If you work at home, it is important to define your workspace, and keep it separate from your living space. Defining these areas is the key to maintaining a healthy work/life balance in your home. When decorating your home office, you have the freedom to choose how you want it to look, so it is vital to choose something you can feel good about, and to choose something that inspires you to work well.

Place your desk in a “power position.” This means that your desk should face outwards, so those looking in cannot view your computer screen. Creating a power position establishes your home office as a place of production, and helps you feel confident about the work you are producing. Hang pictures of family in your home office, and also surround yourself with things that inspire you. Motivational sayings, and paintings from your favorite artist may inspire creativity while you work. It’s important to create comfortable sitting areas in your home office, so those visiting will feel welcome, especially if you need to hold meetings in your office. Appropriately decorating your home office is the most fundamental way to feel confident and productive while you work at home.

We are lucky to live in an area that provides recycling cans for paper and plastics. However, for everything else we have to find a place that can take it or just store it until we can figure out the best way to deal with getting it recycled. For the most part, we have been able to find places to recycle all types of glass as well as electronics. However, there are some other types of things we have had some issues with like paint and rechargeable batteries and the Earth911.com website has been a help in us finding what we need to do.

Another tough item we had to look far and wide to recycle was glue. We finally found the Elmers Glue recycling program that lets visitors know how to recycle old glue bottles and sticks. You can also find out how to win school supplies like backpacks and binders. This is a great way to help the environment and get your kids together for next year’s school year. It does take some time and effort to not only recycle but to find out how you can recycle some everyday items and keep this stiff out of the landfills.

I Have always believed that one of the best things for people to be is as self sufficient as possible. Even though I try really hard to live by this rule all of the time there are some things that you just can’t do by yourself. I can understand when the lock in a door will not work so you try to fix it by yourself. But when you need a new lock it is time to call a locksmith. Another example is if you try to install a new ceiling fan in your house you may be able to do it by yourself but if you have no experience or knowledge about doing something you should seriously get an electrician.

Some guys do it themselves because they are too proud to let some one else fix their house. That idea is just foolish because you could end up hurting yourself or you could just end up making the whole thing worse. You could break a whole in the ceiling, mess up the wires or break the fan. Now it’s all worse. The bottom line is; know when you can do it yourself and when you need to hire a professional.

Have you ever really had to use the restroom and there was no good place in sight? You don’t want to go to a gross gas station or McDonalds. Now that is just nasty and nobody wants to have to do that. I was in this awful situation the other day and I can tell you it wasn’t fun.

There are a few easy fixes for this. Some are easier than others. The easiest and, let’s face it, a classic, is to just go in an empty bottle of some sort. Water, Coke, Gatorade. Anything will do in this situation. Another thing you can do is look around for a nice grocery store. In my experience, nice grocery stores have very nice restrooms. I understand that there may not be a nice grocery near by but even a sub-par grocery is better than a convenience store.

So over all there are some good choices out there. And when disaster strikes let’s just hope you have one of these choices available to you. If not, you may have to use the bottle method. But that’s better than nothing.

I need to start putting some thought into what I say and up the general vocabulary. To start, two words that need to come back with a vengeance: gumption and akimbo. Don’t they just seem fun to say and they have great meanings too! Courage, guts, nerve, oomph, all those words sum up gumption, but gumption just has more substance and more syllables. I was out the other night, and a friend of mine was telling a story about the amazing lengths he went for a girl he was madly in love with and he slid the word into his story. I swear the story got 3 times as good with that zinger of a vocabulary word or maybe I’m so fixated on this word, because it is generally lacking in many of us young folk nowadays. I think we all need it to come back in life. If we start using the word, maybe we will start to embody it?

Akimbo – arms akimbo, bent or arched. Maybe there is a connection with this word and the previous. Superheroes and wonder-women seem to be associated with this word and image of arms at the hips and elbows bent upwards. And it could be easily argued that these figures of strength easily have gumption.

I recently asked my lovely wife what she wanted for her birthday. I was expecting a romantic weekend getaway or a nice evening out for dinner and a movie; you know something that you would see in a movie. What I got was a request to paint the interior of the house. Of course this has turned into more than just the interior of the house because when you change colors you also have to change the bedding in the bedroom as well as the dressers and tables, curtains, pillows, etc.

