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Amitabh Bachchan Summoned By US Court For Instigating Violence
Amitabh Bachchan has been summoned by the US court for instigating violence and in 1984 anti sikh riots. Read to know the details of the case lodged…
Amitabh Bachchan, the Shenshah of Bollywood has landed into trouble. A Los Angeles federal court has summoned the Bollywood actor today for allegedly instigating violence in the 1984 anti-Sikh.
Here, his son has achieved major success with his movie Happy New Year and father Amitabh can't even rejoice for he has been summoned by the US court for a very serious matter.
Amitabh Bachchan has been accused of raising slogans saying, "Khoon ka Badla Khoon se lenge" (Blood for Blood) slogans against Sikhs on October 31, 1984, after the then prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated. The issue is quite old but a very serious matter and Big B has just 21 days to respond to these insane charges against him.
The violence that took place left over 8,000 dead, most of whom were Sikhs. Last year, the main witness in the case, Jagdish Kaur asked why the actor had not been booked, he said, "I watched live relay on Doordarshan and saw Amitabh Bachchan raising his arm and shouting the slogan, 'khun ka badla khun sae lenge' (Blood for blood) two times. "
Bachchan wrote a letter, "I wish to take this opportunity to vehemently and categorically deny these allegations against me which are completely baseless, false and untrue. The Nehru-Gandhi family and our family have old ties from our city of origin, Allahabad.
We have been together in each other's hour of grief and joy, but to allege that I was a part of the crowd that incited them to raise anti-Sikh slogans is a preposterous and blatant lie. Quite contrarily, I have always propagated the soothing of injured feelings and the maintenance of serenity.
The unfortunate incidents of the riots of 1984 against the Sikhs shall always remain a blot and a dark phase in the history of our country, a country that prides itself in its secular credentials."
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Posted on October 28, 2014, in Sri Lanka. Bookmark the permalink. Comments Off on Amitabh Bachchan Summoned By US Court For Instigating Violence.


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There's many opportunities for cougar dating in the United Kingdom. If you know where to look, and what places to go to, you will be able to find the cougar of your dreams. There's no reason why you can't be able to find a cougar or a cub when you're living in the United Kingdom.
All that you really want to know is the top cities and the best places in that city to be able to find your cougar or cub faster. The only problem is that if you don't know where the best places are, you're going to have some troubles in UK cougar dating. The reason is that not many cougars make it public that they're looking for a young cub and that they are into cougar dating. Here's the top 5 cities in the UK where you will have the best chance in finding a cougar.
Cougar dating in London
Cougar dating in London is popular, but you will struggle to find the best places where cougars and cubs is hanging out. Most people that's staying in London make use of cougar dating websites to find their cougars. Dating online in London isn't just easier, it is also more effective. You will find more cougars or cubs online than in clubs and bars.
There's lots of great cougar dating sites in London that you can use. Some of the most popular websites for London are olderwomendating.com, toyboywarehouse.com and mingle2.com. But, if you're not into online dating, you can go to places like the Light bar and the Tiger Tiger bar. This is high society bars, where cougars and cubs may hang out.
Cougar dating in Glasgow
Cougar dating in Glasgow is another top city where you will be able to find great places for cougar dating. Cougar dating is something that's getting more popular by the day, and when you're living in Glasgow, you don't need to wonder where you're going to find a cougar or a cub.
If you're into online dating, you will find great cougar dating sites, where you can search for cougars or cubs living in or near Glasgow. However, if you don't like going online to online cougar dating sites, you don't have to worry. There's many cougar clubs and bars in this city, where you can find a cougar or a cub. Some of the places are: The pot still and The Butchershop Bar & Grill. There's some other places as well, you just need to search online for the best cougar dating bars and clubs in Glasgow.
Cougar dating in Liverpool
Cougar dating in Liverpool won't let you down. There's lots of cougar dating places where you can go to for meeting cougars and cubs. You can also make use of speed dating to meet as many cougars or cubs as you can in one night. Speed dating is getting quite popular in Liverpool, but you need to know where you can find speed dating services. They might not be found easily, but searching will make it worth your while.
Then you can make use of online cougar dating, by using the best cougar dating sites for Liverpool. There's many of these sites online, so you won't have trouble finding the best one. There's two great clubs where you can go to, if you're interested in meeting cougars and cubs in a relaxing atmosphere. You can easily find cougars and cubs in Liverpool, you just need to know where to look.
Cougar dating in Manchester
Cougar dating in Manchester can be great. It depends on where you're going to be able to meet cougars and cubs. There might be some great high society clubs and bars where you can go to, to be able to find cougars. But, the problem is that there's may be many clubs and bars in Manchester, but not many where cougars and cubs hang out. You need to have a great knowledge about all the clubs and bars to know where you can find cougars.
But, you can always make use of online UK cougar dating sites, where you can find cougars and cubs that's living in Manchester. On these sites, you will not have a shortage of finding and meeting cougars in Manchester. On all the best cougar dating sites for the United Kingdom, you will find cougars and cubs.
Cougar dating in Birmingham
The last city in for Cougar dating in the UK is, Birmingham. Cougar dating in Birmingham is popular and you will not have a problem in finding cougars and cubs if you're living in this city. There's many cougar bars where you can go to, where you will be able to meet all kinds of cougars and cubs.
You just need to know the bars where the cougars hang out. Some of the bars that you can go to, are; BrewDog, The Lord Clifden and Cherry Reds. There's also other bars and clubs for cougars. Another way that you can find cougars in Birmingham is by making use of the online dating sites. With the online dating sites for Birmingham, you will find as many cougars as what you want to meet. It is just important to make sure that you're not just using any online cougar dating sites, but the best cougar dating sites for Birmingham.
For those who live in the United Kingdom and who is interested in cougar dating, don't have to wonder where they will meet cougars and cubs. In these cities, you will find many places where you can meet cougars and cubs. You will also find speed dating services that you can use to meet as many as up to 10 cougars per night, or you can make use of the online cougar dating sites for the UK. More and more people are starting to use the Internet to find their cougars and cubs. It is just easier and more convenient. The only thing that you need to know about cougar dating in the UK, is that you need to make sure that the dating sites that you're using are legit and trustworthy.
>> UK Cougar Dating Sites Reviews to help cougar and cub singles in United Kingdom to find the best cougar dating sites online.

subset: commoncrawl


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About | Nancy Long
Nancy Long has 30 years experience in Direct Sales and Network Marketing with special focus on Nutrition and Sales Force Training and Development. She has worked with two leading American firms specializing in Financial Planning and Nutrition and has consistently achieved top positions and awards in Sales and Sales Force Management in these companies year after year. Nancy Long's previous company is one of Fortune's Top 10 ranking US Corporations. Over the past 30 years, Ms Long has help thousands of people earn four to five figure US$ incomes using her expertise in:
- sales presentation mastery,
- interpersonal skills,
- leadership training and
- personal development.
Her "Nancy Long Insurance Agency" consistently secured more than a million dollars worth of new commissions (1st year premiums) each year and is very well known in the region.
If you are dissatisfied with your current career, contact Nancy for a confidential consultation.
This is Ms Long's Resource Blog for everyone interested in:
- Staying Healthy particularly in Heart Health;
- Getting Health Alerts;
- Finding a Home-based Business or Franchise;
- Receiving Useful Information about How to Achieve Personal and Financial Freedom through Direct Sales, particularly in Network Marketing and particularly about Unicity International.
You can contact Nancy Long via the "Contact Us" section of this website if you need any advice in these areas.
Nancy Long
More about Nancy Long & her Story
© https://teamrich.wordpress.com – About | Nancy Long


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Muhammad is Real.
Reader comment on item: Who was the Prophet Muhammad?
Submitted by Usman Sabri (Australia), Apr 19, 2006 at 16:52I am giving an offer to all the people wo doubt about the existence of Muhammad. Anyone who wants to have a spiritual link with Muhammad contact me. With this spiritual Link with Muhammad you will be not only able to learn directly with Him and will also be able to See Him.
Usman Sabri
Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".
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Knowledge BiteShould I get my book cover designed by a professional?
If you are releasing a book for public sale and consumption and hoping to earn money, then you are embarking on a business venture. The best way to get sales and interest from readers is to create a quality product. If you've found your way here, you're obviously conscious of the important of good editing to polish your work before publication, and the same principles apply to cover design.
Unless you are a proficient graphic designer, do not design your own cover.
I can't stress the above enough. Homemade covers by someone who has only a rudimentary grasp of design software or principles are instantly recognisable – and not in a good way. While you might be proud of what you have created, you have to detach yourself and look at it critically. Can you really see your homemade cover sitting side by side with bestsellers on a table at Waterstones? If you were browsing for a book and saw a thumbnail of your cover, would you want to explore further? Is this really the best way to advertise something you've put a lot of work into?
In most cases, the answers to the above questions are no.
Professional cover designers aren't just skilled at using complex graphic design software. They have their finger on the pulse of what's selling books. They know the elements that make up a good cover and how to appeal to a reader. They know genre expectations and how to attract specific types of reader. And they know how to create good covers without relying on cheap stock images that are on a dozen book covers already.
The old adage 'Don't judge a book by its cover' is all very well, but people do. Think about when you go into a bookshop. The cover is usually the first thing that attracts you to picking up a book. You see a cover that appeals to you and you pick up the book and then flip to the back to read the blurb. Then, if you're still interested, you might open it up and leaf through it or read the first page or two. At each stage, you risk losing the reader's interest if what they see isn't interesting or appealing enough.
Don't do your book a disservice by skimping on the face of your book.
A good cover designer will be able to tease out the information they need to design an effective cover, but you might want to have some ideas or suggestions before you embark on the process:
- What genre is your book?
- What are the main themes?
- What other covers in a similar genre do you find appealing?
- What do you want your cover to convey?
Try not to get too wedded to specific scenes that you think would make a good cover. By all means mention them to your designer, but often simple is better and standalone scenes sometimes don't make good covers as they lack any context (and remember, your book cover will appear as a small thumbnail image in many places on Amazon, so it needs to be bold and clear enough to be visible even at smaller sizes).
Most cover designers have portfolios on their website that you can browse through. Recommendations from other authors are very valuable here too.
Remember: your cover is your book's face to the world!


