Coffee Caffeine: How Much Is In Your Cup?

Coffee is a complex mixture of chemical components of the coffee bean. Some of these components are partially destroyed by the roasting process; however, many of these components are not. Caffeine is one of the components that is not affected by the roasting process. With the addition of hot water, the caffeine is extracted from the coffee bean.

Caffeine was discovered in coffee in 1820. Caffeine is an alkaloid that acts as a mild stimulant. It increases the blood pressure, stimulates the central nervous system and the action of the heart and lungs, and promotes urine formation. It also acts as a diuretic and delays fatigue. Caffeine does have some positive side effects. It has been found to help treat migraines since it helps constrict the dilated blood vessels, 

Therefore reducing the pain. It also has been documented to increase the potency of aspirin and to slightly relieve the affects of asthma attacks. It has been suggested that caffeine has been linked to possible cancers and birth defects. However, this has not been confirmed and there are no bans or warnings that have been issued by the US Food and Drug Administration (US FDA).

The amount of caffeine found in the coffee beans varies. On average, a regular cup of coffee contains approximately 90 to 150 mg of caffeine. Coffee brewed in a drip coffee maker has about 115 to 175 mg of caffeine while other coffee makers may brew coffee with about 80 to 135 mg. typically; espresso has about as much caffeine as a regular cup of coffee. 

On average, a standard espresso cup would have about 100 mg of caffeine. However, the serving size for espresso is much smaller. The actual content of caffeine per milliliter in an espresso is much higher than in a regular brew. Also, caffeine is assimilated quicker when ingested in a concentrated dosage such as an espresso cup.

The amount of caffeine found in coffee blends will also vary. The following are examples of the caffeine content for different coffee blends:

-Brazilian Bourbons: contains 1.20% caffeine
-Columbia Excelso: contains 1.34% caffeine
-Columbia Supremo: contains 1.34% caffeine
-French Roast: contains 1.22% caffeine
-Costa Rican Tarrazu: contains 1.35% caffeine
-Vienna Roast: contains 1.27% caffeine
-Decafs: contains 0.02% caffeine

People hypersensitive to the caffeine found in coffee may decide to drink decaffeinated coffee. This way, they can still enjoy the great coffee taste, yet avoid the caffeine. Coffee can be "decaffeinated" by treating the green beans with solvents called chlorinated hydrocarbons. Once the solvents are removed, the beans are then roasted by ordinary procedures. Most people become accustomed to decaffeinated coffee and do not have to worry about the effects of caffeine.

10 Things You Didn't Know about Barbecue

Every spring, North Americans gear up their grill, stock up on the meat and prepare for many mouth-watering barbecues. But how much do we really know about the art of barbecuing? From the familiar pastime's origins to surprising tips and tactics, this list will provide you with all the information you need to wow your friends at the next neighborhood barbecue!

1) Barbecues originated in pig-pickin, feasts that was common in the Southern United States prior to the Civil War. Whole pigs were cooked and eaten by the crowd.

2) "Smoking" was used as far as 6000 years ago in order to make meats safe to eat and store. The meat was exposed to smoke and low heat in order to prevent bacteria and enzymes from growing.

3) In Australia, a barbecue is commonly referred to as a barbie. The famous statement "I'll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you," which appeared in Australian tourism advertisements, is often used to refer to the country.

4) What most North Americans partake in today isn't actually barbecuing. Barbecuing is cooking at temperatures around the boiling point of water (180-220*F) for a longer time period, in order to make the meat tender while preserving its natural juices. Today, the method most commonly used is in fact broiling: cooking at 475-700*F in much less time.

5) According to the Barbecue Industry Association, half of all marshmallows eaten in the U.S. have been toasted over a grill.

6) For an easy way to check how much propane you have left, bring your bathroom scale outside and weigh the gas tank.

7) The origin of the word barbecue is unclear. Some believe it came from the American-Indian word barbacoa for a wood on which foods were cooked. Others say it came from the French words "de barbe a queue," meaning "whiskers to tail."

8) to add a Smokey flavour to your gas-grill-cooked foods or foods cooked inside the house, use "liquid smoke." A condensation of actual smoke, this product can be easily added to your barbecue marinade or sauce.

9) Brisket, the extremely hard cut of meat taken from a cow's chest, takes one to two hours per pound to barbecue. That's an average 12 hours on the grill for a basic 8-pound piece!

10) Kansas City, Missouri and Lexington, North Carolina both claim to be the barbecue capitals of the world. Memphis, meanwhile, stakes a claim to being the pork barbecue capital.

Now you're set to impress!

True Happiness

Most people look outside of themselves as the cause of their unhappiness or frustration. After all, wouldn't life be practically perfect if the significant people in our lives would simply do things the way we want them to or do what we think is best for them? Actually, this is the kind of thinking that perpetuates the misery!

I agree that most of today's unhappiness centers on important people in our lives not cooperating with us. Can anyone relate to that? Have you ever had a child who makes a decision that puts them in serious danger? Have you ever had a significant other decide to relocate or make an employment decision with which you were not in agreement?

