Every year hundreds of millions of dollars are spent by government employees on purchases that have nothing to do with government work.  You might call these items “personal” however they are spending Tax Payers money on these items and with no accountability.  After all with over 2 Million employees working for the government how is anyone supposed to keep track?   You might say it would be like your children buying anything they want with a credit card and never having to account for one single dollar…but you still have to pay the bills.   Is that frightening or what??

Enter Blippy…what if every item that is purchased with a government credit card was posted on Blippy? After all it is our money and we want to see what it is being spent on.  If an aid has to get some items for the office…it would appear on Blippy…if a congressperson has to rent a car using our money, it would appear on Blippy.  After all, haven’t we been told over and over that it is the tax payer’s money that is being used??  Well what if the tax payers want to know what some of that money is being spent on and who is spending it?

Make it mandatory for every credit card issued by the government to be posted on Blippy.  Now that would be the start of transparency!!

1. My mother taught me TO APPRECIATE A JOB WELL DONE.
“If you’re going to kill each other, do it outside. I just finished cleaning.”

2. My mother taught me RELIGION.
“You better pray that will come out of the carpet.”

3. My mother taught me about TIME TRAVEL.
“If you don’t straighten up, I’m going to knock you into the middle of next week!”

4. My mother taught me LOGIC.
“Because I said so, that’s why.”

5. My mother taught me MORE LOGIC.
“If you fall out of that swing and break your neck, you’re not going to the store with me.”

6. My mother taught me FORESIGHT.
“Make sure you wear clean underwear, in case you’re in an accident.”

7. My mother taught me IRONY.
“Keep crying and I’ll give you something to cry about.”

8. My mother taught me about the science of OSMOSIS.
“Shut your mouth and eat your supper.”

9. My mother taught me about CONTORTIONISM.
“Will you look at that dirt on the back of your neck!”

10. My mother taught me about STAMINA.
“You’ll sit there until all that spinach is gone.”

11. My mother taught me about WEATHER.
“This room of yours looks as if a tornado went through it.”

12. My mother taught me about HYPOCRISY.
“If I told you once, I’ve told you a million times. Don’t exaggerate!”

13. My mother taught me the CIRCLE OF LIFE.
“I brought you into this world, and I can take you out.”

14. My mother taught me about BEHAVIOUR MODIFICATION.
“Stop acting like your father!”

15. My mother taught me about ENVY.
“There are millions of less fortunate children in this world who d don’t have wonderful parents like you do.”

16. My mother taught me about ANTICIPATION.
“Just wait until we get home.”

17. My mother taught me about RECEIVING.
“You are going to get it when you get home!”

18. My mother taught me MEDICAL SCIENCE.
“If you don’t stop crossing your eyes, they are going to get stuck that way.”

19. My mother taught me ESP.
“Put your sweater on; don’t you think I know when you are cold?”

20. My mother taught me HUMOUR.
“When that lawn mower cuts off your toes, don’t come running to me.”

21. My mother taught me HOW TO BECOME AN ADULT.
“If you don’t eat your vegetables, you’ll never grow up.”

22. My mother taught me GENETICS.
“You’re just like your father.”

23. My mother taught me about my ROOTS.
“Shut that door behind you. Do you think you were born in a barn?”

24. My mother taught me WISDOM.
“When you get to be my age, you’ll understand.”

And my favorite: 25. My mother taught me about JUSTICE.
“One day you’ll have kids, and I hope they turn out just like you

Now that you have had a good laugh…how many of the above did you hear?

She just knew that she had done all the right things for marketing. She had been to the classes, she had taken the courses, she had hired all the right designers to design the packaging…but she didn’t seem to be getting anywhere on money.  I set an appointment and she brought over all her paperwork, files and samples. We sat at the table going through all the information.  She had a great package, interesting idea but she still couldn’t figure it out.

I started to drill down into her product.  Where I found what was plans for what looked like a machine; she had “invented” a very expensive way to use foil in ‘color weaving’ hair. (For you gentlemen, it means putting highlights into hair to look kissed by the sun.)

I took a look at manufacturing… which at this point she was doing herself.

She ‘invented’ and paid to have built a machine that took: smooth flat foil cut it into 4” widths and put in a ½” fold at one end. That machine cost $24,000 to build and wasn’t always accurate.