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by Mark Matousek ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 1996
A professional glamour hound ditches his thankless career in magazine journalism and goes on a circuitous quest for spiritual comfort in this surprisingly engrossing, cant-free memoir. As a prized writer and editor at Andy Warhol's Interview magazine in the mid-'80s, Matousek hobnobbed with celebrities. But after a few years he began to feel oppressed by the shallow, glittery milieu. He gives a mesmerizing account of the horrifically dysfunctional upbringing that underpinned his malaise: a promiscuous, unstable mother, a father who abandoned the family when the author was four, one sister a suicide, another immensely, miserably overweight, a third mildly crippled and self-loathing. After a stint as a teen hustler, he made it through college and to Andy's Factory. As AIDS continually came closer to Matousek's life, grief and fear were added to his ennui. Finally a British novelist and all-around spiritual prod named Alexander Maxwell recognized Matousek's discontent and dragged him off to India, where he began an ongoing struggle with questions of faith and spiritual practice. Matousek writes matter-of-factly about his intensely unsettling experiences with trances, visions, and the mystical energy of certain gurus, and he is persuasive when relating his trouble relinquishing doubt. The chief distinction of Matousek's spiritual journey is the harrowing background against which it is set: The traumas of his childhood and the surreal sufferings of his friends with AIDS suggest a less hallucinatory echo of David Wojnarowicz's work, as if Wojnarowicz had exchanged his prophet's fury for optimism. Matousek describes his puzzled fascination as he came to terms with both his submerged capacity for sadism and the realization that he'd been the victim of childhood incest; he suggests that all the truths that he has embraced since his quest started have been stepping stones to spiritual enlightenment. The surprise is that Matousek can get away with such New Age musings and make them seem utterly down to earth, even inspiring.
Pub Date: April 2, 1996
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead/Putnam
Review Posted Online: N/A
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
Categories: NONFICTION
© Copyright 2020 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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On of my project we switched from TDS to Unicorn. After we configured Unicorn and set up dependencies between configurations I wanted to verify that every item was migrated from TDS (
*.item) to Unicorn (
*.yml) in the database successfully.
I wanted to check by the following points:
- Is there any difference between field values?
- Detect missing items
- Detect missing field values
First I needed to setup one Sitecore instance for TDS (tds910) and one for Unicorn (unicorn910). I deployed (TDS) and syncronized (Unicorn) the items and then ran the following few scripts.
In most cases I needed to compare 2 tables –
SharedFields or
VersionedFields. In your case maybe you need to also run the scripts above for
Detect difference between field values
I ignored the following fields to give me meaningful results:
- Updated
- Revision
- Created
- Updated by
- Owner
- Created by
- Lock
- Blob
You can add more filters or remove these from the script below.
Detect missing items
This is quite obvious: I would like to have the list of items which are in TDS but not in Unicorn accidentally.
Detect missing field values
This one also quite obvious: I would like to have the list of field which are in TDS but not in Unicorn accidentally.
If you would switch from Unicorn to TDS, you can use the same scripts, you just need to change the table and alias names in scripts above. I hope it helps a bit! If you have any question or remark let me know!


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Bing Your Maps is an Orchard CMS module that provides Bing Maps functionality for your Orchard website.http://bingyourmapsorchard.codeplex.com/
|bing-maps maps orchard orchard-module
Bing Maps implementation for the Orchard Project. Supports both static and interactive maps using latest Microsoft Interactive SDK 7.0bing maps module orchard
An Orchard CMS module to display more than one place on a Bing Map. This module would be great for creating a guide to an area displaying all the different points of interest.
Orchard Twitter Rules makes it easier for Orchard users to send Tweets in Twitter service after the trigger of events in the Orchard CMS. It's developed in C# and makes use of the Orchard Rules engine. Making it easy to automatically Tweet after a BlogPost publishing. This...orchard orchard-cms orchard-module orchard-rules
An Orchard module for creating module profiles for different environments (eg. development, release). Using the admin interface, you can create different sets of features and corresponding states (enabled/disabled) and activate (and inverse-activate) them in the admin interfa...orchard orchard-cms orchard-module
Orchard BlogML Module The Orchard BlogML module allows users to import blogs from other blogging engines in to orchard, and also allows users to migrate there blogs out of orchard.blogml
Home of the Advanced Menu module for Orchard CMS. Allows you to add hierarchical navigation and breadcrumbs to your Orchard-based site. Currently it's the most popular navigation module in Orchard Gallery.menu module modules navigation open-source orchard
This is a simple module to protect anonymous users from accessing specified content To utilize the feature, simply add the Members Only content part to any content type to make that content type available to authenticated users only.orchard orchard-cms orchard-module
This module provides image multi picker field for Orchard CMS 1.5.1. This module can help you to create image gallery, banner rotator or any other image list.orchard orchard-cms
Orchard Image Gallery project is intended to provide an Image Gallery module for Orchard Project. The Image Gallery module provides means to upload images and organize them into galleries. These image galleries are used on Orchard to present images in a beautiful way.
Mvc-mini-profiler implementation as Orchard module. Database profiling just has been added. It is much easier to see what Orchard engine do during page processing. Because of database profiling performance overhead is a little higher than in previous version, do not use it on...orchard profiler
Bing Maps Extensions is a set of helpers that extend Bing Maps for Enterprise with functionality not implemented directly by the Bing Maps API.bing-maps mapping virtual-earth component extenders
A jumpstart Orchard module, implementing basic module functionality. Created to make Orchard module creation a bit quicker:)
Demo Orchard module for training purposes. This module completes the training materials at http://orcharddojo.net/orchard-resources
The EDB Smooth Streaming module allows you to add adaptive video streaming to your Orchard website using the Smooth Streaming IIS Media Services extension. It supports conversion of video files to the Smooth Streaming format using Expression Encoder Pro in one easy step.media module orchard smooth-streaming video
The Bing Maps ASP.NET Control is a wrapper for the Microsoft Bing Maps AJAX control. http://www.microsoft.com/maps/ It provides a drag and drop experience for Visual Studio ASP.NET developers and removes the need to code javascript.bing map
A Winforms User Control for displaying and manipulation maps using Microsoft Bing Maps.virtual-earth bing-maps geospatial maps microsoft-ve user-controls ve
This Orchard module extends Orchard's default TinyMce module by including the full set of TinyMce plugins.orchard orchard-cms tinymce wysiwyg
A module for Orchard to allow you to include a MailChimp subscribe page to your Orchard site.
An Orchard module only containing the Javascript.NET (http://javascriptdotnet.codeplex.com/) binaries for easy usage inside the Orchard CMS.
We have large collection of open source products. Follow the tags from
Tag Cloud >>
Open source products are scattered around the web. Please provide information
about the open source projects you own / you use.
Add Projects.


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Hello. I'm Mercy Desdemona. And, I know a lot of you have known me for a while but to those that are new, Hello. Today, I am going to be answering some emails that I have received while I have been away from the internet. I try to respond to everyone individually however, because I have been away for so long there are just too many emails to respond too. If you have a question for me feel free to email me at: firstname.lastname@example.com
Q: We know you're a metal head but do you listen to other music? – Tabby .L.
A: Yes. I love classical, swing music, jazz, 80s new wave, and prog rock.
Q: Why do you always look so miserable? – Jack.R.
A: I suffer from NBF – Natural Bitch Face.
Q: Have you ever met one of us IRL? – Hanna . O.
A: Yes. I have bumped into a few followers at Con. I'm always pleased to see people who follow my dreadful works.
Q: What is your dream vacation? – Rich
A: I'd love to tour the castles of Europe. I'm fascinated more by old buildings than beaches and casinos.
Q: What do you enjoy doing the most?
A: I enjoy creating things. Writing, music, etc. Being a creative cuckoo.