Did one of your parents ever say something critical to you that rocked your confidence? Ever had a supervisor who micromanaged your work and never gave credit for your good work performance? I think you get the idea. Any one or combination of these things can be a source of unhappiness for us and I'm sure you can add several others to the list.

While we are in situations such as these, it sure feels like if the others in our life would just cooperate and be the way we want them to be, and then our lives would be so much better, happier and more fulfilling. While this may, in fact, be true, what I also believe is this. While we are busy trying to get those significant others in our lives to do things our way, the behaviors we typically engage in to move others in our desired direction are exactly those behaviors that damage, and ultimately destroy, our relationships.

You know the behaviors I'm talking about: punishing, guilting, complaining, nagging, threatening, criticizing, "the silent treatment", and if we are particularly savvy, rewarding to control, otherwise known as bribing.

If you are one of those people whose first choice of action is to negotiate and open the doors of communication, then you are rare. Ask yourself what do you typically resort to when negotiations fail?

I know one of my more polished behaviors is nagging. I am a world class nag---just ask my children. You know the drill. "How about cleaning up your room today?" Thirty minutes later, after the child is still in front of his video game, "Are you going to get to that room today?" Maybe two hours later, several decibels louder, "What about that ROOM?" Then, as a last frustration, it's "Will you get off your lazy a* and clean your blanket blank room!!!!" Ever been there? Did it work to get the room cleaned? In my case, it usually didn't.

However, I've have had some parents tell me that repeated nagging does work but then my next question usually has a different answer---At what cost? What was the cost of getting that room cleaned? First, there was the cost of you losing control and being a person you probably don't want to be and secondly, there was a definite cost to the relationship between you and your child. Do you believe that after an exchange such as that one, the two of you will be ready and willing to have a meaningful discussion about life or anything else about which you may like to talk? Probably not.

What I am about to say probably goes against what you have believed the good majority of your life and that is that you, and you alone, are responsible for your own happiness. If you are waiting for someone to do something differently or for a particular thing to manifest itself in your life in order for you to be happy, then you are operating from the outside in instead of the inside out.

I am not here to tell you to stop what you are currently doing. If you want to hold on to your beliefs that when your husband becomes more affectionate, your children more obedient, your wife more supportive, your boss more appreciative or you to get your education, pay off your credit cards, buy your first home, etc. in order for you to be happy, then go ahead. But for those of us who want to practice inside out thinking, we don't like to give the power to others to control our happiness or any of our other moods or emotions. We know that we are responsible for ourselves and no one else.

What I can help you with is learning how to be the person you want to be, feel the emotions you want to feel by changing what you do and how you think about things. There is a quote I want to leave you with from Jimmy Dean. "You can't change the direction of the wind, but you can adjust your sails." This is representative of true inside out thinking. People and events are going to be what they are around us. There is very little we can do to impact other people's behavior and the uncontrollable events in our lives but there is always something each of us can do to manage those things better.

Psychotherapy as ulimia Treatment

In a world obsessed with thinness, it is very hard not to succumb to the temptations of easy weight loss even if these methods are not healthy at all. Bulimia is the most common unhealthy method of weight loss. Unfortunately, people, especially women, are easily drawn to this because they are conditioned to be attractive - thin is beautiful. 

Images of rail-thin models and actors emblazoned on billboards, television, and runway shows encourage the notion of thinness as beauty. But those afflicted with the disorder still have hope. Bulimia treatment is available as psychological therapy to guide patients to recovery and a healthy lifestyle.

Psychotherapy is the commonly prescribed treatment because experts agree that the problem is psychological. People often engage in bulimic behavior - eating and vomiting - because of low self-respect, distorted body image, insecurities, and other psychological factors like depression and stress. Therapists usually start treating bulimia by addressing the mental and psychological issues. They believe that if these negative perceptions are erased or converted, controlling bulimic impulses will be easier for the patient.

With all psychological therapy, it is required that the patient acknowledges her problem. She must accept that treatment takes time and effort - her disorder did not happen overnight, and neither will recovery. Given that, there are several bulimia treatment methods a counselor uses. Cognitive behavior analysis is the most popular of these methods. This type requires the patient to write a journal or food diary. 

Thoughts and daily food intake are recorded in the journal which the patient reads with her counselor. This will make the patient more aware of her eating habits and the emotion she attaches to her eating and food. The journal keeps everything in perspective, allowing the patient to see herself objectively, making it easier to address the emotional and psychological issues that trigger bulimic behavior

A similar treatment is behavior analysis. The counselor suggests different rewards and reaction as means of fighting bulimic impulses. The treatment emphasizes the use of alternative activities and even food when the patient suffers bulimia attacks. For example, if the patient feels the onset of bulimic impulses, 

she can divert her attention to reading or taking walk rather than doing a fridge raid. Behavior experts suggest replacing the contents of the fridge and the pantry with healthy food like nuts, grains, vegetables, and fruits. This way, if the impulses become too difficult to resist, the patient won't feel compelled to purge because the food she consumed were health foods.