At the end of the production line was a box that the machine was to fill.  Seemed simple enough…till I told her turn on the line and let it run about 10 minutes.

That was an eye opener! About 1 in 5 sheets she was taking out of the line crumpling up and throwing into a waste container.  At the end of the test I made some mathematical calculations.  Asked why she took product out of line and she told me it wasn’t pretty enough to be in the box.

So I told her the bad news, even adding the tiny amount of the recycling of the waster container foil return… she was losing about $4.00 per box.  She was never going to make a profit on even one box of this product. No matter how pretty it was.

There is more to this story…but always, remember to put everything into your costs in manufacturing of any product. And if you purchase a piece of equipment that only works 80% of the time; don’t pay for it! It is a money loser.

To the Romans of the Empire, December 25 was, according to the Julian calendar, the winter solstice.  It was the birthday of the unconquerable sun and was believed to be the time when it began rising with new vigor after its autumnal decline.  It therefore seems most likely that the Christians sought to replace the celebrations of the sun with that of the Savior.

However, citizens were not thoroughly prepared to relinquish some of the existing customs. For instance, the Romans celebrated the agricultural festival of Saturnalia from the middle to the end of December.  It was a time of feasting, dancing and indulgence.  Rather than wholly abolish these rituals, the Church successfully “Christianized” them…it divested them of their unacceptable features, and incorporated them into the Christmas celebration.

This merging and transformation of celebrations goes a long way toward explaining the exchanging of gifts, feasting, use of greenery and decorating with candles and other types of lights.  It also helps explain the origins of the Christmas Yule Log…formerly a symbol of the hearthfire at the center of family life.

The other day I was in a large national store looking for PJ’s as a gift.  I was having a hard time finding anything.  As I wandered the department I noticed other women with scrunch noises, a-gasp mouths, scrunch eyes and just plain rotten looks.

Finally I said to one woman; “Having Problems?”  Her comment was just my thoughts.  “Everything is ugly! There is nothing worth buying!”   I went to the next woman; “You look like the rest of us…having problems?”  Her answer was the tops:  “Did they get this department mixed up with the pre-teens?”  The next one wasn’t so nice:  “This is garbage!”

Designers… how long has it been since you have walked the floor of a PJ’s department in any store that is not in New York City?  How long since you were in any other state but New York? Or are you just sending the junk out to the other states?  The one woman had it right…we are not pre-teens and pre-teens should not be dictating what adult women wear to bed!

Just because we are going to sleep doesn’t mean that we have lost our fashion flare.  Scotty dogs, ducks, lambs, bears, moose or any other animal on our sleeping or at times, our lounging attire we left years ago!   And by the way there are more colors in the rainbow than, pink, blue, extra pale purple oh yes, and GRAY.  And why do most of you think we all like to get ready for bed in pastels?  I prefer something just a little sexier in colors.

Oh Please, we have been setting the fashion curve for decades.  Including the mod designs: which, came to some designer in London on an acid trip during the late 60’s.  But the PJ’s of today are an actual shame.

We are not trying to look like our pre-teens, or our teen daughters.  You might think that is ‘cute’ but most of us don’t.  We want stylish, designs with great interesting fabrics.  You can’t tell me that they can’t print almost anything on fabric these days? They print the moose don’t they? Designers; watch what stores are putting on sale and how soon they go on sale after the item hits the stores.  This should help you in what you design.

We don’t want the cramp your style, but the last thing my husband wants to see is me coming to bed in PJ’s with ducks on them.  It is demining to women that have been setting the style longer than most of the new designers are old.  We might have worn and made the mod designs a hit; but that was back in the 60’s when our mothers were still wearing full skirts.

Happy Holidays

Amazingly Yours

Dr Marlene

I sincerely hope that you and yours have a wonderful holiday season.  No matter how you celebrate it the only thing that is important is that you do celebrate and enjoy life.

This long explanation gets around to… it must have been fate working for me. I launched my own (name on the bottle) skin care line 3 days earlier. To me Looking Younger is what skin care is all about.

Caroline and I talked about what happens within the body. The chemical processes of all the different foods that we eat and what they do to the body. The body is actually a very efficient chemical processing plant. Each item of food that we eat gets processed in a different manner to be used by the body. Did you know that your stomach hydrochloric acid is where almost everything starts in your own personal walking talking chemical processing plant?