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Children's author Mona Kerby and school library media specialist Sarah Chauncey have teamed up to create the Skype an Author Network, an terrific online resource to help authors who offer virtual visits connect with teachers and librarians. If you're interested in offering this kind of virtual visit, they'd love to have you click on this link to learn more about joining. Sarah has also asked me to pass along a request for patience…since it will take a while to get everyone added. (Thanks to edulemba for passing along this link to me!)
Tag: virtual author visits
Virtual Author Visits: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, & the Awesome
There's been a lot of online chatter lately about virtual author visits, and as someone who wears two hats, I've been paying special attention. Because I'm a middle school English teacher as well as an author, my ability to travel for school visits is somewhat limited, so I'll be using Skype videoconferencing software to offer virtual visits to classrooms and book clubs when THE BRILLIANT FALL OF GIANNA Z is released in September.
I also love the idea of my own students having more opportunities to talk with authors, and today my 7th graders had a virtual visit with the amazing Laurie Halse Anderson. We read CHAINS this winter and were swept away, so the kids had lots of questions about how Laurie researched the novel and brought her characters to life. Laurie is planning to offer virtual visits for schools starting in the fall, and we were thrilled to be her guinea pigs. Our kids piled into the auditorium at 9:45 this morning and waited for my laptop to ring with Laurie's 10am call on Skype.
And then there she was!
Laurie and I agreed to double team an online review of our virtual visit – I'm providing a teacher's perspective, and she's blogging about the experience from the author's point of view over at halseanderson . So here are my thoughts on virtual visits: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the awesome…
The Good:
~Laurie is not only an incredibly talented author but also a friendly, generous, down-to-earth person, and that came through on the big screen, too. Our 7th graders loved her before this visit; they love her more now.
~She gave answers that were just long enough but not too long. We had time for about 30 kids to ask questions in a 45-minute visit, and they were just thrilled. When the kids asked about her research, she held up her latest sources.
~Our plan to keep things organized worked. Students knew who was asking questions and when it was their turn. I gave each interviewer a rundown, along with an index card with the question her or she wrote.
Kids were on "standby" when the person before them on the list was talking with Laurie, and that kept things moving along.
~The setup for this virtual visit was pretty much painless.
~I brought in my laptop from home (a MacBook with a built-in camera), connected it to the projector in our auditorium, hooked the computer into the school network, and patched it into our sound system.
~Skype worked like it was supposed to work 95% of the time. (See "the Ugly" for the other 5%)
The Bad: (What we'd do differently next time)
~Sometimes, it was hard for our auditorium audience to hear the questions being asked. Our interviewers were facing Laurie on the laptop, rather than the other students. Next time we do a virtual author visit, I'll remind the kids about the need to speak up, try to get a microphone set up, or perhaps ask if our author might be willing to repeat questions before answering.
The Ugly:
~Skype is wonderful and magical and free. It is also subject to the whims of all sorts of Internet bandwidth, firewall, and other technology issues that I don't entirely understand. As a result, four or five times during our virtual visit, we simply lost the connection. Laurie's face would freeze mid-sentence, and we had to hang up and call her back. Usually, that all happened within a few seconds, but once I had to quit Skype and re-launch the application before we could get our connection back, and that took an extra minute. Overall, the interruptions were annoying but manageable.
The Awesome:
~Kids who I never dreamed would stand and share a question were so excited to talk with Laurie. She treated each student like his or her question was the most important one in the world. I watched their faces as they listened. They glowed.
~My class was watching the ALA video-conference from Denver last month and cheered when Laurie was announced as the winner of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement. We cheered again today and loved that she could hear us this time!
~We also got to listen to Laurie read the first few pages of FORGE, the sequel to CHAINS, told from the point of view of Isabel's friend, Curzon. It is so full of promise that I don't know how I'm going to wait until 2010 to read the rest.
Thanks, Laurie, for such a wonderful morning with our kids!
If you want to read about another author/illustrator's experience, Elizabeth Dulemba has an extensive blog post on her first virtual visit, too.
And finally….a to-do list for teachers who want to set up a Skype virtual author visit.
1. Download Skype at home and try it out with someone you know. Figure out how it works. It's pretty simple, but you'll want to make sure you're comfortable before you set up a visit.
2. Contact your technology coordinator to see if you can use Skype at school. Some will say yes. Some will say no. And some will wave magic wands and adjust bandwidth restrictions and unblock things so you can pull it off. Send them chocolate later.
3. Contact the author with whom you'd like to have a virtual visit. Find out about availability, technology needs, and fees. Also be aware that video chats aren't everyone's cup of tea, so if an author says no thanks, respect that.
4. Once you've set up a date and time (morning may be best to avoid high usage Internet times), reserve the space where you'll be having your virtual visit. Make sure the equipment you'll need is available and working. If you're not good with technology, enlist the help of a co-worker who is. Send that person chocolate later, too.
5. Make a plan for your virtual visit. How long will it last? (30-45 minutes seems to be perfect.) Who will ask questions? Where will they stand? Where do they go when they're done? If you figure it out ahead of time, you won't have to interrupt your visit to deal with questions.
6. Talk to your students about etiquette for a virtual author visit. In many ways, it's just like having a guest speaker in your auditorium or classroom in person, and kids need to know that all the same rules about courteous behavior apply. It will also be important for them to know that technical issues are a possibility and that their quiet cooperation will help you get things fixed more quickly.
7. Test Skype at school. It doesn't matter if you've tested it at home; things are different on school networks, and you don't want to discover a problem when it's time for your virtual visit.
8. On the day of your virtual visit, launch Skype and either call the author or wait for him/her to call you – whatever you agreed upon in advance. Know that there may be technical problems, but you'll be able to fix them. You may want to have kids bring books for silent reading in case there's an extended period of lost contact. Planning and flexibility (and a sense of humor!) will go a long way toward making your virtual author visit a great experience!
One more thing….
9. After your virtual visit, would you stop back here and let me know how it goes? I can't wait to hear more about kids & authors coming together through technology!


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To have good sales in your store, you should take care of your customers. Attracting new customers is as important as turning them into loyal and repeated customers.
How to manage customers
Managing customers and communicating with them is crucial for running business. Every time a new customer places an order in your Ecwid store, they appear on your customer list.
You can see and manage all your customers in your Ecwid Control Panel → My Sales → Customers:
For all of your customers who place an order, Ecwid creates an account with your store. It allows your customers to view their order history and see the statuses of their current orders.
When customers place an order or create an account in your store by clicking the "Sign in" link, they appear on this list.
You can manage your customers in the following ways:
- Add customers to customer groups.
This allows you to give them discounts or create specific CSS codes that can hide or show certain elements depending on what group a customer belongs to.
- Mark customers as tax exempt.
If you charge taxes in your store, you can mark some customers as tax exempt
- See all orders placed by a specific customer.
To do it, simply click on the number in the Order count column. To get more statistics about your store, check out the Reports page in your Ecwid Control Panel → My Sales → Reports.
If you need to create a list of people who use your Ecwid store, you can export the customers list in a CSV file.
How customers can use their accounts
In their accounts in your store the customers can:
- See all their orders with current payment and fulfillment statuses.
- Specify VAT ID. If a customer enters their VAT ID, it will auto-fill on checkout.
How to add customers to the store
Sometimes when you start a store you may already have a list of customers or you may want to add new customers in bulk to your existing store. You can import them to Ecwid with the help of the Import customers app.
The process is simple: upload a CSV file with customers via this app. This CSV file must have comma (",") as a delimiter and it must start with a header ("name","email","password"). You can import customer's name, email address, and password (optional).
How customers can log into the account
Previously, we used the traditional way for customers to create an account or log in to it. Customers needed to enter a login and a password. Now we've come up with a new up-to-date method for login using a link.
Here is how it works: customers click the "Sign in" link, enter their email address and get the link for signing in to their inbox. When they click the link, they are taken back to the storefront and they are logged in. Here is the form the customer will see:
Logging in by a link has a number of advantages:
- Customers don't need to remember passwords.
- After an order is placed, the customer's account is created automatically for the email address used.
- You can see all the customers who placed orders in your store, you can see them in your Ecwid Control Panel → My sales → Customers page.
- A customer can see all the orders placed with their email address in their account.
- This is a more secure way of login than using a login/password. Since the login link is sent to the email address, only the owner of the email address is able to log into the account.
Social Login
Your customers can also login with their favorite social platform: Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and Amazon.
This is achieved with the Social Login application for Ecwid.
The app adds buttons to your storefront so that customers can click on them and login to their account easily and quickly:


text:
Any sort of intense exercising can sometimes result in injury, it's a sad but true fact. Whether you pull your hamstring running or your bicep lifting, pulling a muscle is never fun or comfortable. What happens to your body is that essentially the muscle tears away from where it's supposed to be which is what causes the pain. It's made even worse by the fact that sometimes there really isn't anything you can do about it other than let your muscle rest and recover. Still, it's always good to find out sooner rather than later so here are 5 signs you might have pulled a muscle.
1. The area is swollen
This isn't always the case though, a lot of pulled muscles go unnoticed because there is little to no swelling. However, if the tear is significant and you have done a fair amount of damage to your muscle then there will definitely be some swelling.
2. It's painful even when you aren't using it
Pain at rest is one of the first signs people tend to notice. It's fairly normal to feel some type of pain while you are exercising strenuously, however if the pain increases while you are resting then there might be something more serious going on.
3. It hurts to use it
You'll probably notice this sign as soon as you try to use to affected muscle. If the tear is bad enough you could end up doing more damage to your muscle if you continue to use it, instead try to keep the muscle well rested and try your best to avoid using it.
4. It's only one side
Unlike sore muscles which you can usually tell are different from a pulled muscle because it impacts both sides (i.e. both legs or both arms). You would have to be very unlucky to pull both hamstring muscles.
5. You felt it happen
If you inadvertently over stretched a muscle, you might feel the onset of pain straight away. In some ways this is great! You are able to stop whatever you were doing that caused the issue and immediately start treating the muscle. On the down side, you probably just experienced a very uncomfortable sort of pain.


