DATE: Saturday, June 23, 2012
TIME: 9am – 12pm

PLACE: Douglas Park in Santa Monica
Chelsea Avenue (Between Wilshire and California)
Santa Monica, CA 90403

We will be set up on the NW side of the park. (Close to the playground.)
WHAT: bring your used adult clothing and accessories, sort them in the pile according to size and then swap away (clothes, shoes, accessories, belts, scarves, anything that you are tired of wearing and want to swap for something different)

We need everyone to please spread the word to your other friends. If you belong to a list, please post the information.  All items left at the end of the swap will be donated to charity.

Any questions, please contact Snow at snowwht@gmail.com.

It happens to the best of us: mysteriously falling short on cash when we could’ve sworn we’d just hit the ATM. Where did all that money go? On any given day, there are a number of ways we leak money – knowingly or not. Here’s a look at how to reclaim some of that money.

Food
One messy money mistake is filling up our grocery carts with way too much. Researchers at Harvard Business School have found that we tend to go overboard on groceries, especially at warehouse clubs, where we think we’re saving money by buying in bulk, but not always, especially considering how much excess food goes straight into the trash. According to the book American Wasteland, families toss out up to 25 percent of their food or roughly $2,200 every year.  [For tips on how to shop smart at warehouse clubs, check out The Best Things to Buy in Bulk]

Read full article here.

This post is to let you know about a really cool event happening for parents of daughters.  Check it out:

Tech Savvy: Preparing Girls for the Future with STEM

“If we’re going to out-innovate and out-educate the rest of the world, we’ve got to open doors for everyone. We need all hands on deck, and that means clearing hurdles for women and girls as they navigate careers in (STEM) science, technology, engineering, and math.”

- First Lady Michelle Obama

Today’s girls at risk of losing out on tomorrow’s opportunities. Find out why there’s still a gender gap in STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Math — and how you can give your kids the skills they need to succeed. For anyone interested in youth development.

Thursday, May 10, 2012 

6:45-8:30pm

Marlborough School

250 South Rossmore Ave, Los Angeles

Panelists:

Jane Margolis, UCLA Graduate School of Education, Author

Nadine Afari, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Director of USC JEP Young
Scientist Program

Amy Kim, Director of STEM programs, Girl Scouts/LA

Simone Wu, Google Engineer

Moderator: 

Dr. Barbara Natterson Horowitz, UCLA Professor Division of Cardiology, Author

Opening Remarks:

Yalda T. Uhls, Los Angeles Director, Common Sense Media

Please help us adhere to City requirements and commitments with our neighbors by parking in our Third Street parking lot. Please do not park on the street.

Attendance gets you automatic entry into raffle for a chance to win 10 tickets to see one of two IMAX® films at the IMAX, California Science Center, “Born to be Wild” or “To The Arctic” in 2012, winner will be announced at the end of the program.

Suggested donation of $5 online here or at the door

My pain is your gain though because I’ve researched plenty of apps and just like so many other things in life, sometimes exactly what you need is already in your possession. You just have to understand what you have.

Case in point, Apple’s Reminders for the iPhone and iPad.  I’ve surfed the App store and downloaded quite a few to-do apps.  Some for free, some paid.  Finally, I went back to Reminders, the built in app.

It’s not fancy, pretty simple in fact. Honestly that’s what I want my to-do app to be – easy. I don’t want to have to take a tutorial, I just want to get things done.

What I love most (yes, I’m releasing my inner fangirl) about Reminders is the view options. I can view my entire list or I can view it by day.  You can set the reminder for a certain day and time or you can make it location based. The reminder will go off if you and your phone are near a certain address – that does put a drain on the battery though.

If you’re like me (and I’d like to think I’m not so neurotic that others can’t relate) then you will love looking at the Completed list. It shows completed tasks by day. Not that I’m ultra-competitive or anything, but I like trying to check off more to-do’s than previous days.

The reminders show up on my iPhone and iPad as banners and also sync with my iCal. I don’t particularly use iCal that much, although I do sync my Google calendar with my iCal. Unfortunately, I can’t sink my Google Tasks with my Reminders but I’ve found that it doesn’t make a difference because it does sync with my iCal tasks.