Joining support groups is also an effective in bulimia treatment. Having other people with the same problem encourages the patient and provides her with a support network. Enlisting the help of family members and friends is also a healthy option because the patient is assured of love and support regardless of her weight. The patient had bravely recognized the disorder as first step in her battle with bulimia. What she needs now is to come to terms with herself, her relationship with others, and loving support.

Energize Your Writing and Increase Your Output

Every writer can benefit from a study of the effectiveness of their individual writing process. You can write more and you can write better by making some adjustments in your writing strategy.

Recently one of my writer friends complained about their declining word output.

"I spend more time at the computer than I ever did before and I'm just not producing like I used to," she griped.

After spending a day in writing conferences coaching my struggling novice writers, my response came without conscious thought on my part: "Tell me about your writing process."

"My what?" She asked.

Ah-ha!

I regularly coach my beginning writers about how to develop their own personal writing strategy or process and as a teacher of writing I think about mine quite often, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that experienced, professional writers rarely spend time talking about this critical element.

What a mistake!

It is easy to understand why. Many of us are simply too busy writing to think too much about the actual process. We have deadlines to meet, assignments to pursue, and pitches to create. When we do spend time with other writers our interactions typically fall into three categories--seeking admiration for our success, input for our end product, or escape from writing.

Many writers also take their writing process for granted and simply follow the old adage--if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But what happens when it does break down as it did with my friend? If you don't understand your own writing process then you can't fix it. And just like many of the machines in your life, regular maintenance checks just might prevent a major breakdown in the future.

My friend's problem was easily identified and solved once we actually studied her writing process and writing life. Yes she was spending more time in front of the computer but she had lost a big chunk of her prewriting time due to changes in her home life. Once she understood that problem she was able to make adjustments to her schedule and she is seeing her daily word count rising back to her old levels.

So how is your writing process?

Many writers shy away from the term as it brings back fearful memories of a rigid structure forced on them in school. That is not what I want to talk about at all. Frankly, I always teach my students that there is no such as thing as the writing process.

Don't get me wrong. I believe we each have our own individual writing process, I just don't believe in the one-size-fits-all type strategy that many writers were force-fed. Just think about it. How could there be just one writing process--every writer I know is an individual with various strengths and weaknesses and personality traits. Every writer is wired differently from every other writer. That is one of the things that make reading such a pleasure. It follows very logically then that every writing process should differ just as every writer differs.

Having said that I should point out that although the actual shape and form of each writing process is individual to the unique writer there are certain constants:

~ Generating ideas and choosing a focus
~ Organizing those ideas
~ Writing
~ Revising
~ Editing

The amount of time you spend on each stage of the writing process varies according to the writer and the task and this is especially true for me. Many writing tasks are so familiar to me that I spend very little time choosing a focus or organizing my ideas so I can leap write into writing. On the other hand I often generate four or more pages of fiction in about an hour at the computer because I spend a lot of time generating and organizing my ideas before I sit down.

I have spent years honing my personal writing process and know that the step I actually spend the least amount of time is writing. I have learned to let my creative juices flow and not to worry about such petty concerns as grammar, sentence structure, and word choice. I rarely waste a moment on organization or paragraphing. I just let the words flow through my fingers tips until I have emptied my budget. Then I hit save and print, tidy up my papers and set them aside.

Revision is usually the lion's share of my writing process. It may take me two or three drafts to reorganize and shape a piece until I am willing to share it with others. Depending on how difficult and/or complex the subject then I may need to loop back through brainstorming, organizing and writing to improve my project. I may make a few minor adjustments to grammar or spelling or sentence structure, but primarily I concentrate on the larger issues of focus and development and organization.

When I am finally satisfied my article, chapter, or essay is working as a whole then I begin the actual editing process of cleaning up word choice and sentence structure and any other stray problems that have been overlooked. I usually spend only one draft on this actual process.

If you are serious about improving your writing quality and productivity then you need to spend time analyzing your personal writing process. You might be surprised by what you learn--and I know you can put the knowledge to good use.

Russian traditional porcelain Gzhel - location and history of production

Gzhel is historical name for few villages located less than 100 miles Eastward of Moscow near historical Kasimov road. Near this place well known deposit of kaolin (white porcelain clay) located, and Gzhel clay is well known for its whiteness and quality. It was this deposit which was used by creator of imperial Russian porcelain, Dmitry Vinogradov, to create well known Lomonosov porcelain at XVIII-th century.

Kasimov road got its name due to Kasimov town. Kasimov was established near 1152 by Duke Yuri Dolgorukiy and named Gorodetz - Mesherskiy. At that times town was used as eastern fortress at the borders of young Russia, located at Eastern border, at the river Oka. At 1376 town was completely destroyed during Mongols invasion.