text:
When I magnify a window in Chrome, I see an icon like this:
When I reduce the size of a window below it's normal 100% I get this:
Clicking either of those icons gives me options for modifying the magnification level.
On DEV when I am following someone I see this button. Clicking it makes me "unfollow" them.
We're inconsistent in our UI in that we treat the home page "save" button differently by offering a hover state which indicates the intended action.
As we seek to make this behavior consistent, I'm curious what you consider to be fundamentally correct behavior. This situation is handled differently across the web but I'm curious if anyone feels like there is a true best practice.
All comments on the subject are super appreciated!
Posted on by:
Ben Halpern
A Canadian software developer who thinks he's funny. He/Him.
In my experience, the button should convey the action. Although the button says Following, that does not indicate what it should do. If we take a page from Twitter's UX, hovering over the button when it says Following, changes the text to Unfollow, the intended action. So I think it's OK to show the current state potentially, but in the end before it's pressed, it should convey the actual action about to happen.
Update... Just adding this comment here as I forgot to mention mobile
Good point about touch/mobile with hover. I should have took a bit more time before answering. 🙃
Looks like Twitter on mobile just shows Following and when you click it, you get the same prompt as desktop prompting you to make sure you really want to unfollow. I agree having just unfollow text would have made sense here like you suggest.
What about touch devices? They don't have hover effects.
This is a huge part of mobile UI that I think a lot of people overlook if they're more focused on desktop. I think you should always design as though hover is not an option, only using it to add extra clarity, but not relying on it to convey the meaning of a button, etc.
I answered it here.
Good point about touch/mobile with hover. I should have took a bit more time before answering. 🙃
Looks like Twitter on mobile just shows Following and when you click it, you get the same prompt as desktop prompting you to make sure you really want to unfollow. I agree having just unfollow text would have made sense here like you suggest.
What is interesting is that with Twitter, even as something as non-destructive as unfollowing someone, they prompt to confirm so even if you didn't understand the meaning of the button, you've got a second chance with a more complete description.
unfollow on Twitter can be pretty destructive, in that if you unfollow somewhat who is private, you have to request permission to follow again (so it's very clear to that person that you unfollowed). I'm a fan of any action that can be difficult to redo easily (or may have unintended consequences) getting a two step confirmation.
Well, at least they prompt you before you unfollow.
That's no surprise, as Twitter focuses on maximizing engagement from its users.
They really don't want you to unfollow anyone. 🙈
They now even prompt you what the handles you follow like and follow themselves... Quite annoying. 🙄
Here's an example of the worst possible combination of things, courtesy of Quora:
It says "Follow", but that's not an action, because the tiny tick indicates I'm already following. I have no idea what happens if I click on "All notifs" and don't want to try.
I thought exactly the same example about Twitter. I think it is always good to convey the action. When I see a "Following" button I somewhat feel that I spend a split of second to understand that it is a button and it may be used to unfollow someone. On Twitter if you hover over it you have no doubt about it. However, this is not true for the app which makes me think what we can do to convey the action and state at the same time on mobile apps.
I expect a button to tell me what will happen if I click. For example, as I write this, I have two choices:
Preview or
Submit. Both of those are very clear as to what the action will do. (Although clicking
preview changes the button to
markdown which I actually find confusing. I expected something more like
edit. )
To be honest, I didn't know that
Following was a button that would unfollow. 😳 There's nothing about it that indicates to me visually that I can click on it. The
+ Follow is more clear, mainly because of the
unsave hover over I find really confusing. What does that mean? I don't know how you
unsave something, unless it means it's going to be deleted.
This is an interesting topic. I had an argument with a designer regarding this sometime ago. Personally I think if its a simple toggle which turns something on/off indicated by an icon, I would prefer showing the
current state.
If its something which requires a call to action and includes some text (which you could/couldn't cancel in the future) , I prefer showing the
intended behavior
Based on how confusing I find my iPhone mute toggle button, I am leaning toward the idea that buttons that have no text (are they always toggles?) should be different from text-based buttons. Icon toggle buttons seem to make more sense to me when they are, as you say, showing the current state. Then again, play/pause, if it's one button that toggles, would make more sense to me in the normal way, where the play button means I want to play, not that it's already playing.
I remember seeing something similar about toggle states on the UX Stack Exchange site. That question/answer talk about on/off options and indicating state etc.
While it is super convenient in one way to have the button be dual purposed, it is probably better to give more distinct actions and have them be more discoverable.
It might take up more space but maybe more:
Saved. Undo?
("Saved." would be text, "Undo" would be a link)
That way you give both the current state and the desired action.
With the following button, I do think you have more flexibility with it simply because of the ubiquity of that type of button across other systems (Twitter etc).
A toggle should show a current state. A button should show an action.
When the button shows a current state, it stops being a button, and becomes a sort of a tag. Whether alternating between a tag and a button on hover is good user experience - is quite subjective. Users might not realize that a tag could be actually clickable or would become a button on hover. Moreover, it is even less intuitive on mobile, because there is no such thing as hovering.
Most of the time the actions can also convey the current state. For example,
Unsubscribe button would imply that the current state is
Subscribed. I don't personally think that the users really need an extra confirmation describing the state in that part of the UI. Perhaps another UI is needed to list all user subscriptions and allow them to manage them all in one place, maybe something like a "SUBSCRIPTIONS" section on YouTube.
What we have here is a blend of different paradigms: button and checkbox. In the cases you mentioned here, the button is actually not representing a singular action, but instead a dual-state or in case of the zoom a multi-state switch.
The ideal solution would be a component that conveys both its present state and its future state in an understandable way. In case of the follow-button, this would probably be something like a Checkbox button
The checkbox conveys that this element has a state that could be toggled rather than singularly selected.
There's a tension between screen real-estate and clarity of function. The "state button" takes up less space than the switch or checkbox, but it can be unclear what the current state is, because of the blending of paradigms that you mention.
The button should describe the action to be performed. Use a separate label or some other indicator to show the current state.
As a demonstration, most video conferencing apps confuse me with their "mute" button. I'll see a full mic and I'm never quite sure if it means "my mic is currently on" or "click me to turn your mic on". Since they almost always act as both the action and the indication of state, I'm left always worried that I misread the UI and am actually unmuted when I think I'm muted.
Another thought: if a button is intended to convey both state and action, it should be designed as a switch. A switch cognitively makes it clear whether it's on or not, and also indicates an action can be taken. Here, I would expect the switch's text label to indicate the current state, with the switch's own appearance, together with the label for the current state, implying what will happen when I click the switch.
I don't think the label for switches should change between states. That is always something that confuses me:
[ON] Do something
[OFF] Don't do something
When seeing the first it's clear: right now "do something" is on, so it'll be done. But the second isn't: "don't do something" is off - does that mean it will now be done? Or not?
If the text were to stay constant, I can switch "Do something" on or off, which makes it really clear in my opinion.
Also, always use the positive clause to avoid double negations.
[y/n] do something
[y/n] don't do something.
The second could lead to "not don't do something" when read out, which doesn't make much sense. "Yes, do something" and "Not do something" make more sense. :)
I would say that I am on team "action". I think a button should indicate what will happen if you click it. For the "Following" button, you could rename it "Unfollow".
I think the hover behaviour @nickytonline mentioned is okay for desktop, but that wouldn't really work for a touch interface. I'd suggest the default should be "Follow" and "Unfollow". Then you could optionally add the fancier "Following" with "Unfollow" when hovering over the button for desktop devices.
One tricky case I've run across though is a toggle for muting. On my iPhone, it shows a speaker with a slash through it when the sound is not muted, and a normal speaker when the sound is muted. That's consistent with what I've said above, but it's actually very confusing to me in practice. It seems to make more intuitive sense to me that the speaker with the slash indicates that the sound is currently off.
Good point about touch/mobile with hover. I should have took a bit more time before answering. 🙃
Looks like Twitter on mobile just shows Following and when you click it, you get the same prompt as desktop prompting you to make sure you really want to unfollow. I agree having just unfollow text would have made sense here like you suggest.
- Hover states should be optional as they don't always exist (mob/kiosk/disabled/TV etc). Active state.
- Combination of icon & text. Icon should "be more substantial" once activated. Think filled hearts vs outline. Finger presssable (44px+ says HIG).
- It's not save, it's "bookmark". You are not saving anything. There is no organizational element. Icon on the left shows bookmark (that's "tag" really, but looks like a bookmark-ish). A variation of that works better.
- Use correct casing. trendy lower case & EASY DESIGN ALL UPPPER reduce readability. Harder to pull off.
- Avoid 'hurdling' (distractions that have to be seen 1000x times but rarely used - save btn distracting from titles & activity level). The instinct is "more saves because it stands out" but that is not aways correct. If the content is good, people will find the way to "save" it.
a.. Now:
- Your btn says "Follow'
- I press, it says "Followed" (or following). Supplement it with the appropriate symbol (or color). Behavior is implied. Done.
b. Otherwise:
- Your btn says "Follow?'
- I press, it shows my next action. "Unfollow".
In this case, I am subliminally being told to unfollow you so your current choice seems better.
Like, Unicorn & Save/Bookmark are pretty much 1-2-3 rating system where all three btns do almost the same thing (they could be merged, with a built in bookmark aspect). Then you can have other features.
Follow/unfollow on your profile listings, along with descriptions would be useful (so you can follow or unfollow without having to check each profile).
Something like this seems like a correct behavior to me. Straightforward and simple, though it may seem a bit flashy at some point.
This is the way to go, you may want to add the "result" in the button.
When clicking "+ Follow", jump to the "✓ Following" state.
If you hover again display: "x Unfollow"
This Implementation does not consider Mobile UX, in this case you may want to prompt the user for an action.
Don't. Make. Me. Think!
By this I mean, if it's a "button", always make it clear what pressing it will do.
Find another way to convey state if you can't make the button do both things easily.
Also, if pressing the button is trigging an action that might take time, make it obvious I pressed it and they I'm now waiting.
And if you don't want me to press it again while I'm waiting, disable it.
While you are at it, remember to enable it again if the action was successful and can now be done again or if it failed/times out and can be retried.
Where possible, don't make the button change after I click it to be doing another thing. Find room for another button.
And finally, any actions I might want to preform a lot, let me do them against multiple instances of the item, using some kind of multi-select. Bonus points for a "select all".
One obvious place for this, I would like to be able to find all the people who I can "follow back", and do they all in one go! Not one at a time.
Thanks for listening. As always, my opinions are my own. I am open to updating then if presented with a solid argument.
I'd lean towards showing current state for consistency not just across this app but across most apps 'cos that's how my minds expects the UI to be across apps these days.
It could be
Save <=>
Saved instead of
Save <=>
I definitely think buttons should indicate expected behavior, not state. I think we can apply the single-responsibility principle here! While it is usually not used for UI/UX, it was invented to make code easier to understand for humans. So I think it works just as well for UI/UX.
Therefore I think buttons should say "Save"/"Unsave", "Follow"/"Unfollow",... It is possible to add another item to the UI indicating state: "You are following USER123"/"You are not following USER123." Be careful though to make these really clear.
I think of buttons as function invocations, or requests for action. Something else can then tell me the result.
There might be good exceptions though - as there always are.
Oh, also: I don't think hover effects are enough. If someone is using a touchscreen they don't work, and to others it might not be obvious. When using a keyboard instead of mouse they also don't work. Rather have two different UI elements.
Jakob's Law indicates users expect and prefer a similar pattern across the internet.
For example:
1 billion people on instagram are used to seeing this functionality with that saved icon, and possibly majority of us experienced instagram UI. We can make it easier for users to not guess the UI of same functionality and make it quick for them to start.
The place this confuses me the most is with twisties (the little arrows on accordion items or menu expanders). The can either show the current state or the action to transform the state and there's no consistency between providers.
I like the way Apple did it back in the day where they indicated the collapsed (vertical) state of an item with a horizontal arrow. i.e.
closed: ⇦
open: ⇩
Especially with a transitional animation, this helps alleviate some of the confusion. I think Apple have gone to the dark side on this since though. Switching between styles on a Mac and on a Google leads me to not trust any control I see and click everything at least once to discover what it does.
It's like when you search a form to see whether there's a
save button or whether things are just going to update by magic. Sites and apps are so inconsistent in this that nobody is ever really sure if their changes are going to stick, and you end up closing and reopening the settings pages just to make sure.
Where I'm going with this is that I'm not sure at this point that there is a correct answer that's compatible with keeping terse buttons or pictographic icons, because the well has been thoroughly poisoned.
Totally just my personal opinion, but I think a button should indicate the
intended behavior.
Following example doesn't completely offend me, only cause I know it was
Follow 'before' I clicked it (however long ago it was).
Save example here doesn't bother me a ton, mostly because of the hover state + the know the
Save button used to be there so it makes sense thats where un-save lives too
I think I would change both to their intended action, and maybe use something else to display the
state? :shrug:
I second this. In most cases, it seems more clear to show the intended action rather than the current state. My thought on this falls back to what feels natural to the average user. For instance, as I'm typing this on my phone, I see a "Submit" button. I know that clicking it will submit this post. But what if it showed "Not Submitted" instead? Would I know to click it to send it? Probably not. At least not right away. But it's a matter of context as with most things and highly subjective as well. I think I err more on the side of "what buttons are considered the most important/most used, and how do I make it most obvious what their function is? " Keeping them simple and easy to understand, I believe most people will pick up the more intricate buttons through experimentation on their own. Ya know, give them enough to understand basic functionality, but not so much that they lose curiosity. DEV seems to balance that line very well so far.
We have this conversation over and over at work and never come to a consensus >_>. My opinion mirrors the physical world. We're all used to controls telling us what they do. If they need to show state, there's usually a separate indicator of some sort. Given that we all use physical controls all the time, it makes sense to try and replicate that behavior. That's why buttons exist in UI to begin with right?
More important than that though, make sure whatever decision you make you write it down in your style guide so you can stop having the same discussion.
I think the button should convey what action will be performed rather than the current state. It's a common pattern I see when looking at websites that are in 2 languages in Canada (french + english).
For example on Kijiji (It's like Ebay), if you're navigating the site in English, you'll see "FR" displayed in the navbar to switch to French. If navigating in French, you'll see "EN" displayed in the navbar to switch to English.
Man, that's confusing like hell... 😳
I have to agree for this case. I think "switch to FR" would be much better.
The way shown basically shows the opposite state - neither an action, nor the current state... 😅
It's quite common on web sites, though. Sometimes you'll see "English" or "Français" instead of just the first two letters. Sites that support more than two languages will usually have a dropdown to pick your preferred language, usually showing the currently selected language. Can't say I've ever had any problem with either approach.
Hi Ben... GREAT question, and I've actually learned a ton from reading through the responses.
At the end of it all, to me I go back to my machinery/engineering roots:
A "button" is a "do" thing, It's an action, as mentioned, but at the core, it represents a verb.
The text on a button fills in the blank of this statement : "When I press here, it will do _____"
Follow, Save, Accept, Submit... they're all verbs.
When I reach for a button, my expectation is that it will "do" the verb that it says on it.
"Following" is not a verb (action), it's a state/condition.
( "All Notifs" in one example... not a verb (I wouldn't have clicked on it either ;) !)
When a button text gives me state, it's not very clear or distinct..
It requires more mental overhead, in that I have to think about different states, and translate to action.
When a button gives me a verb, it just seems more simple, natural, intuitive.
Be safe, be kind... wash your hands :)
well both, there could be 2 ways to get each value such as:
When the button is clicked do this...
Button.getState(); //JS oriented, but can be changed for the language
which can always use a loop to check the state of a button...
This dilemma is common due to trying to do too many things with one element (communicate a state AND describe an action).
The proper solution is to have text that comminates the state (like a checkmark & the word Following) in addition to a button that says Unfollow.
I would say, if it is some kind of toggle button it should tell the user the current state. For instance, "Following".
If it is a button to perform an action (which is not supposed to toggle some state), it should tell the action with a verb
It can be both depending on the priority of the context and whether words, icons or styles can clearly differentiate the actions. Also, for critical actions there should be confirmations, especially if its only icons
This is my personal opinion, A button should only communicate the action. In this case, the button should only say unfollow or unsave. maybe we can use some other icons to display that you are following that user or saved the post. That would be less ambiguous for the user.
I think it depends on how it's framed. The follow button, for example, functions more as a checkbox than a button. That is, it has two states, and no real side effects that can be immediately determined (passive state). The save button is similar, but there's an immediate action or change in state associated with it (active state). As for the magnifying glass, it's not really a button. It's an indicator of state, but clicking it doesn't really trigger any action or state change other than showing a UI pane that has buttons for triggering state changes.
You are confusing two closely related UX elements - A button and a toggle button.
A button doesn't have a state.
It merely provides a way to perform an action - just like a link, or the physical buttons on your mouse - It's there to be clicked and therefor should convey the action it will perform - Just like the "WRITE A POST" button on the top right corner of this page (BTW, I'm not a native English speaker, but shouldn't that be "Write a post"?)
A toggle button, on the other hand, is a different kind of button. It's like the on/off switch and has two distinct modes - but in my humble opinion - it should still convey the action rather then the state.
Let's look at the follow toggle button: Its state is either "following" or "not following" - and I imagine everyone can understand what happens when you click a button entitled "Follow" or "Unfollow", much more intuitive than "following" and "not following" (What the hell should "not following" mean on a button, anyway?)
In my opinion - If you want to convey state, neither a button nor a toggle button is the way to do it - they should both convey action.
current state should be conveyed by other UX elements - texts, checkboxes and radioboxes comes in mind.
Too many buttons are trying to act like a push-on-push-off switch.
Imagine your game controller buttons being replaced with switches... that would be tedious and no fun.
Therefore, a button should be labeled for it's action, not it's state. Only checkboxes or switches should be labeled for their current state.
As others have said, the "problem" is that the buttons are doing double-duty. Once you're putting two things in one place, I'm not sure there's a "right" way to juggle them.
(It's a bit like mutable data structures -- when space is at a premium, the place gets prioritized over the stuff that's in it. But if you have to, you make do.)
I think this is one place where skeuomorphism make sense. If something behaves like a toggle, making it look like a switch helps get the point across.
Short of that, IMO ideally the status and the actions have separate homes. Short of that, having a hover state seems better than not having one, but it still excludes mobile and screen reader users (I think).
I feel that the button should state what it will do. Having button text change on hover/focus seems like an accessibility nightmare. It could also cause confusion for faster mouse users.
I would like things to clearly communicate their intentions, color changes and stuff to achieve this are great.
I prefer the button tell me the exact action that will occur when I click it. I didn't realise that clicking the "Following" button actual unfollows someone :) I rather would prefer a text label Following followed by a button stating Unfollow.
My thought is that they should follow their real-life counterparts. A button should indicate what actions you can take now. Like below here, I can click "preview" or "submit". If I can follow you, there should be a button I can click that says "follow".
Following the principle of least astonishment, I'd say the button should describe what happens when clicked.
I think buttons should convey current state by default, and intent when they are hovered over.
I don't think there's a true best practice for this. This should be done depending on the context.
I don't have enough UX skills to answer, but I would be curious to see what our folks in the domain think about through a survey?
Difficult question tbh, but I would say the intended behavior is the way to go. A button indicates that an action will be performed when clicked.
Consider tooltips to describe about the current state or purpose of the button:
- Follow (Click to follow)
- Unfollow (Click to unfollow)
A button should state the intended behaviour, a user needs to see what a button does, before he's using it.
I personally believe that the intended behavior should be marked. As it makes understanding more clear and less-technical people can also understand it easily.