The skin is the largest organ in the body. Yes it is considered an organ. Can you just imagine what we would look like without it? Although the molecule structure is the same skin can be different all over the body from thick to think areas. For women the skin on our face is the most important skin we take the most care with.  Actually that should be for men also but the gentlemen haven’t completely come around yet.

Skin and its seven layers is designed to shield our muscles and organs in a very compact and pliable manner. Many products that are used today that are called natural only work on the top layer of skin. That layer is the easiest for almost any product to “plump up” to look and feel soft. Easy because the product can be made of the simplest of ingredients and methods…think of stories of the mixtures during the Egyptian times or the 1800’s in America. Simple mixtures of natural household ingredients were used to “Make a woman beautiful”.  Applied to the first layer of skin to make it softer or lighten it up

Today we have much better technology…technology to get through the many layers of skin. Ingredients that are also harder to pronounce…specialty ingredients that come from extraction and separation processes.   An example is Vitamin C.  Most women know that Vitamin C is good for the skin.  However rubbing your face with an orange or lemon does nothing but make your face sticky. But if a chemist extracts Vitamin C from a lemon and you rub that on your skin it will rehydrate the collagen in your skin. And that rehydration is what we all need.  Then that same biochemist takes that Vitamin C (that could be called something else by now) and mixes it in a particular way to get a wonderful serum type product that  softens the skin, clears up “cruddy spots”,  works on wrinkles and helps smooth and rebuilds the texture of the skin.  That is the miracle of today’s technology… and a very smart biochemist. Because it’s more than just Vitamin C…it is the many ingredients including  the special proteins, extracts, enzymes and more that make up a product that goes down all seven layers and gets into the fibers of the skin to rebuild and regenerate.   www.ssskincare.com

I tell my friends that this scale does everything but make your morning coffee. And yes, I still drink coffee but I don’t overdo it! So let me tell you why I love my scale. The amount of information that it gives you is great helping you stay on whatever Trak you choose to use in your life. It also keeps my calculations down to almost nothing. But that is not the reason I love my scale.

It gives you your skeletal muscle percentage. This is a great number to know because by tracking this number you can see if any changes in your eating habits are better or worse for your system. If you know the percentages that are normal for your weight and height you have an easier time to Trak your progress. But that is not the reason I love my scale.

This scale calculates you BMI designated by the World Health Organization. Now I know there are hundreds of places on the web to find this number but it is nice to see it tracking right there before you turn on your computer in the morning. But that is not the reason I love my scale.

Visceral fat level is calculated. That means the fat around your mid-section. Men this is a good one for you. Once that moves out of the normal range, you are working on a paunch belly. Not good and very hard to lose. Ladies that number can go up with age. Keeping that number under control is important. Eat too much red meat and that number will climb, if you watch it, you can stop the climb by sticking with more veggies and less fat meats till it goes back down…and it will…because the body is always in flux. But that is not the reason I love my scale.

If you step on the scale first thing in the morning out of bed, you can get a pretty good reading of your Resting Metabolism Rate. Now this number will tell you how much you can eat if all you do is rest all day. The energy you expend the higher number of calories you can eat. It’s like a game…keep all the numbers in balance and you stay healthy and slim. Eat less than your Resting Metabolism number and you will lose weight. It is all about balance. But that is not the reason I love my scale.
The reason I love my scale is…drum roll… it tells me from all the calculations my body age. Not my chronological age. But how old my body is acting! Work does pay off. With all my work at losing the weight I also lost a few body years. My scale tells me my body is 13 years younger than my chronological age.
That is the reason I love my scale!

We (meaning us women) don’t want to miss anything. That includes great information. That is the reason that I have decided to interview men in print on my blog. Now that doesn’t mean that I won’t put my two cents in on fashion and other things from time to time but I want to bring you my loyal readers well rounded information that we can all use.

The first one will be posted later this week, when I Interview Nick Naton from an interesting company that does what they call Celebrity Branding on almost anyone.

Information you can use!
Looking at a changing world

I will be looking for feedback on all the interviews from all of you. The more feedback the better. Now I am looking for men to interview. Men with information that will help us in what we want to do. So if you know any, email me at drmarlenebbs@gmail.com

Amazingly Yours,
Dr Marlene