Moments of Awareness

Flowers, Dude's Mom, Lisa's Motorcycle, Vinnie's Birdhouses, Little Dude & Robie Creek Park See the full gallery on posterous Posted via email from Peace Jaway

Plants & Dogs :)[[posterous-content:pid___1]] Posted via email from Peace Jaway

Yes, I did it. I set a goal to hit a target weight by my birthday this year. No, it’s not a higher weight than I’m at now. I also set a goal to ride my bicycle at least halfway up Bogus Basin Road on my birthday. What was I thinking? And now I’ve told the world. Here’s to accountability in 2011. I have a lot of work to do. If you made health-related goals or resolutions this year, joining a gym might be part of the plan. Before you dive in, take a moment to consider this: At the national level in 2010, the Better Business Bureau received 6,359 complaints about gyms and health clubs, putting the industry in the top 25 for the most complained-about businesses. In Idaho, the BBB received 108 complaints — ranking the industry at No. 5 for complaint volume. Here are some things to think about before signing up for a membership: ASK THE GYM • What are the terms of any introductory offers? Gyms often use special introductory offers to lure in new members. Make sure you understand ...

Featured on MOA January 1, 2011    Download now or listen on posterous Rain_into_Snow_into_Lounge_into_Rain_Stereo.mp3 (5907 KB) Posted via email from Peace Jaway

Students at alternative high schools throughout the Treasure Valley will soon get a leg up on college and careers through a grant-funded effort at the College of Western Idaho. The Nampa-based community college is the only Southwest Idaho institution among six state colleges that will receive a total of about $4.6 million through the Continuous Enrollment Initiative. The J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation grants, to be announced Thursday, aim to help at-risk students, GED students, displaced workers and others who traditionally have fewer opportunities to take advantage of higher education. This latest building block in the foundation’s “Go On” program seeks to keep Idahoans in college after they start. CWI’s grant calls for collaboration between college and high school faculty, advising and other transition services, campus visits and mentoring high school students by college students. “About 67 to 70 percent of our kids go on to college, but at the end of the first year h...

Si nce the jump-start of horror-rock, critics debated whether the genre was capable of progressing beyond a meager soundtrack for trick-or-treaters on speed. The Misfits added some much needed catharsis with Glen Danzig’s soul-eating fantasies and visions of JFK’s assassination, but even his more vile content did not truly conjure images of paganism, murder, and the alienation of the undead. Horror-punk limped along for the next 20 years, til AFI’s earlier releases attempted to hearken back to the era, minus the macabre (plus more emo). AFI soon made a cash-grab, and punk music saw pretenders like Blink 182 and Yellowcard again dominate the scene. In response to the fake trend, the underground crypts began to rumble. Helping awaken the dead for nearly 7 years, a trio of brothers known as Calabrese, understand the core of horror-punk’s menacing tone and executioner-like prowess. With Bobby (guitar/vocals), Jimmy (bass/vocals), and Davey (drums), Calabrese link directly to the ...

Steve Bronstein/Getty Images Can regular exercise avert or undo some of the harm associated with binge drinking? Perhaps even better, could exercising beforehand pre-emptively reduce your urge to overindulge in alcohol later? Or does exercising actually drive you to drink? Those questions, relevant to any of us whose memories of New Year’s Eve are fuzzy, have been the subject of a growing number of studies recently, with thought-provoking results. One of the more telling new studies examined the issue of whether being fit and exercising reduces the urge to drink. For the experiment, researchers used adult male rats with an inbred taste for alcohol. Half of the rats were given access to running wheels for three weeks. The others were kept in cages without wheels. After three weeks, the running wheels were removed, and half of the animals from each group were allowed unlimited access to alcohol for 21 days. Earlier studies by other researchers found that animals given equal acces...

Marilyn Barbone Many people tend to think that all obese people have to do to solve their problems is eat less and move more. Alcoholics, on the other hand, need treatment. But are the two disorders really all that different? Is it possible that eating in today’s sweet and salty fast-food world is actually somewhat, well, addictive? Could people with a predilection to abusing alcohol and drugs just as easily abuse food? A study published in The Archives of General Psychiatry this week is not the first to examine the neurobiological similarities between behaviors that drive obesity and those that drive substance abuse. The researchers, from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, examined two large surveys of nationally representative samples of American adults questioned about alcoholism in their families. Each included about 40,000 adults; one survey was carried out in 1991 and 1992; the other was done a decade later, in 2001 and 2002. The people surveyed wer...

Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work. Tags: Brazil , Children and Youth , Income Inequality , Mexico , Poverty , Rural Areas , World Bank Bruno Domingos/Reuters An apartment building in front of the Rocinha shantytown in Rio de Janeiro. The city of Rio de Janeiro is infamous for the fact that one can look out from a precarious shack on a hill in a miserable favela and see practically into the window of a luxury high-rise condominium.  Parts of Brazil look like southern California.  Parts of it look like Haiti.  Many countries display great wealth side by side with great poverty.  But until recently, Brazil was the most unequal country in the world. Today, however, Brazil’s level of economic inequality is dropping at a faster rate than that of almost any other country.  Between 2003 and 2009, the income of poor Brazilians has grown seven times as much as the income of rich Brazilians.  Poverty has...