text:
There is a picturesque village about 5km to the west of us,
which early in September has it's annual show,
weather permitting. This year it went ahead, unlike the
2008 & 09 when those with clout, the Health & Safety
folk, prevented the show from going ahead. Rain
and wet ground was cause.
Mrs H thoroughly enjoys the Clonaslee show, the crowds,
the atmosphere and the animals, especially the bulls.
My first attention is always drawn to the horses, not
because I am a rider, for I am definitely not.
It is that they hold a certain majestic mystery for me.
Here they are, those magnificant animals, along with their
handlers. The younger men always seem to wear bowler
hats which rest upon their ears !
This is the supreme champion of the show,
a wonderful beast. Just look at that straight back
and the chunky forelegs, a fine specimen of bullhood indeed.
Now this is the correct way for farmers' wives
to enjoy their Sunday afternoon. Sitting in amongst
the bulls and enjoying a glass or three of wine....
and great craic !
Potatoes and onions on display, where shape, size
and colour, I presume, are important in determining the winners.
Here in the hall an assortment of exhibitions
from art to large nosegays plus breads, cakes, tarts and knitting.
From an earlier blog, you will no doubt recognise
this, our traditional fuel, that has been hard won
from the bog.
The competition here is about the straightest
block of turf and squareness of section, it must
also have weight, dryness and make a good clack
(sound) when two pieces are knocked together.
This then is the Clonaslee agricutural show, one of a number of shows
that take place in the locality. There is a far larger show in a neighbouring town
that draws in thousands of people from far and wide and each has different attractions.
Our local show is our preference of course as it is also a chance to catch up with friends,
neighbours and buy homemade goodies to take home for tea.