Later, after the disintegration of Mongols Empire, it was on border with Kazan khanate. Czar "Basil II the dark" used the town for political purposes and provided it as a gift and residence for khan Kasim, who escaped from golden horde. Son was "dissident" member of Khans dynasty, who, later, took part in many military battles against golden horde on the side of Russia. The town and neighborhood – as a result, got the name "Kasim kingdom" – khan’s dynasty kingdom inside Russia, 

under the rule of Moscow Czar. For century’s small town was residence of pro-Russian khans, mix of cultures, bridge between east and west. This was road used by Duke Dmitry Donskoy in his military campaigns against golden horde. But it was not military road – more importantly, it was heavily used for trade, and each military campaign ended with new waves of trade. So was Kasimov road – road from Moscow to East, Silk Road of the ancient Russia.

Road always was heavily used for trade. Goods were delivered from central Asian countries, through Caspian sea basin, by Volga river, than by Oka river. Than, delivered by Kasimov road to Moscow and westward. Location, resources and history determined the well known folk art of Gzhel – national Gzhel porcelain. Archeological excavations prove that the craft of pottery has existed in Gzhel since the beginning of the 14th century. 

In the second half of the 17th century, Afanasy Grebenshchikov, a merchant, built a manufacture where he made various kinds of majolica earthenware. For his ware, he used the famous white porcelain clay (Gzhel), as well as the experience of potters from Gzhel. Upon returning to their homes, the craftsmen began establishing their own majolica manufactures. Till nowadays Gzhel items produced in almost any village in the region of Gzhel.

One and a half thousand years ago anonymous Chinese potter from province Kao-Ling got inspiration: He has alloyed local white clay (named kaolinum) with sand and shpate, and according to the poet it shined like a snow. It was possible due to already then Chinese had furnaces in which the temperature reached 1500 Celsigrade.

At Russia up to the Peter I all ceramics, switching and porcelain was called "tseninoj", arisen from this Chinese "tsy". Russians have begun to use porcelain since XVI century. For example, Tsarevitch John Ioannovich had porcelain suleja (a vessel with a narrow throat). "Tsenina" (porcelain from China) was used by Boris Godunov (1588).

Many researchers believe that tradition to paint porcelain with blue under glazed cobalt paints appeared at Gzhel due to influence from China, influence, penetrated by Kasimov road, where Gzhel region is located till nowadays.

Fast and Reliable Recovery of Microsoft Office Documents

What would you value most in a data recovery solution should you lose an important document? Would it be speed, convenience, or ease of use? These things surely matter for all kinds of computer software, but data recovery has one specific demand that outweighs everything else by a huge margin. This factor is reliability of the recovery.

Microsoft Office documents store results of many hours, days or even years of work of practically all office employees and most people who use their computers at home. Microsoft Word dominates the market of word processors, and most if not all documents are stored in RTF and its proprietary DOC formats.

Microsoft Excel and its XLS file format dominate spreadsheet market. Most presentations are created in Microsoft PowerPoint and stored in PPT files, and most charts and drawings are drawn in Microsoft Visio and saved as VSD files. Combined, files in these formats occupy significant space on the users' hard drives, and represent hours and hours of work, much more than any other file format.

In an unfortunate case of hard disk crash or file system failure, what would you try to recover the hardest? Would it be a set of software products such as Windows or Office itself, which you can easily re-install from the original CD or DVD, or would it be files and documents you spent your personal time working on? 

Unless you have a fresh backup of your documents somewhere, the documents are impossible to simply re-install. If you have a recent copy of your Office documents, that's great! But what if your backup is several days old, and you've put a lot of work into these documents? Or even worse, what if you don't have a backup at all?

Recover latest versions of your deleted documents even after a hard drive failure with Disk Internals Office Recovery securely and reliably. Unlike general-use undelete and data recovery tools, Disk Internals Office Recovery strongly benefits from being designed specifically to handle documents stored in Microsoft Office format.

General-use recovery products scan the computer's file system in order to locate files that were deleted or corrupt because of a hard drive failure. However, they frequently fail to work properly if the file system itself is damaged, which happens a lot after hard drive failures.

Disk Internals Office Recovery scans entire surface of your hard drive in order to locate all Microsoft Office documents that are still there. In order to find the documents, it uses a set of signatures that are characteristic for the Office file types. The file system is also scanned in order to retrieve the names of the files. The results of disk scan are matched against information contained in the file system, and you are presented with a complete list of all Microsoft Office documents that are on the disk and that are still possible to recover.

Quite often you don't want to see the list of all Microsoft Office documents that were ever saved on your computer. There's no point in spending time scrolling through an endless list of files if you just need the latest revision of a PPT presentation or an XLS spreadsheet, but you need that document right away. Disk Internals Office Recovery offers an extensive set of filters allowing you to display only the files that you need with just a few mouse clicks. If you need a DOC file that you know you worked with today, 

you simply activate the File Format and Date filters, and only the Word documents that were modified on this day will be displayed. If you don't remember the name of the file, but know its title or the person who created the document, the Title and Author filters will show you those files. Similarly, if you only remember a line or even a few words of text from the document, you can instantly locate that particular file by activating the Text filter.