Your gadgets and computers, your software and sites — they are not working as well as they should. You need to make some tweaks. But the tech industry has given you the impression that making adjustments is difficult and time-consuming. It is not. And so below are 10 things to do to improve your technological life. They are easy and (mostly) free. Altogether, they should take about two hours; one involves calling your cable or phone company, so that figure is elastic. If you do them, those two hours will pay off handsomely in both increased free time and diminished anxiety and frustration. You can do it. GET A SMARTPHONE Why: Because having immediate access to your e-mail, photos, calendars and address books, not to mention vast swaths of the Internet, makes life a little easier. How: This does not have to be complicated. Upgrade your phone with your existing carrier; later, when you are an advanced beginner, you can start weighing...

BARGAIN hunters will need to be craftier when booking a trip if they want to get the best prices this year. It’s no secret that airfares are up and added fees for everything from checked bags to exit-row seats are pushing the cost of flying higher. On top of that, hotel bargains are expected to be harder to come by as  business travelers  begin to return, diminishing the need for hotels to discount rooms in major cities. But that doesn’t mean a year in front of your television. There are still plenty of ways to cut costs. Here are 11 strategies — and some useful Web sites — to help you save on travel this year. 1. SHOP “PRIVATE SALES” A growing number of Web sites, including SniqueAway.com , TabletHotels.com and Jetsetter.com have flash sales of 20 to 60 percent off hotel packages to travelers on an invitation-only basis. Jetsetter, for example, recently offered a Friday night in January at the Angler’s, a boutique hotel i...

Whatever else it holds, this new year is sure to produce a healthy serving of redemption stories, against-the-odds tales of people who bounced back from the layoffs, foreclosures and other wreckage of 2010. They landed better jobs. They started successful companies. They found time to write a book, to study animal husbandry, to learn a new trade: to generate just the sort of commentary about perseverance, self-respect and character that can tempt anyone who’s still struggling to throw things at the TV. Character is a fine thing to admire, all right — once the storm has passed and the rigging is repaired. But when people are truly sinking, because of job loss, illness, debt or some combination of ills, they have no idea what mix of character, connections and dumb luck will be enough to pull through. To use the psychologists ’ term, they don’t know how “resilient” they are, or how much resilience even matters. Do I have the right stuff? Or i...

ROSLYN HEIGHTS, N.Y. — As students returned to class this week, some were carrying brand-new  Apple  iPads in their backpacks, given not by their parents but by their schools. A growing number of schools across the nation are embracing the iPad as the latest tool to teach Kafka in multimedia, history through “Jeopardy”-like games and math with step-by-step animation of complex problems. As part of a pilot program, Roslyn High School on Long Island handed out 47 iPads on Dec. 20 to the students and teachers in two humanities classes. The school district hopes to provide iPads eventually to all 1,100 of its students. The iPads cost $750 apiece, and they are to be used in class and at home during the school year to replace textbooks , allow students to correspond with teachers and turn in papers and homework assignments, and preserve a record of student work in digital portfolios. “It allows us to extend the classroom beyond these four walls...

JOHN FRASER’S new restaurant is doomed. It may make a splash at the start, but by this time next year it will be over, done with, kaput. At least if you take him at his word. For his follow-up to Dovetail , an elegant success on the Upper West Side, Mr. Fraser has chosen a project with a death foretold. He signed a short-term lease for a space in SoHo whose landlord cannot promise that the building, likely to be demolished, will be around past July. In return he received a rent of about $9,000 a month, well below market rate. He was also freed from many of the little and big concerns that can turn the opening of a restaurant into such a protracted odyssey and the running of it into such an expensive one. Because he’s not fashioning a keeper, he can — and must — keep his investment low. He’s not paying for, or bothering with, a proper sign out front. The dozens of chairs, used, were bought on eBay for under $10 each, and if they’re not so...

MUMBAI — Microcredit is losing its halo in many developing countries. Microcredit was once extolled by world leaders like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as a powerful tool that could help eliminate poverty, through loans as small as $50 to cowherds, basket weavers and other poor people for starting or expanding businesses. But now microloans have met with political hostility in Bangladesh, India, Nicaragua and other developing countries. In December, the prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheik Hasina Wazed — who had championed microloans alongside Mr. Clinton at talks in Washington in 1997, while Mr. Clinton was president — turned her back on them. She said microlenders were “sucking blood from the poor in the name of poverty alleviation,” and she ordered an investigation into Grameen Bank, which had pioneered microcredit and which, along with its founder, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. In India, until recently home to the world’s ...