text:
Vikings vs. Seahawks: Full Roster Report Card Grades for MinnesotaNovember 18, 2013
Vikings vs. Seahawks: Full Roster Report Card Grades for Minnesota
No one really thought the Minnesota Vikings had a chance against the Seattle Seahawks. All six of the predictions in the St. Paul Pioneer Press expected the Seahawks to win and cover the spread of 12.5 points.
A search of the Twitterverse found only fans so drunk on the purple kool-aid that they are blinded by any reality believing that the Vikings had any chance to pull off an upset.
This one wasn't even deserving of a comparison to the biblical reference of David and Goliath—as David was able to defeat the giant in an upset. In this case, the giant shrugged off the underdog and swatted him with a rolled-up newspaper, putting him in his place.
The Seahawks showed the Vikings that they are a much better team. They used one of the Vikings' former weapons, kick returner Percy Harvin, to hammer it home.
Harvin only touched the ball twice in his Seattle debut, but both times he came up with big plays to help the Seahawks. His only catch converted a 3rd-and-10, and his one kick return was good for 58 yards and set up a Seattle touchdown right before the half.
Seattle turned a fumble and three interceptions into 20 points in routing the Vikings 41-20.
It was another ugly loss for the Vikings despite an improved effort by the defense. An ugly loss deserves some ugly grades—don't expect any high marks for this one.
Christian Ponder: F
Ponder had his worst game of the season. He completed just 13 of 22 passes for only 129 yards. After throwing two interceptions on back-to-back drives in the fourth quarter that led to 14 points for the Seahawks, he was benched for the first time in his career.
Along with the two interceptions, he also had a fumble that led to a field goal in the first quarter. Even with a touchdown, his passer rating was a lowly 53.0.
Matt Cassel: F
Coming in for Ponder in the fourth quarter, Cassel promptly did his best Ponder imitation and threw an interception. Showing some mercy at this point, the Seahawks only converted it into a field goal.
Cassel finished 5-of-13 for 78 yards with a touchdown along with the interception. His passer rating was even lower than Ponder's at 52.7.
Josh Freeman: N/A
Inactive for the fourth straight game, Freeman has got be thinking that he is in football's version of hell. He's mostly likely counting the days until he gets to sign a contract with the Oakland Raiders.
Overall grade: F
Running Backs
Adrian Peterson: D-
Seattle did a very good job of keeping Peterson from making a difference in this game. He finished with 65 yards on 21 carries—an average of only 3.1 yards per carry.
Toby Gerhart: C
Gerhart led all rushers with 67 yards on seven carries—most of them coming in garbage time after the Seahawks built a 41-13 lead.
Overall grade: D
No touchdowns from the unit for the Vikings really says it all.
Wide Receivers
Greg Jennings: Inactive
He was a surprise last-minute scratch for the Vikings. Jennings was listed as probable on Friday according to Vikings.com.
Jerome Simpson: F
Benched at the start of the game for his DWI last week, Simpson was not factor with only one catch for one yard.
Cordarrelle Patterson: D+
Targeted nine times, Patterson only came up with three catches for 28 yards. His longest reception was only for 15 yards. Either he is overrated, he's not being used properly, or it's Christian Ponder's fault.
Jarius Wright: C+
The brightest spot for the unit, Wright got the start in place of Jennings. He finished with only three catches for 69 yards, but two of them were for touchdowns.
Joe Webb: D
Webb had only two catches for nine yards. There's a reason the Vikings wanted to keep him on the roster. I wish he would show us some of the athleticism that he supposedly possesses.
Overall grade: D+
Tight Ends
John Carlson: C
Carlson has had a couple of good games since taking over for Kyle Rudolph as the No. 1 tight end. After catching seven passes for 98 yards against the Redskins, Carlson had five catches for 69 yards to lead the Vikings.
Rhett Ellison: Incomplete
Ellison was activated for the game against the Seahawks, but he did not make a catch.
Chase Ford: D
Again, Ford is doing a very good Carlson impression. He finished with one catch for 11 yards. He doubled his season output in one game. He only needs six more catches to match Carlson's total from last season.
Overall grade: C
Carlson looked good early in the game when Christian Ponder completed a couple of passes to him.
Offensive Line
Run Blocking: D
Adrian Peterson had 21 carries and only gained 65 yards—enough said.
Pass Blocking: C
Seattle was only credited with two sacks and three quarterback hits. It wasn't the fault of the offensive line that Minnesota quarterbacks threw three interceptions.
Overall Grade: C-
Defensive Line
Jared Allen: C-
Allen finished with five tackles and no sacks. He did knock down one pass and had one quarterback hit on Russell Wilson.
Kevin Williams: C-
Williams only had two tackles, but he was part of a unit that held Marshawn Lynch to only 54 rushing yards.
Sharrif Floyd: C-
See Williams—the exact same stat line.
Brian Robison: C+
Robison recorded the only sack of Wilson in the game and led the Vikings with two quarterback hits.
Everson Griffen: D
Only one tackle for Griffen in the game.
Fred Evans: C
Evans had two tackles, one for a loss.
Chase Baker: C
Baker had three tackles in only the second game of the season he's seen any action.
Overall grade: C-
Sure, they limited Lynch to 54 yards, but he also had three touchdowns.
Chad Greenway: C-
The Vikings' leading tackler the last five seasons, Greenway is not performing like a Pro Bowler. He finished with six tackles against the Seahawks, but not one of them sticks out in my mind.
Erin Henderson: C-
The same goes for Henderson. Henderson finished with six tackles in the game, but not one of them made a difference.
Marvin Mitchell: C-
Mitchell finished with only four tackles, but at least one of them was for a loss.
Overall grade: C-
Not an impressive game for the linebackers. There was not one play that changed the momentum of the game.
Chris Cook: D
Just because Cook's a starter doesn't mean he's good. Cook finished with two tackles and no impact. He was covering Percy Harvin on his only catch of the game—good for 17 yards and a first down on a 3rd-and-10 play.
Josh Robinson: D
Robinson got lucky when an offensive holding penalty offset his pass interference penalty. He finished with one tackle.
Xavier Rhodes: D+
Rhodes gave up a 44-yard reception to Doug Baldwin in the first quarter. It was the longest play of the game and led to the Seahawks' first touchdown.
Marcus Sherels: D-
Sherels did not look good on defense. He finished with three tackles and was credited with one of three passes defended by the Vikings.
A.J. Jefferson: C
He finished with one tackle in limited action.
Overall: D
Russell Wilson only had five incomplete passes in the game.
Jamarca Sanford: C-
Sanford finished with seven tackles, one tackle for a loss and one quarterback hit, but his performance did not stick out at all.
Andrew Sendejo: C
See Sanford—the only difference is that Sendejo led the Vikings with 11 tackles, and that's not necessarily a good thing.
Robert Blanton: D
Blanton finished with two tackles and no impact.
Overall Grade: C-
A lot of tackles, but not one that changed the momentum of the game.
Special Teams
Blair Walsh: C+
Walsh made both field-goal attempts and both PATs to finish with eight points, but his kickoffs are not getting deep and ending up as touchbacks. Percy Harvin was able to return a kickoff 58 yards at the end of the first half that resulted in a touchdown.
Jeff Locke: C
Locke averaged only 36.7 yards on three punts, well below his 45.6-yard average on the season.
Cordarrelle Patterson: C
Patterson averaged 29.3 yards on four kickoff returns. He still leads the NFL with a 34.4-yard average for players with more than four attempts.
Marcus Sherels: F
There were five punts in the game for the Seahawks. Sherels did not return one of them. He let one bounce inside the 5-yard line. The only positive is that he did not muff any of them.
Overall grade: C-
There were no big plays for the Vikings to help offset what Seattle was doing in the game.


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Erectile Dysfunction Basics
- Can Blood Pressure Meds Affect Erections?
- What Is the Source of My ED Issues?
Erectile Dysfunction Treatment
- Are All Penis Enhancement Pills Bogus?
- Natural Ways to Maintain an Erection?
- Surgery to Correct a Penile Leak?
- Erectile Dysfunction After Prostate Cancer Radiation
- Two Years, No Erection. Please Help!