For those of you who need to do project management, you can create different lists and still view the to-do’s by date.  For me, I create lists for my books and what needs to be done. So I can look at the big picture and then manage the tasks by putting them on my calendar.

Another plus, you can set your reminders verbally by using Siri on the iPhone.

I realize I probably have more than enough tools to run the world, all that’s left is to just go ahead and do the darn thing.

Whether showcasing a baby’s first 365 days or an expecting mother’s blossoming baby bump all in 30 seconds or less, users simply take iPhone photos of the subject as often as desired utilizing an on-screen grid to help standardize photo positioning and then create a movie with just one tap.

I would imagine we could also use this app for the teen years to show our progression of grey hairs as our kids put us through the ringer. Then we could really have proof when we say they have aged us!  I’m thinking about using it for Maltese after he gets a hair cut so we can track how fast his hairs grows. As you can see, the possibilities are endless.

Let’s face it, most kids aren’t reading the starred reviews of Publisher’s Weekly or Kirkus. So, I asked my daughter, my favorite guinea pic, how she finds the books she selects to read? She seems to be on top of the popular young adult books, Wonder and The Fault in Our Stars.  She hears about them before I do – and I do read the reviews!

My daughter is 10 and an avid reader.  I noticed with some series, they spread like a cold via word of mouth in her class. Other books, she finds by looking online in the iBookstore. She felt it was not a large selection and it covers quite a span of ages – children’s through teen.  That’s where she found The Fault in Our Stars.

She thought it looked interesting and read the sample. We had to go out and get the hard copy, she’s not crazy about reading books on the iPad. She found Wonder by browsing the tables at Barnes & Noble. The cover caught her eye.

The main thing that I get from her, is that if the book looks interesting, she’ll read the back copy and then if that’s interesting, she’ll read the first page. If she likes the first page, she’ll buy the book.

What are the takeaways as an author? When designing and writing the jacket copy – it has to be able to catch the eye of kids who are visually savvy – they’re on the computer, play video games, watch tv, etc. They’re just as discerning as adults, if not more because they have shorter attention spans. And the first page?  You better sell it.

That’s just my anecdotal market research, take it for what it’s worth and share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Sibylla Nash is a freelance writer and author of the novel Bumped.

You’re expected to complete 100 pages of an original screenplay in 30 days. The rules are pretty simple:

1) To be crowned an official Script Frenzy winner, you must write a script (or multiple scripts) of at least 100 total pages and verify this tally on ScriptFrenzy.org.

2) You may write individually or with a partner. Writing teams will have a 100-page total goal for their co-written script or scripts.

3) Scriptwriting may begin no earlier than 12:00:01 AM on April 1 and must cease no later than 11:59:59 PM on April 30, local time.

4) You may write screenplays, stage plays, web series, TV shows, short films, comic book and graphic novel scripts, adaptations of novels, or any other type of script your heart desires.

5) You must, at some point, have ridiculous amounts of fun.

Your fabulous prize upon completion? Knowing that you dropped-kick procrastination in the face! Boo-yah!  I don’t know about you, but that’s huge for a writer.

Writer’s Store is one of the sponsors and they’re offering 15% off screenwriting tools (like Final Draft 8, Storyist, Contour and Movie Magic Screenwriter) to help kick things off.  Just enter code 30DAYS12 at checkout on WritersStore.com.  Even better, Storyist is offering 25% off if you buy directly from them and Scrivener is offering 20% off.  Go here for details.

Go here to get started.

The maximum award is $25,000, and full-time educators, principals, paraprofessionals, and staff members with projects that improve student learning in K-12 public or private school are eligible to enter. The deadline for application is April 30. In the past, winning projects have included a parent’s resource library, an iPod reading project, and even a second-grade book swap.

Just think about all the blood, sweat and tears that went into creating your book. The sleepless nights as you wrestled with the revisions and the breathless anticipation as you waited to see your book cover. Let’s not forget, the proud moment when you first held a copy of your book in your hands or saw it for sale on Amazon and B&N.

You may think your roller coaster ride is over but believe it or not, the journey with your book is not even close to being finished. Thanks to the internet and social media, you’ll be doing marketing and promotions for your book before, during and after, long after, publication. (Read more)