With full document preview in the free evaluation version, there are no worries or surprises in buying Disk Internals Office Recovery. Download the free trial version from http://www.diskinternals.com/ and see for yourself that it is fully capable to do the job!

Rolfing: Relive Stress and Physical Discomfort through Structural Integration

ROLFING works with the connective tissue. Connective tissue wraps the body entirely, much like a wet suit does a swimmer. It wraps each muscle and muscle fiber in a continuous network, even supplying the internal membranes that wrap our bones and support our internal organs.

We all hold tension and stress in our bodies. You may feel it in your head, neck, shoulders and back most often. The stress may come from physical trauma like an auto collision, a fall or maybe surgery. It may be generated by life situations such as divorce, moving, abuse or a death in the family.

So what is ROLFING? To say that ROLFING is a technique for physically aligning and standing the body upright in gravity in 10 sessions somehow misses the point. For me, ROLFING is Dorothy, aged 67, a polio victim at three and surgery at 12, free of back pain and able to walk up and down stairs in a normal manner for the first time in 30 years.

ROLFING is Joyce, a 35 year-old attorney who says, "My shoulder and neck pain are gone, and the greatest surprise is my new attitude and positive outlook on life." ROLFING is an Olympic medalist in gymnastics who had lived with the pain of working out and performing with bones broken and muscles torn in childhood, saying, "My back is better, the pain is gone and I feel better."

The body responds to stress by tightening and shortening. Most people can identify the muscular body tightening associated with momentary stress. We say we? Hold ourselves together? What most of us miss is how the yearly accumulations of day by day tightening and tension are locked into the body and affect our overall health. A distortion in one part of the dynamic system affects the total system. A hurt back, knee or neck might cause us to favor that area. Since we live in the field of gravity and are constantly struggling to hold ourselves upright our initial favoring can become a chronic imbalance and a limited movement pattern.

Physical approaches to dealing with stress and imbalance in the body have been around for a while. ROLFING is one of the earliest and most profound of the manipulation techniques; it is the most structured and developed system of "deep tissue work". Rolfing's premise is that the body's organ of structure is the fascia; and that life is an ongoing encounter with gravity, the force that is always with us.

Dr. Ida Rolf (she called it Structural Integration, her followers called it ROLFING), said:

"One individual may experience his losing fight with gravity as a sharp pain in the back, another as the unflattering contour of his body, another as constant fatigue, and yet another as an unrelentingly threatening environment. Those over 40 may call it old age, yet all these signals may be pointing to a single problem so prominent in their own structure and the structure of others, that it has been ignored; they are off balance. They are all at war with gravity."

Rolfing is also my 72 year old Uncle -- who at 72 was still teaching tennis and golf despite chronic pain in his neck, shoulder and heels -- standing upright in the kitchen telling my wife he still thought ROLFING was strange, but somehow it worked, he was no longer in pain.

Project ideas for Decoupage

Here are some varied ideas for new decoupage projects. We've even included some children's projects as well.

Boxes:

Boxes provide interesting results when done with decoupage. A variety of boxes are available in craft stores. A box should be given two or three thin coats of an oil based paint as a base and at least three coats of varnish to finish. The final coat can be rubbed with dampened emery cloth for a fine, soft, matte finish.

When lining a box with fabric, put the seam at the front of the box. When the box is opened, you can see the back "wall" of the box but not the front one where the seam is.

If lining a box without overlapping the fabric onto a piece of cardboard, glue the pieces of fabric on to the sides and then glue decorative braid along the top edge to hide the raw edge.

Lining a box finishes it well, especially a jewelry box or a trinket box. To line a box cut a piece of sturdy cardboard to fit into the bottom. It should fall in and out easily, without catching on the sides. Cut a piece of wadding the same size as the cardboard. Cut a piece of fabric about an inch larger on all sides than the cardboard. Put the fabric face down on the table with the wadding and then the cardboard on top. 

Cut the corners off diagonally so that you don't have a bulge at the corner. Pull one edge of the fabric up onto the cardboard and glue it down. Bring each side of the fabric up onto the cardboard and glue down. To glue this padded shape into the box, run a line of glue on the box bottom close to the sides. Push the padded shape down into the box and press firmly.

Soft flock can be used to give a box a soft, flocked interior and comes in a variety of colors. It's a good idea to paint the inside of the box a similar color.  Soft flock comes in two parts. There is colored glue in a bottle, paint this inside the box. Sprinkle the flock pieces generously into the box. Close the box and shake vigorously. 

Pour out any excess onto a piece of clean paper. Use the paper as a funnel to put the excess back into the bottle. If you want to flock the inside of the box but not the lid of the box, insert a piece of cardboard between the box and lid, close the lid and shake. When you remove the cardboard, the lid will be clean and the box will be flocked.
 
Picture Frames:

Picture frames make ideal gifts. Or you can use decoupage to brighten up a cheap frame. As you need to see how the frame will look once upright, it's a good idea to attach your cutouts with tiny pieces of masking tape to work out their positioning.

