the grapefruit seeds left over from breakfast and shove them in some dirt in a cup and place them reverently into the sunlight streaming in onto the window ledge and watch delightedly as they grew into real live plants.....nice and tall and then would topple and never quite become the grand indoor grapefruit trees we imagined would appear. But it did teach us what was possible. Grapefruits could potentially be grown from seeds, if only the right environment was created and nurtured.

But is it merely fantasy or more than possible? What would it take to grab any ole acorn or shake the seeds from a pine cone, bury it in some good dark earth , water it and set it under a grow light?
Would it be so hard to grow a proverbial forest indoors ? ")

It would be so thrilling to watch something that I plucked and planted easily sprout roots and a firm trunk and then be able to see it flourish into a hardy strong plant....or even a short tree?

Have you ever had any luck with adding rooting compounds to your indoor plant/indoor tree experiments?

Ever used a grow light?

My son used to play Farmville online for hours....and I dabbled with it upon occasion some years ago. What a delight to be able to grow things virtually overnight...and be rewarded with a speedy and visible harvest :)

Hey, with today's technology and "anything is possible" mentality, I believe that we are just on the cusp of massive agricultural breakthroughs. Vertical farms are just the start. I just pray that I will be able to play with some of these new hi tech "easy grow" food crops right here in my home....and voila...poof...an almost instant harvest ")

Peace,
Carla


Thursday, August 25, 2016

What is the REAL Program Behind Rewards Cards?

Ed Liebow, executive director of the American Anthropological Association, says corporations increasingly struggle to make sense of the big data sets they collect on their customers. (quoted from article "Beyond Spam"
at https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-hormel-spam/)


So we can agree that corporations are collecting "big data" on you and on me.....all of us, as often as they can.
Yes, they may be having trouble  managing and/or extracting helpful information from that  big data, but that is only a matter of time and acumen.

One of the ways in which corporations collect data on us, their customers, is through the use of "rewards points cards". These "loyalty cards" are swiped
whenever someone buys anything at a certain store, and reports precisely when ( precise dates and times), where and what a human is purchasing. It also records the total bill of that particular transaction....and how it was paid for.....cash, debit or which credit card.

Why do we use loyalty cards and thus voluntarily give corporations precious private data about our purchasing habits? Because we LOVE free stuff, even if the real value of the points is quite small in real dollars.

It may take someone two years to accumulate enough "loyalty reward points"
in order to purchase even $20 worth of free merchandise, but humans are toting around dozens of rewards point cards, with the mere whisper that they might score some great freebies in the near or unforeseeable future.

Does that mean that I denounce points cards? Nope. But I do want to remind my readers that whenever they are using ANY kind of rewards points cards, that their shopping data is being collected about EVERY SINGLE transaction they swipe that particular points card for.

Corporations spend billions of dollars annually to do market research and here we are giving it to them on a platter for free or next-to-nothing....by voluntarily using our rewards points/loyalty cards....(  a free coffee is all it takes for many of us to divulge tons of our most personal shopping habits!)

Collect travel miles? Yes, your transactions are being collected and stored and analysed so that big corporations can figure out how to market more products to us and part us from more of our money. No, they aren't necessarily out to steal from you, but their goal is to accumulate as much of your cash as possible through the sales and marketing of their products.

Am I anti-corporation ? Nope.....far from it. But I just want my fellow consumers to be aware of the information that they are freely giving away to large corporations simply by using/swiping their loyalty/rewards point cards.

On a bit of a side note....paying cash is still more anonymous than using a debit or credit card. But cameras are rolling anyway, recording all transactions on film no matter how we pay for it....and no matter which rewards point cards we may or may not be swiping.

But maybe just maybe, we can limit the amount of free information that we provide to big corporations for free or next to nothing. Maybe we can think before we whip out our fave points card the next time we run to the store.
Maybe we don't care who finds out what our favourite brand of corn chips are, and where we like to buy them, at what price and at what time of the day and with what form or cash/debit/credit we pay for that bag of corn chips. But maybe we do care.....and maybe we don't need to sell our most valuable information quite so cheaply. 

Thinkfully yours,
Carla