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Source: http://gpcvb.informz.net
Pumpkin Days and Corn Maze (October 1 – November 10)
Have an unforgettable fall season at Tolmachoff Farms and experience the ultimate holiday outing where there is something for the whole family: A great big pumpkin patch, six-acre family corn maze (search for pieces of your map as you walk through), mini corn maze, and a haunted corn maze. Other activities include a petting zoo, train ride, hay pyramid, corn box, pedal cart track, jumping pillow and much more.
Schnepf Farms Pumpkin and Chili Party (Thursdays-Sundays through November 3)
Fun for the whole family on the farm! For the entire month of October (Thursdays-Sundays) Schnepf Farms offers fun fall activities like hay rides, a corn maze, a pumpkin patch, pig races and, of course, chili.
CALA Alliance Festival (October 6 – November 5)
The month-long valley-wide celebration allows audiences and participants to enjoy the artistic, musical and culinary offerings of the regional Latino community through various exhibits, concerts, street fairs and more. Audiences can look forward to a cornucopia of exhibits, performances and cultural activities showcasing the work of top-notch Latino and Latin American artists.
Arizona State Fair (October 11 – November 3)
There will be something for everyone in the family at the Arizona State Fair this year. Numerous food booths will be there to satisfy your carnival cravings. Musical guests Alabama Shakes, Billy Currington, The Wanted, Trace Adkins, ZZ Top and more will be performing. With Native Spirit Dancers, the Great American Petting Zoo, and the Great American Duck Race, there will always be attractions for the family.
Oktoberfest at Tempe Town Lake(October 11 –13)
Come out and enjoy Oktoberfest at Tempe Town Lake this year. There will be 15 kinds of German beer, authentic German food, wine gardens, Daschund racing, Kinderfest KidsZone, music and much more.
PoeFest at Hotel San Carlos (October 11, 12, 18, 19, 25)
Produced by Arizona Curriculum Theater, PoeFest 2013 marks the fifth year of presenting a month-long festival celebrating the works of Edgar Allan Poe. PoeFest is not a reading. The actors perform Edgar Allan Poe's stories in character as inmates from a 19th Century asylum for the criminally insane. Poe's stories rotate nightly and are presented inside the Ghost Lounge at the historic Hotel San Carlos, frequently listed among the top ten most haunted hotels in America. Stories include Annabel Lee, The Raven, The Cask of Amontillado, The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart, and more.
Greater Phoenix Greek Festival (October 11–13)
This festival is an opportunity to share in the rich history, culture, and culinary delights of Greece. In addition to the authentically-prepared Greek cuisine, you can sample some imported Greek wine, beer and, of course, ouzo and the Greek classic Metaxa. Additionally, the nationally-recognized community dancers, in traditional costumes from the various regions of Greece, will be performing throughout the weekend.
Octoberfest at Salt River Fields (October 12)
Octoberfest returns to Salt River Fields for another great year. Enjoy one of the Valley's biggest celebrations of beer with activities for the whole family, great food, live music, kids zone, interactive games and more.
31st Annual Native American Connections Parade (October 12)
The parade is produced by Native American Connections and features nearly 100 entries every year and shares the rich cultural exchange through the vibrancies of Native American art, music, and dance in heart of Downtown Phoenix. This year's parade theme is "Native American Pride: Celebration of Culture through Art, Music, and Dance."
Great Pumpkin Festival (October 17-20)
Every autumn the Desert Botanical Garden's Great Pumpkin Festival is one of the Valley's favorite places to find that special pumpkin. Take an authentic hayride out to the Garden's pumpkin patch, where each day children 12 and under can choose their own free pumpkin. Get lost in the Amazing Hay Bale Maze, visit with adorable farm animals in the petting zoo, enjoy lively country and western entertainment, carnival style games and much more!
St. Rose 2013 Oktoberfest (October 18-19)
This two-day event means authentic German and American food, live entertainment and lots of fun for the whole family!
Bratwurst, soft pretzels, apple strudel and other German favorites put the Oom-Pah in Oktoberfest 2013.
Arizona Taco Festival (October 19–20)
More than 50 teams take up the taco-making challenge as fans sample and savor their creations. Taco competitors are judged by officials of the National Taco Association. The stakes are higher than ever with the $10,000 cash prize that taco teams are battling for. The event is filled with music, food, and fun including, lucha libre wrestling, boutique tequila expo, more than 100 types of tequila and more.
Rainbows Festival and Street Fair (October 19–20)
The annual Rainbows Festival and Street Fair is a celebration of the diversity of the LGBTQ community. The event is located in historic Heritage Square Park in downtown Phoenix. Each year, the Rainbows Festival draws a crowd in excess of 12,000 friends, families and allies. Rainbows Festival is the second largest LGBTQ event in the state of Arizona, only second to the Phoenix Pride Festival.
The annual Rainbows Festival is a free event open to the public. There will be nearly 150 exhibitors and sponsors throughout the two-day event. Rainbows Festival is the new home of OUTdayPHX, a celebration of National Coming OUT Day.
Halloween Balloon Spooktacular (October 25-26)
This fourth year of Halloween fun for the whole family returns to Salt River Fields. Featuring more than 20 colorful hot air balloons to light up the sky, 1700 pounds of candy for Trick-or-Treaters, tethered hot-air balloon rides, live music, food, drinks, kids zone, a haunted house fit for all, fireworks and more.
Wild Western Festival (October 25-27)
One of the biggest and best Western events in America features gunfights, stunt shows, American Indian dancers, trick horses, magic shows, live music, a kids korral and much more.
Dia de los Muertos Festival (October 26-27)
Spirits will connect at the Mesa Arts Center's annual Dìa de los Muertos Festival – a community celebration complete with a community altar, live music and performances.
The Day of The Dead festival will also feature delicious food, a mercado featuring an assortment of Dìa de los Muertos merchandise, jewelry, arts & crafts, the Bookmans family activity area and more.
Autumnfest 2013 (October 26-27)
Celebrate all things fall as the Anthem Community Council hosts its sixth-annual Autumnfest. This family-friendly event celebrates the season with fall-flavored festivities including arts & crafts vendors, carnival rides, pumpkin picking and an apple pie baking contest.
Scottsdale's 44th Annual Fall Festival (October 26)
Kids and families can enjoy a live magician, haunted house, 25 carnival games of different skill levels, inflatables, and costume contests. There will even be a play area for the real little monsters in the TOT's area. Be sure to grab some tasty treats from a variety of food vendors during the event, and especially before Scottsdale's best up-close firework show goes off.


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NY Eve
Thanks to our friend's Terri and Andy for hosting another awesome New Years Eve. The food was excellent and to top it all off, this was the year that I didn't overdo it. Mariah Carey did her song before midnight and achieved full redemption. Then they kicked it over to Britney Spears in Las Vegas and she wasn't that bad.
NY Day
Woke up in the morning for a round with the buddies. Like clockwork one or two of them have canceled. Gary and I joked this morning that we should have a betting table and place bets on what time we find out people cancel.
Enter Big E. He's become one of the guys that I can count on for a solid round of golf.