Remember to remove the back and glass before beginning work. Use your fingers to wrap your cutouts over the edges of the frame. To ensure that you cover your frame completely with varnish, you may want to prop it up. You can use dowels rods as a frame and balance your picture frame across them. Make sure that you have newspaper below to catch any drips and gently wipe drips from the underside with a cloth. Leave it in position for a couple of days to dry thoroughly.

Candles:

Mark your design on the candle. If the candle is wrapped, remove the wrapper to a quarter inch more than the design area. If it isn't wrapped, mask off the area to be left plain with paper and fasten with tape. Lightly sand the area to be painted and remove dust with a cloth. Apply two thin coats of oil-based varnish to the uncovered area. 

If you're placing images on a painted background, sponge on a couple of coats of gesso. Don't sand and allow to dry between coats. Sponge on background colors and allow to dry. Finish with up to five coats of varnish, lightly sanding between the last two coats. Using a craft knife, remove the wrapper and tape. Finish the cut edge with ribbon or braid.

Children's Projects:

Decoupage is a craft that is easy enough for children to be involved in. With their small fingers, children are often capable of very fine work with practice. However, depending on the age and ability of the child, you may want to make a few allowances. It's best to think it through so that they can work with your guidance, but actually perform each step themselves.

Boys as well as girls can enjoy decoupage, and as many young boys are fascinated with small and fiddly items, they can be particularly adept at this sort of work. Decoupage can be helpful in developing hand-eye co-ordination as well as powers of concentration. Once they have been introduced to the techniques, most children can be left to do projects alone, so long as someone is available for advice if they run into problems. If you aren't yet competent at decoupage yourself, you can learn together.

Children will usually prefer deco up aging different types of items to adults. A serving tray is likely to have little appeal, but a lunch box or moneybox would get lots of use. For a first project, it's best to start with something small and many children enjoy decorating blown eggs, and are fascinated with the process of blowing the eggs.

For very young children, you can use safety scissors with rounded ends. As these scissors make it more difficult to cut small areas accurately, you will need to choose simple images and shapes to work with. Comic books can make a good supply of images and, generally, the bold pictures will be easy to cut out.

As many children get bored easily, it's worth taking a few moments to plan how the project is going to be done so they spend as little time waiting around as possible. Instead of cutting out all the images first and then after painting a surface, sitting around waiting for it to dry, paint the object first and the cutting can be done while it's drying. Or you can have two projects on the go at once so that they can switch between them.

Getting rid of air bubbles can cause the greatest problems and the easiest tool for most children to use will be the back of a spoon. Rather than using varnish or lacquer to finish, it's safer to use glue. Keep varnishes and paints out of reach of small children.

With a little forethought, decoupage is one of the safest crafts children can be involved in and it's simple enough for them to produce pleasing results.

The Famous Grouse Scotch Whiskey

Famous Grouse:

Ask the Eddington Group's master blender, John Ramsay, what makes his drams different and he immediately proposes marriage. In the whisky-making sense, of course. Marriage used to be normal practice for blenders: before bottling, malts and grains would be brought together for a period of mingling. Most firms have abandoned the art, but Edrington sticks to the old ways, marrying its blends for six months and at reduced strength.

'The bean counters in most firms decided it wasn't helping the bottom line,' says John. 'But we ran an exercise to see if we were getting a benefit from marrying, and we were.' It's all down to maximizing flavour.

'When you add water to cask-strength malt, some components become unstable,' he continues. 'We give that time to settle, which means we can give the final blend a light filtration. If you don't do this you'll have to give it a harder filtration to get that stability - and then you lose some flavour'.

The process is made more complicated by his insistence on marrying blocks of blends. 'We'll combine malts and grains; reduce, marry and have Blend One,' he explains. 'Then we repeat the exercise and get Blends Two to Four. When it comes to bottling, rather than just using all of Blend One and then moving on, we'll use some from each batch. It's a form of whisky solera'.

But we skip ahead. Edrington's brands (which include Famous Grouse, Cutty Sark -which they blend for Berry Bros - Lang's Supreme and Black Bottle) start their lives as the new make samples from a host of distilleries, and are nosed by John every day. Then, like every blender, he has to work out how much new make to lay down, to satisfy potential demand for any of the brands many years down the line. It's this ability to assess new make and mature spirit that sets blenders apart.

John can stick his nose in a glass of Glenrothes 5-year-old from sherry wood and know if it fits 'the wee picture in my head', and also how that whisky will behave when combined with thirty others. While some of us may be able to pick out a few malts at a blind tasting, a blender knows not just what it is but whether it fits within the right parameters according to age and wood. It's an awesome ability, but this modest man hasn't allowed it to go to his head.

These blends are very different creatures: they don't just have different core malts, the wood recipe has also been carefully plotted. The sherry wood in the delicate Cutty comes from American oak; the richer Lang's uses Spanish oak and Grouse uses both. 'You want a fragrant sweet aroma in Cutty, so you use American wood and a Speyside malt like Tamdhu for sweetness, with some Bunnahabhain for freshness. Grouse is Speyside-based as well, but there is a lot of influence from Highland Park and the mix of sherry from Spanish and American wood'. 

