Happy Labor Day
September 7, 2009 by Lillie
Hope you’re enjoying family, friends, fun, and food this Labor Day weekend.
Labor Day began as a holiday for workers who were union members. Today it’s a holiday for all us: union workers on the assembly line, nonunion workers in the discount store, corporate executives, entrepreneurs—and even freelancers.
Relax and have fun!
photo credit: adotjdotsmith
Socialnomics
September 4, 2009 by Lillie
Amazing, if true.
WhoHub Interview
August 3, 2009 by Lillie
Do you like reading interviews of creative and entrepreneurial people? WhoHub has more 18,000 interviews online in a number of categories.
You can read individual interviews, including my interview, or you can read answers to specific questions from many different people.
You can even create your own interview—just register and choose the questions you want to answer.
Happy Valentine’s Day
February 14, 2009 by Lillie
Happy Valentine’s Day to my readers. I hope each of you enjoys a day filled with love, joy, and pampering.
The Knight-League Scholarship
February 13, 2009 by Lillie
A reader e-mailed me and asked me to help spread the word about the Knight-League Scholarship, a writing competition for high school seniors that will award three $5,000 scholarships.
Holly Alonis wrote:
I write to you as an online liaison for the LEAGUE, which is a school and web-based system for service learning that empowers young people to make a difference in their communities. …
The KNIGHT scholarship is a national scholarship competition where 3 students will be awarded $5,000 each for their writings or reflections on their civic experiences in one of three categories …. The scholarship is open to high school seniors from all over the country; even students who are not part of a LEAGUE classroom can apply!
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation promotes excellence in journalism worldwide and invests in the vitality of 26 U.S. communities. Since 1954, the foundation has given more than $300 million in journalism grants.
I hope you can join me in supporting The LEAGUE by informing your readers about this scholarship opportunity.
If you are or know a high school senior who writes well and who could benefit from a college scholarship, enter or encourage them to enter the Knight/LEAGUE Scholarship competition. The deadline is March 6.
The Two Stone Tablets of the Testimony
February 4, 2009 by Lillie
Aundrea Hernandez, designed the header for my blog as well as covers for Dream or Destiny and for several clients’ books.
Last fall, she asked if she could refer a client who needed a Web site. Although I generally create Web sites for my author clients, the only other sites I have created have been for my church and for my brother, a commercial real estate agent.
I hesitated at first but agreed to meet with A.E. Tracy Potts. He came into my office carrying the Two Stone Tablets of the Ten Commandments and talking about his mission. He believes he has been called by God to take the Name of God out into the world on stone tablets of granite like those on which God wrote the Ten Commandments with His own hand. My immediate reaction was to jump at the chance to be part of this project; however, I didn’t agree right away because I wanted time to pray about my decision.
After praying, I felt sure I wanted to be involved, and I have been working with Tracy on the Web site for HaShem Artworks since then. Tracy and his dedicated team had already been working for many months. Tracy researched the language that was in use at the time the Ten Commandments were written and created a Phoenician Paleo-Hebrew font. He studied the kind of granite that was on Mount Sinai and what rough-hewn granite tablets would have looked like. Under divine inspiration, he designed a special table with rotating disks and acrylic holders to display the Tablets. He found the stonecrafter and the woodcraftsman and an illustrator to create several pieces of artwork.
This Sunday, February 8th, the results of all that work will be revealed to the world in the first public display of the Two Stone Tablets at the Norris Conference Center in San Antonio, Texas from 5 PM to 7 PM. The details of the event can be found in the PRWeb news release on the first public showing of the Two Stone Tablets.
The video below depicts the creation of the Two Stone Tablets of the Ten Commandments in the Mind of God. Listen for the blessing that God promises wherever He causes His name to be remembered.
Another Chance for Christmas Giving
December 14, 2008 by Lillie
In case you missed my post on Christmas giving, here’s another chance to drop something into the bright red kettle to support the great work of the Salvation Army.
Christmas Giving
December 8, 2008 by Lillie
As a writer, I’d love for you to give my novel Dream or Destiny to everyone on your Christmas list who enjoys mystery or romance novels. For other genres, I recommend books by my clients and books by authors who have visted my blog.