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By Amir Taheri
For three decades Khomeinist rulers in Tehran have dreamed of change in the Middle East. Now that change is really happening in much of the region, Tehran is watching with growing nervousness.
That the Khomeinist regime should have dreamt of change is no surprise.
Thirty years ago, Iran under Velayat-e Faqih or rule by a mullah looked out of place in the Middle East. Indeed, with the exception of Tibet's government in exile under Dalai Lama, the Khomeinist set-up did not resemble any regime in the world. Like the Bolshevik regime of Russia in 1917, it had to either become like others or make all others like itself.
For a decade, under Khomeini himself, the regime tried to make the rest of region like itself by "exporting revolution".
The results were meagre. Tehran managed to influence part of the Shi'ite community in Lebanon and create a branch of Hezbollah in that country. Tehran also succeeded in turning Syria into a client state without, however, persuading the Baathist regime to adopt Walayat al-Faqih.
In the decade that followed, under President Hashemi Rafsanjani, the regime tried to become like others, especially in the economic field. The strategy produced a class of new rich with extensive business contacts with the outside world, including the Gulf region.
In the final analysis, however, that strategy, too, failed.
Under President Muhammad Khatami, the regime tried a new version of that strategy, this time emphasising the political domain.
Known as the "Davos Strategy", named after the Swiss village where Khatami spent time courting Western political and business leaders during the World Economic Forum, it focused on public relations. That included pseudo-intellectual speeches in Western universities and clubs, peppered with quotations from Hobbes, Locke and de Tocqueville.
Nicknamed "A Smile Under A Turban", Khatami for a while charmed some naïve souls.
However, that strategy, too, failed because a leopard does not change by painting is spots.
By the time, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had become president, it must have been clear to rulers in Tehran that no nation would be foolish enough to copy Walayat al-Faqih.
That was why Ahmadinejad tried to move the ball in a different court by focusing on the Israel-Palestine issue.
His calculation was based on the assumption that the issue was top of the list of priorities for Muslims, especially Arabs, throughout the world.
To that end, Ahmadinejad adopted an incendiary rhetoric to inject the classical Khomeinist discourse with a stronger dose of anti-Israel and anti-American themes.
Well, that strategy, too, has failed.
The Arab Uprising was, and is, about people rejecting brutal and corrupt military-security regimes imposed by coups d'etat and maintained by repression. It is not about religion and even less about Israel-Palestine. Nor is there much sign of anti-American sentiments, quite the contrary.
No one knows how the current tsunami may reshape the political landscape.
But one thing is certain: no one is trying to adopt the Khomeinist model.
Tehran strategists are not quite sure what is happening in the Middle East. Nevertheless, it is clear that, all in all, they are pessimistic about the outcome of the current turn in the region's political kaleidoscope.
After 9/11, the mullahs feared that change in Afghanistan and Iraq might be extended to Iran. President George W Bush's so-called "Freedom Agenda" for the Greater Middle East clearly included Iran.
Now we know that change in the Middle East need not come either from "export of revolution" by Iran or military invasion by the United States.
This why Tehran is nervous. Ten days ago, Esfandiar Masha'i, the key strategist in Ahmadinejad's administration, warned against "starry-eyed assessments of the events" in Arab countries affected.
"We must not assume that the change will necessarily be in our interest," he said.
Newspapers controlled by the "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenei attacked Masha'i for "trying to create the impression that the Arab Uprising is not profoundly Islamic."
However, the Islamic Majlis, Iran's fake parliament, has just published a lengthy analysis that echoes Masha'i's alleged "pessimism."
It says that Libya will end up under a new government backed by the United States. Nevertheless, the Majlis rejects the idea of backing Muammar Gaddafi to prevent the US from scoring a strategic gain.
The analysis also admits that Egypt and Tunisia will end up under new pro-Western regimes backed by their respective armies. The most that Tehran could hope for is to restore diplomatic ties with Tunis and Cairo. But even that "does not look likely at present."
The Majlis analysis insists that the Islamic Republic should deploy "strategic support" for President Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria to crush the popular revolt.
In that context, the analysis adds, the role of Hezbollah in Lebanon is "of special importance". The "spread of revolt to Syrian cities" a threat to "the interests of the Islamic Republic".
The analysis recommends hat Hezbollah units be used to affect the outcome of the current tensions, especially in Bahrain and Yemen through "asymmetric warfare."
The Majlis report calls for using Hezbollah to "strengthen our zone of influence in Lebanon".
The analysis also recommends the use of "clandestine operations" against Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Another move recommended by the analysis is to "extend and deepen relations" with Qatar as a means of dividing the Gulf states. With the fall of the Syrian regime now a possibility, the analysis recommends "strengthening relations with Nuri Al-Maliki's government" in Iraq.
All in all, however, the analysis, predicts that Iran's relations with the Gulf states, except Qatar, may be severed at some point in the future.
The Majlis report also predicts a popular revolt in neighbouring Azerbaijan and recommends that "contingency plans be drawn to face any eventuality."
An prising in the former Soviet republic may quickly spread to Iran's Azerbaijani provinces that account for almost 15 per cent of the total population.
The Islamic Republic looks like a man who, all his life, has dreamt of a big do in which he would be the heart of the party but, when the party comes in the end, he has the door shut in his face.
May 4, 2010
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should get out more. We mean that without irony. The Iranian President spoke yesterday in New York at the start of the U.N. conference reviewing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and nothing could have done more to expose the folly of relying on arms control to maintain global security.
The Iranian couldn't have been clearer that his country intends to ignore any and all U.N. pressure to stop building its bomb. He averred that the world has "not a single credible proof" that Iran intends to build a bomb, notwithstanding the world's discovery of its secret uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz in 2002 and its secret underground facility near Qom last year. He even said the U.S. should be suspended from the U.N. atomic agency's board because "it used nuclear weapons against Japan" and depleted uranium weapons in Iraq.
Delegates from the U.S., U.K. and France walked out during the speech, to their credit. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs chimed in that the remarks were "wild accusations, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took to the podium later in the day to accuse Iran of "flouting the rules" and declaring it is "time for a strong international response."
This is all true enough, but it ignores Mr. Ahmadinejad's real message, which is that Iran won't be deterred by a stricter world antiproliferation treaty, or by one more U.N. Security Council resolution, or by the moral example, as President Obama likes to put it, of a new U.S.-Russian arms treaty. Iran wants the bomb in order to become a more potent Mideast power that can do as it pleases without having to worry about opposition from the world's largest nations.
Give Mr. Ahmadinejad credit for lack of artifice. He says what he and the ruling class in Tehran believe and thus betrays what they intend, however "wild."
The truly humiliating spectacle is the sight of the world's leading powers devoting a month to updating a treaty designed to stop nonproliferation even as Mr. Ahmadinejad makes a mockery of that effort before their very eyes.
If Iran does get a nuclear weapon, or even the capacity to make one at a moment's notice, it would be the most damaging act of proliferation since Stalin got the hydrogen bomb. The event would set off a regional nuclear arms race, as Turkey, Egypt, the Saudis and perhaps even the Gulf states seek their own nuclear deterrent. The rest of the world would see that Iran was able to face down the world's leading powers—and prevail. The damage to world order would be traumatic. And that is before the increased risks of global nuclear terrorism from Iranian proliferation.
If Mr. Obama and other world leaders were serious about Iran, they wouldn't merely walk out on Iran's president. They would rally the world to stop him, explaining the grave stakes to the public, and making clear to Iran that there is a deadline to diplomacy and that military force will be used if diplomacy fails. The only serious person at the U.N. on Monday was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
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124 days down, 241 to go!
Dear Vacation sans kids,
You were great. I miss you. But I missed my boys more. And I am glad to be home. Even if re-entry into Mommyland was brutal (ie, so challenging that I almost kissed 123 days bye-bye.) Who knew that 4 boys could make 3 days of feeling calm disappear so quickly?
See you soon I hope,
The Orange Rhino
I was gone from my darling four boys for 64 hours.
It took about 12 hours for me to feel relaxed, to feel like I was on vacation, to not look at my watch to see if it was someone's nap time or if it was time to get ready for dinner.
It took a mere 5 hours of the boys being awake the morning after my late night return for all the stress and exhaustion that had seeped away to re-enter my body. At FULL force.
Welcome home mommy! Mommy I need you to wipe my butt. Mommy I need water. Mommy he touched my face. Mommy I don't know what I want so I am going to whine. Mommy my teeth are coming in so I am going to cry. A lot. Mommy, mommy, mommy!!!
Where were the I love you's? The I miss you's? The hugs and kisses? Oh I got them. Big time. And that was the greatest moment EVER.
But it only lasted for minutes. Minutes I say. And than BAM. It was time to be mommy again. No more kicking my feet up having deep conversations with my hubby over a strawberry daiquiri. No more taking a two hour nap. No more sleeping in, until, get this 6:30 am. GASP. Nope. It was time to be Mommy again. I was back in Mommyland where one doesn't just love their kids but has to also care for them, a wonderful yet hard at times, task.
Don't get me wrong. I was THRILLED to be home. I AM thrilled to be home. Gosh, I missed my boys so much. Every time I called and spoke to them I wanted to go home to hear their laugh, to watch them make silly faces, to get their hugs. But being away was good for ALL of us. It was good for my boys and me – we never get a real break, I think this made us appreciate each other more. It was good for my husband and me – we needed some connecting time, big time. All in all it was a great escape, hard to be away, but worthwhile. I truly chilled out for the first time in oh, 24 months or so?
As I re-entered Mommyland I promised myself that I would keep my "vacation" mindset on. That I would not let the stress of parenting suck me in right away. That I would at least wait a day, hopefully more before I became a twit about clutter, things to do for the kids, things to do for me, doctors appointments to make.
Wishful thinking. 1 day? As if.
I don't know what put me over the edge. What made my "vacation self" disappear. All I know is that one moment I was calm and next minute, Holy Sh*t!! I wanted to scream at everyone! At everything that moved. Everyone wanted me. Everyone was yelling. I was tired and to make matters "worse," darnit, I couldn't yell and that one piece was kicking my a*s.
And that is when I remembered how I felt when I started The Orange Rhino Challenge. OVERWHELMED. Exhausted. Infuriated. It. Is. HARD. Hard. Hard not to yell. Just being away for three days of peace and quiet made my home life feel like someonewas taking a hammer to my head. All the chaos. All the yelling. All the needs pounding me left and right. It is A LOT to take in. And not being able to yell to stop the pounding? It is blooming hard work. And so is parenting. I guess I had kind of forgotten that while I was away. And coming back to it all made me want to scream "JUST BACK OFF! Give mommy one second to breathe. PLEASE!"
But I didn't.
Instead all day long I had silent conversations with myself.
"Don't yell, you don't want to yell."
"Don't yell, you aren't mad at the kids, you are just tired."
"Don't yell, you are just stressed because of the laundry that awaits and the bag to unpack."
"Don't yell, it is just cookie crumbs."
The list could go on and on. Every second, okay maybe not every second, but maybe every 10 minutes? I was telling myself another reason not to yell. Between the literal noise outside my head, and the constant racket inside my head, I was ready to explode.
I got very close. Numerous times. And when that happened I just used my new catch phrase "Mommy is very frustrated. I do not want to yell. I do not want to start again. Please help me." I am not sure it helped changed their behavior at the moment (I was TOO tired from sleeping on the couch to notice a thing!) but I do know it kept my behavior in line. Phew.
When I zonked into bed that night, more liked passed out, I was really perturbed. How could I miss these kids so much, how can I love them so much, and then within hours of being home I want to yell at them? Didn't I become a more loving, peaceful, and empathetic person these last 120 days plus? What happened? Did the new me just vanish after 3 days of a break? Will it come back? WTF?
Thankfully, oh so thankfully, the answer is YES. The new me did NOT disappear. All my hard work was not lost. I have changed habits (I think) and this change will not go away. I just had a challenging day. IT HAPPENS. But after a good night's sleep in my own bed, and a mental pep talk that I knew that the first day back would be brutal, I started Sunday on a much better note. How do I know? Well when I stepped out of bed onto a huge pile of Legos that someone had left behind at 5 am? I didn't yell.


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My mom is a huge genealogy buff and has researched several branches of our family tree back to the 1200's and beyond.
She discovered that three of William Shakespeare's grandparents were from our family tree!
That section of the tree is so tangled that it gets really hard to wrap your mind around – instead of branching out, it is grafted back onto itself like a fancy topiary tree.


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Canada-based Labs Games will be rolling out their new strategy game Safe House on Steam soon.
You are an undercover CIA agent, infiltrating the fictional country of Kazataire following a military coup. Your goal is to collect enough intel on those currently in power to bring them down. To do this you'll not only do some spying yourself, you'll manage a network of other spies from a top-secret HQ. Sneak around, earn the trust of your enemies and solve puzzles if you want to win the spy game.
- Construct and manage your own top-secret spy headquarters.
- Devise and solve a variety of spy-themed puzzles – such as decoding scrambled messages, forging documents, and exchanging secret phrases.
- Embark on a non-linear single player campaign and unlock multiple endings based on your choices.
- Play your way in the unpredictable 'Endless' mode.
- Enjoy an iconic art style reminiscent of '60s spy movie classics.
You can check out Safe House beginning May 22, at a reduced price of $8.99. The game will revert back to its intended MSRP of $9.99 after a week — which we admit isn't that huge an increase. You decide if you want to save a buck. Labs Games' trailer lies below.