He uses a very Scottish analogy to describe the art of blending. 'It's like putting together a good soccer team. You need a strong central core, then you can tack the stars around that. It's useless if you haven't got that central core right.' But the unsung, hard-working midfielder in all the Edrington blends is North British grain. 'We use different grains: some for commercial reasons, but also to give different characters in the blend. We'll use Strathclyde when it's younger, as it matures quicker. North British ages well, so it will be used in older blends -it also rounds out the wood influence on older whiskies. 

'A blend is a bit like a pasta with sauce,' John concludes. 'The grain is the pasta, edible but bland, and the malts are the sauce - a bit strong on their own, but together they're a great combination.' CUTTY SAR1C first made in 1923 by London wine merchants Berry Bros & Rudd, Cutty Sark was specifically made as a light-flavoured blend that would appeal to the American market, even though Prohibition was in force. It was smuggled into the United States by one Captain William McCoy and became so popular that people began demanding 'the real McCoy' as their choice of bootleg liquor. 

TASTING NOTES: 

Cutty Sark Gentle, light nose with oat, butter, icing sugar and some delicate raspberry. A mix of cream and grass, with a touch of lemon sherbet on the finish. * * *

BLACK BOTTLE:

Originally conceived by Aberdeen tea merchant Gordon Graham in the 1870s, Black Bottle passed through many different hands before landing in Highland Distillers' lap in 1995. John Ramsay has since reformulated it to be 'the malt with the heart oflslay' and uses all seven Islay malts in the blend. It's a brand to watch. 


TASTING NOTES:


Black Bottle 10-year-old Islay personified: ozone, ginger, ripe fruit and ginger. With water, an intense smoky perfume leaps out, then mingles with soft cakey fruit before a blast of salt-spray halfway through. Stunning. 


FAMOUS GROUSE Perth wine merchant William Gloag started blending whiskies in the 1860s, to warm the cockles of the huntin', shootin', fishin' set. In 1896 his nephew, Matthew, created The Famous Grouse. It remained a little-known classic until the 1970s, but since then has become Scotland's favourite dram, number two in the UK, and is spreading its wings into export. 

TASTING NOTES:


The Famous Grouse A fat, juicy, succulent nose with a bint of menthol, lavender and a drift of smoke. Lovely weight on the palate, which is sweet, lightly spiced and tinged with peat.

Simple Steps to Buying a Laptop

It's easy to be confused by all the different options when purchasing a laptop computer. There are literally hundreds of models to choose from for all different prices.  The key to finding the right laptop for you is determining firstly what your needs are going to be, then determining how much money you are willing to spend.

There are some general factors to consider. The first would be the size of the laptop. Do you want an ultra portable laptop that's small and light weight or do you want something more like a desktop replacement while compromising on size and weight.

The second factor to consider would be the size of the hard drive on the laptop. Laptop hard drives are a lot smaller than desktop hard drives. A standard laptop hard drive size would be around 100gb. If you need to store large files such as videos then you would have to consider getting something with an upgraded hard drive.

The third factor would be the size of the memory. A standard size would be 256-512mb. Anything above this would cost extra. You would need to consider what you are going to use the laptop for. If word processing and web surfing is all you want to do then 256mb would be more than enough.

The final factor would be pricing. This is completely a personal choice but you do get what you pay for. Laptop prices have dropped dramatically these days and a laptop can be bought for as little as $1000. Considering a couple of years back you couldn't get a laptop for under $2000 this price isn't too bad. But of course it all comes back to your needs. If a high end laptop is what you need for picture or video editing then expect to be paying over $2500.

Buying a laptop doesn't need to be a difficult task. If you evaluate your needs first and choose carefully your new purchase will be a profitable one.

Data Recovery Tips

Data recovery becomes necessary when your hard drive, memory card or USB flash card fail, and you have no backup available. This article gives an idea on the necessary steps and precautions during the data recovery process.

Before attempting the recovery, you must be aware that the data cannot always be retrieved. In case of a physical failure of a hard disk such as the infamous "click of death" situation, you won't be able to do much good to the hard drive except bring it to the recovery experts. Modern hard drives, however, are complex yet reliable pieces of electronics. They rarely fail for no reason, at least on a physical level.

Logical corruption prevails with the complex operating systems, buggy software, malicious or careless acts of the end-users, malware and viruses. Power failures and computer hardware malfunctions also account for many cases of corrupted hard drives and lost data.

The logical corruption can be dealt with at home. Provided that you have the right data recovery tools, you'll be able to do it yourself without any special skills.

Be aware that the data recovery process is a lengthy one. You'll need plenty of time and enough space on a working, non-corrupted hard disk to facilitate the recovery. Before you begin, make sure that you restrict any write operations onto the damaged disk. If you don't have data recovery already installed on your computer, don't save or install the data recovery product onto the corrupted drive. Instead, use a different drive letter, a flash memory card or a USB drive. 