You may also want to give a gift that will give the recipient the power to change lives. A gift certificate from Kiva.org provides the funds for the recipient to make a loan to an entrepreneur in the developing world. An entrepreneur in the developed world might need a loan of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to start or expand a business. An entrepreneur in a developing country may need less than a hundred dollars to start or grow a business that will lift them out of poverty. The recipient of your gift certificate can make a life-changing loan to the entrepreneur of their choice, and when that loan is repaid, use the funds to make another loan. The cycle can be repeated endlessly, making your gift of $25 or $100 priceless. I made my first Kiva loan as part of Blog Action Day: Poverty.
Another good idea: Charity Checks. You can order giving certificates that can be used to donate to any IRS-qualified charity in the US, and there are 800,000 qualified charities. You purchase the certificate and get the tax deduction. You give the certificate as a gift, and the recipient then determines what charity to donate to. Unlike donating to a specific charity in someone else’s name, with Charity Checks, you know the recipient will be happy with the charity that receives the gift.
Comment added after reading Karen Swim’s post Santa Cause or the Grinch who Stole your Present?: I would recommend a charitable donation as a gift only to people close to you who you know would be happy with this. We do this in my family, but I would never suggest a business do this for a client nor would I do it to someone with whom I hadn’t discussed the idea in advance. I wasn’t clear enough and hadn’t thought through the implications until Karen brought them to my attention. Now back to the original post …
This is the time of year to give beyond our immediate circle. The Salvation Army’s red kettles are a symbol of the spirit of Christmas giving as well as an important means of raising funds to help those in need. I don’t go out to the malls and stores to shop so I miss the chance to drop something into a bright red kettle manned by a smiling bellringer. This year, I decided to be an online bellringer.
Thanks to Jon Swanson at Levite Chronicles for the inspiration. I didn’t know that I could be a bellringer for my own Online Red Kettle. If you do your Christmas shopping online, you can drop something into an online kettle and help the Salvation Army brighten the lives of those who need help this year.
Christmas celebrates the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ who gave the ultimate gift of His life for our salvation. We can share a little of His love by our own giving to our loved ones and people we don’t know. May you enjoy a blessed season of peace on earth, goodwill toward men.
Labor Day
September 1, 2008 by Lillie
Labor Day, the first Monday is September, is set aside to honor American workers. Although it was started by the labor movement for union workers, I think all workers—blue collar, white collar, professional, union or non-union—deserve recognition … and a day of rest.
Enjoy your holiday, fellow workers.
Right Brain/Left Brain
August 9, 2008 by Lillie
I saw a link on Robin Lee Hatcher’s Write Thinking to this test to determine whether you use your left brain or your right brain most.
The right brain relates to creativity, the left brain to logic and organization. Writing requires right brain usage; editing requires left brain usage. I enjoyed taking the test and found the results interesting. You may want to check it out for yourself.
Here is the summary of my results:
Lillie, you are somewhat left-hemisphere dominant with a balanced preference for auditory and visual inputs. Because of your “centrist” tendencies, the distinctions between various types of brain usage are somewhat blurred.
Your tendency to be organized and logical and attend to details is reasonably well-established which should afford you success regardless of your chosen field of endeavor, unless it requires total spontaneity and ability to improvise, your weaker traits. However, you are far from rigid or overcontrolled. You possess a degree of individuality, perceptiveness, and trust in your intuition to function at much more sophisticated levels than most.
Having given sufficient attention to detail, you can readily perceive the larger aspects and implications of a situation or of learning. You are functional and practical, but can blend abstraction and theory into your framework readily.
The equivalence of your auditory and visual learning orientation gives you two equally effective sensory input systems, each with distinctive features. You can process both unidimensionally and multidimen- sionally with equal facility. When needed, you sequence material while at other times you “intake it all” and store it for processing later.
Your natural ability to use your senses is also synthesized in your way of learning. You can be reflective in your approach, absorbing material in a non-aggressive manner, and at other times voracious in seeking out stimulation and experience.
Overall you tend to be somewhat more critical of yourself than is necessary and avoid enjoying life too much because of a sense of duty. You feel somewhat constrained and tend to sometimes restrict your expressiveness. In any given situation, you will opt for the rational, and learning of almost any type should be easy for you. You might need certain ideas explained to you in order to fit them into your scheme of things, but you’re at least open to that!
This pretty well describes me. Let us know in comments if your results describe you well.
