Surviving the Circus of Life

I was born and raised in the south, but have never baked my own loaf of bread. However, after finding this cool website about how easy it is to bake a simple loaf of bread, I've decided that I WILL DO THIS before the end of the year. I remember when I lived in Conway, SC, in the early 1990s, my Sunday School teacher, Nell Vereen, brought me the most delicious loaf of homemade bread I ever tasted. She did that a couple of times. She probably didn't believe me when I told her she made my day! But I was serious, I enjoyed every tiny bread crumb of it. I truly wanted to try it, but at the time, I was lassoing a husband and four children, so I didn't have much time to try something new. Now that I find myself analyzing every single ingredient of everything I purchase, I think it would actually save time to make some of these items myself. And what better time to start baking bread than during the holidays, right? Let us Bake Bread and Break Bread Together! Now t

It's been a stressful year for many people, that was preceded by another stressful year, and many are already stressing about what next year will bring. Tired of Stress Some of us even worry about the negative effects of stress, which creates more stress. Meet Kelly McGoniga l , PhD, health psychologist, author, lecturer at Stanford, and the lady who just enabled me to take another look at stress - for which I am eternally grateful. If you deal with stress, and who doesn't, you owe it to yourself to watch this video. If you handle stress just fine, then watch it anyway so you can share this concept with those who need it. It's a painless way to do something for others, and give them a new perspective on stress. You can also learn a bit about oxytocin , a powerful hormone / neurotransmitter. Here's a teaser of what this brief Ted Talk will cover: "...better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort." Take another look at stress

You've just entered a room where a person has been murdered. There is a person standing over the body, holding the smoking gun. This is a puzzle of cause versus association. There's no doubt that the person died of a gunshot wound (cause), but was the fatal bullet fired from that particular gun? If that was the gun that fired the deadly shot, was the person holding the gun the person that actually fired the shot? All of these questions have to be answered before any valid conclusions can be made. Someone pulled the trigger on a gun that fired a shot that killed someone. Just because there is a gun associated with the current scene, it does not make the associated gun the fatal weapon. The same holds true for the person holding the gun. Just because a person is holding a gun while standing in a room where someone was shot and killed, does not mean that person did the killing, even if they are holding the murder weapon. The gun and the person holding the gun are

I've dealt with the perils of high cholesterol since I was 30. My LDL (bad) levels tend to go up about a hundred points with every decade of my age. Well, until now, I hope. I actually haven't had it checked since shortly after it reached 400. No insurance and no money for doctors, you know. Anyway, back to the cholesterol... Along with that 400 LDL, I had 20 HDL = and that's the scary part. Also, I now have those tell-tale signs of cholesterol, a little lump that appears overnight on your eyelid and never goes away unless you conquer the cholesterol problem. Mine appeared in April of 2009 (yes, I remember when!). Fortunately, I wear glasses now, so its blatantly pushy place on my face is minimized. Surviving high cholesterol can be difficult for some, especially those for whom the statin drugs do not work. Hello, that would be me. However, the homocysteine levels in the blood seem to play an even larger part in determining who is most at risk for strokes. In ot