Even a flash card from your digital camera can be able to store the data recovery tool!  The choice of a proper data recovery tool is a very important one. If you have no previous experience in recovering data, choose one that offers maximum level of automation for an inexperienced uses. It's a good idea to make sure that the tool you pick allows saving a copy of the damaged disk onto a healthy one in order to work on a backup copy instead of operating the live disk. 

Mareew Data Recovery by http://mareew.com is a good choice for the inexperienced user.  Further data recovery steps depend on the data recovery software that you choose for the job. If you settle with Mareew Data Recovery, there's not much to talk about. Mareew Data Recovery can optionally create a backup copy of the damaged disk (I highly recommend that you do so), and performs all recovery operations on the copy instead of the original. If something goes wrong, you still have the source hard disk in its original condition; just make another copy and try again.

The data recovery process is pretty straightforward with Mareew Data Recovery. You get a step-by-step wizard that guides you through the recovery process. Even if you don't read the prompts except the choice of the damaged disk if you have more than one in your system, and simply click the 'Next' button several times, you will be able to recover the damaged disk!

Mareew Data Recovery is able to fix the most complex issues with modern hard disks. Corrupted file systems, bad partition tables, FAT or NTFS failures are not a problem. Most importantly, Mareew Data Recovery values your data more than the integrity of the system structures. You'll have a chance to save your documents, digital pictures and archives from the damaged drive before attempting the recovery. All in all, a highly recommended tool.

Try it free at http://mareew.com/data_recovery/data_recovery.php

Lift Your Soul with a Good Bowl of Chili

"Next to music there is nothing that lifts the spirits and strengthens the soul more than a good bowl of chili." – Harry James. Source: http://whats cooking america.net

When your day has been hard and your soul is longing for the comforts of home, what better to come home to but a delicious bowl of heartwarming chili. The hearty dish has been a favorite in this country for centuries, and has a vivid and rich history. Much has been written about the origins of chili, but regardless of its beginnings, the fact remains that people love the stuff and can't get enough of it.

For families looking to cut food expenses, adding chili to the weekly menu is a great idea. The ability to cheaply feed large families was one reason for chili's popularity in previous centuries, and still remains so to this day. Everyone has heard stories about how cowboys cooked kettles of chili over open flames on the range during cattle drives. They cooked what they had available, and what would keep well longest. Chili is always better the next day after all.

Hard working folks still love to sit down to a piping hot bowl of chili at the end of the day. The best way to have your chili ready as soon as you arrive home is to cook it in your slow cooker.

Here are a few tasty chili recipes to get you started:

Slow Cooked Chunky Chili

• 1 lb ground beef
• 1 lb bulk pork sausage
• 4 cans kidney beans, rinsed and drained
• 2 cans diced tomatoes, untrained
• 2 cans diced tomatoes and green chilies, untrained
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 medium green pepper, chopped
• 1 envelope taco seasoning
• ½ tsp salt
• ¼ tsp pepper

Cook the meat in a skillet and drain. Place it into a slow cooker. Add remaining ingredients. Cover and cook on low for 8-10 hours. Freeze the leftovers for up to 3 months.

Southwestern Chicken Chili

• 5 large chicken breasts, chopped
• 2 cans kidney beans, drained
• 2 cans whole canned tomatoes
• 2 cans canned corn
• 1 yellow onion, chopped
• 5 tablespoons chili powder

Put rinsed kidney beans on the bottom of the slow cooker. Next add Corn. Place 1/2 the Chili Powder on top of the corn and beans. Pile on the chicken slices. Pour in Tomatoes. Cover with remaining chili powder. Cover and cook on High for 8-10 hours. Add the onion 30 minutes before serving.

What is search engine gateway?

Navino launched its search engine gateway service recently. For most of the Internet surfers, search engine gateway is a pretty new concept compared with meta search engine or multi search engine. Put it in simple, it is a web service, which can let you search the best information from the best content providers in one website.

When we try to find information everyday, most of us might go to Google.com. Yes, it's true. Most of the time, Google works well. But does Google return the best information? I guess you would agree that the search engine's ranking algorithm could only give a good answer, but not the best. Well, you may ask, where can I get the BEST? The best weather information? The best book information? The best price for your favorite mp3 player? The short answer is from the brain, from the hand picked information. Therefore, Navino's editors and their users give out that the best weather website is weather.com, the best book website is amazon.com and the best price information is froogle.

Besides best hand picked information resources, Navino also provide the search engine gateway technology. Using this technology, you can search all the best website at Navino. All you need to do is to add a unique search name before your searching keywords.

For example, if you want to search New York's weather, you can search with 'weather New York' and you will be forwarded to weather.com with the keyword 'New York'. If you want to search finance books, you can search with 'book finance' and you will be forwarded to amazon.com with the keyword 'finance'. If you want to search the best price for your favorite mp3 player, you can search with 'price mp3 player' and you will be forwarded to fro ogle with the keyword 'mp3 player'.

Navino search engine gateway is very convenient for your everyday web surfing. Besides that, Navino also provides its users to customize their own search engine gateway and allows its users to recommend search names for public use.