Now, two weeks later, I can truly say that the house looks great! It was my wife’s birthday gift and I did most of the labor, which I really like to do anyway and I also get to enjoy the new look and fresh look of the house. I was so inspired that I went ahead and painted the outside doors and porch that we had been talking about for the last year. The bottom line is, for the price of a weekend getaway, we put a fresh coat of paint on the walls that we will be able to enjoy for years! Happy Birthday baby.

Everyone is talking about going green and wondering what they can do. One easy transition to a greener home is reducing your energy consumption by changing out your traditional incandescent light bulbs for compact fluorescent ones, or CFLs. CFLs use about a quarter of power to operate. If you have a fixture that you would use a 60w incandescent in you would use a 14w CFL. However, unlike incandescent bulbs that put out a warm color temperature, CFLs come in different temperatures such as daylight, bright white, and soft light. Daylight is similar in color temperature the bright, bluish light that enters your window first thing in the morning. Bright white gives off a clean, crisp illumination ideal for kitchens, bathrooms, reading and working. Soft white gives off a warm full glow ideal for living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms and recreation rooms.

The impact of this change is huge. If every home in America replaced just a single traditional incandescent bulb for an Energy Star rated CFL, enough energy would be saved to light more than 3 million homes and cut the greenhouse gas emissions as much as 800,000 cars! Some people are concerned with the mercury in CFLs, however no mercury is released with the bulbs are intact or in use, and if recycled properly will not end up in the environment. In addition, because CFLs use less electricity than incandescent ones, and reduce the demand of electricity, it also reduces the amount of mercury emitted into the atmosphere by power plants.

Every once in a while you just have to stop and appreciate beautiful gardens. There are places you can go to see many of these both online and off.  Some of the off line places are at the local library or in magazines at your favorite book store or hardware store. You will see breakfast gardens, Japanese gardens, meditation gardens, water gardens, iris gardens, and English gardens, gardens for parties, relaxing, and reading and just about anything you can imagine. I often wonder who thinks of these things.

I always thought it was landscape architects and have only recently discovered that many are the creations of horticulturists and artists that have turned their talents to a natural canvas.  It is both exciting and wonderful to see the finished work. Since I am stuck in an apartment right now I often find the most beautiful garden I can find and let my imagination go and just dream of being in that majestic place whether it be large or small. I can smell the flowers and feel the wind blow across my skin and know one day I too will have a beautiful garden of my very own.

It’s amazing how much waste we can reduce in our landfills by composting our food scraps (not animal) and yard trimmings.  It is estimated that could reduce our landfills by one third to half!  We can also make our own really good soil to use in our gardens and yard for nothing.  I don’t know about you, but I think this is a win – win scenario.  So why don’t most of us do this?

In my humble opinion it has to do with several things.  I think most of us, left to our own devices, are just plain lazy.  We don’t want to take the time to build a simple compost pile and certainly don’t want to gather our waste.  The other thing I believe most people think is that a compost pile or tumbler stinks and no one wants to live with a smelly mess!  However, I have had an open style compost pile for years and there is no smell; even in the hottest days of summer!  That’s because we only put in natural scraps that are not animal scraps or waste.  If you do a compost pile correctly, it is a wonderful way to go and stay green!

Growing up beside a running creek was so much fun that I can’t even begin to describe the way it may me feel as a kid.  However, when we moved away from that sleepy little place right after I graduated from High School and before I went to college, I realized what I missed most was the sound of the river outside my window as I slept!  Since then I have been trying to replicate that sound so I could sleep better at night.

About five years ago my wife bought me a sound machine that was beside our bed for a long time and, as good as that was, it wasn’t the same as the real thing.  With that in mind I set out to build my own backyard waterfall last fall and it has been fantastic!  I used native rocks and stone to surround my pond.  I used a pond kit to hold the water and it had the pump I needed for the pond part and I found another l=kit for the waterfall part.  It was hard work digging up the yard because we live where there is a bunch of red clay but it has been worth it!  Now I open up my bedroom window at night and sleep like a baby!