I seem to have been a bit remiss…

However, I saw this on a website earlier today, hadn’t come across it before and thought I’d share it with you:

Kind hearts are the gardens
Kind thoughts are the roots
Kind words are the flowers
Kind deeds are the fruits

Longfellow

What we think about and feel about and speak about we bring about:

So let’s concentrate on the positives!

Neat, huh?

Have a productive day.

Linda

I thought we’d have some fun comparing our automatic understanding of words in the technological age we now live in with that of a world less than a generation ago.

Here are just twenty meanings of words twenty years ago, back in the latter half of the 1980s:

• An application was for employment
• A programme was a television show
• Spam was meat
• Windows were something you hated to clean
• A keyboard was part of a musical instrument
• When you clicked it meant you got on with someone
• A cursor used profanity
• A sand box was something your kids played in
• Memory was something you lost with age
• Navigation was the territory of trained pilots
• Compress was something you did to rubbish
• If you unzipped in public you went to jail
• Log on was adding wood to a fire
• A hard drive was a long trip on the road
• A mouse pad was where a mouse lived
• Post was something you got through your letter box
• A back up was something nasty that happened to your toilet
• You cut with scissors and pasted with glue
• A web was a spider’s home
• And a virus was the ‘flu

I shared these thoughts with some people and got the following additional gems:

Monitors were in class rooms
A mobile was used to amuse a baby
Wireless was something you listened to The Archers on
GUI was the consistency of syrup
Broadband was something John McEnroe wore
Excel was a verb
E was an additive
You practiced Latin in a forum

Please join in and share any extra ones with us that you come up with…

And, as we head towards another festive holiday, happy Easter to everyone.

We’ve been getting a bit heavy the last couple of weeks so I thought it’s time to lighten up a bit (oh no, another awful pun).

Seriously, though, haven’t you felt a bit lighter in step already over the last couple of days with the effect of daytime apparently being longer?

But did you know that it’s a hundred years since summer time was first mooted? For those of you who are interested, there’s some history on how summer time came about.

In six months’ time I’ll probably be miserable for a while when we change the clocks again, but for now, let’s enjoy all the natural daylight we can get!

A brief one this week but what about the potential impact!

Scientists have long held that human beings use a mere 5% capacity of our brains.

Just suppose we decided to use an extra 1%. We could get up ten minutes earlier and, on top of that, watch ten minutes less television every day for a year. We could devote that time to learning something that really interested us and that we could do in our own homes, fitting it around existing routines.

It doesn’t have to be connected to what we do for a living – it could be a new language, stamp collecting, yoga, meditation, genealogy, investment, photography – use your imagination!

At the end of the first year we would have accumulated over 128 hours worth of knowledge or experience of our new subject: That’s the equivalent of 16 eight-hour days!

Don’t you think we’d be pretty ‘up’ on our chosen subject by then? And all for 20 minutes (and maybe an extra 1% effort) a day!

What could you enjoy learning, starting today?

Chris Christofi (who also happens to be a great mortgage broker) shared this story with a few of us the other day.

He said his granddad used fables and stories to get points across to him when he was a young lad and one was about an old farmer and his equally old donkey. They would go out to plough the fields each day and one day the donkey fell into a hole.

The farmer stood and pondered a while as to what he should do. The donkey couldn’t get out under its own steam, the farmer wasn’t strong enough to get him out on his own and the nearest village where he could get help was a good couple of hours walk away.

He decided that the donkey was near enough to the end of his life that he probably wouldn’t last much longer so he might as well just bury him in the hole. So he set about shovelling in the earth.

Now the donkey, understandably not at all happy about this stuff landing on and around him, and with no intention of dying, started moving around, shaking the earth off and tramping it down under him. The farmer, intent on digging and hurling in the earth, didn’t notice.

Some time later the donkey walked out of the hole!

So if something’s getting you down, youâ’re not happy about it and have no intention of accepting it, shake it off and get on with life!

Thanks Chris

He’s bold and spirited, nobody’s fool and has a great sense of humour and compassion but this thought for the week isn’t really about him.

He was a bit concerned that some work being done on his behalf wasn’t progressing as he had expected so he thought he’d find out if there were any unforeseen problems or anything he could or should be doing to help move it along.

He went to the ladyâ’s workplace (which was also her home). The meeting went fine and afterwards he sat in his car for some time.

The lady in question is a girl in her early twenties, paralysed from the neck down, on a respirator 24/7, a fact not known previously to my new acquaintance.

Two points come across loud and clear from this story:

1. The lady in question is determined to be as independent as her circumstances allow and wouldn’t welcome anybody’s sympathy so she doesn’t broadcast her predicament
2. Most of our moans, whinges and complaints fade into insignificance when compared to what she has to face every day of her life

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Okay, do we sit around and wait or do something different? We decided to go out for a brisk walk and reward ourselves with a pub lunch. We boiled loads of water in saucepans on the gas cooker, had all-over washes and only remembered that it was pointless turning on the hairdrier when nothing happened!

On our walk we met up with a friend who decided to join us. Once there we had a great time and caught up with someone else we knew who dampened our spirits somewhat by pointing out that, according to his Sunday paper, apparently this is the worst time of the year for many of us:

• Christmas is well and truly over with only the credit card bills as testimony to yes, we really did spend all that to make it a good one
• New Year is a vague memory and most of our good resolutions have gradually gone by the board again
• There’s nothing on the immediate horizon to look forward to

I’m not denying that all of that is probably true but the great big plus that somehow overrides all of that for me is the days are getting longer! By the time the electricty supply was restored I decided it was too late to do the work I’d intended to yesterday but I didn’t mind getting up a bit earlier today to catch up.

I’m finally coming round to really understanding that it’s not so much what happens in your life that’s important but how you respond to it. My mum’s an eternal optimist and for many years I equated that with naivety, but I was wrong.

So positivity is my word and attitude for this week. And that’s probably just as well, since I heard on the television early this morning that cynicism could be physically bad for your health!

Have a positively wonderful week.

I came across this whilst looking for something to give us some get-up-and-go to start the week. I liked it for its pithiness.

Thomas Dewar was no academic, sitting at home dolling out pearls of wisdom – he was a doer (the pun was unintentional, I noticed it when rereading for typos) who built the family label, Dewars, into an international success. He used his marketing skills and social networks, travelling the world to find new markets and promote his product, exploiting romantic images of Scotland and tartan in his advertising.

This guy knew what he was talking about:

So have an open mind, harness your skills, go out into the world and make it happen for you!

Best of luck and good fortune.

So throw off the bow lines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.”

Mark Twain

I thought we’d stay with the sailing theme for a little longer!