Today is my lovely lady’s birthday and I took the day off of work so that we can spend the day together as a family, I also am taking the family to dinner and the circus tonight. I have celebrated 13 birthdays with my wife and am happy to be celebrating another one here with her this year.
So help me wish my wife a Happy Birthday and many more to come.
-Justin Germino
My boys and I take walks almost every morning before the weather gets hot and we often spend those walks looking for bugs, butterfliest, spiders, toads or lizards we can catch and learn about and keep for a short period of time. Yesterday morning we were lucky enough to catch two very small lizards and take them home and put them in a small bug aquarium.
We caught a baby grasshopper small enough for the lizards to eat, in addition to a few beetles, but not sure if the lizards will eat them. With all the lizards crawling around here in Casa Grande, it is amazing how difficult they are to catch. They are very fast and there are hundreds of little holes in the ground all over the place so they can get into a shelter within seconds of spotting you.
When the rains come we often find dozens of baby toads and sometimes larger ones, last year the boys kept three toads as pets. Mostly we will let the critters go after a few days, if the toads or lizards are big enough to eat normal size crickets, then we will purchase crickets at the pet store and keep them as pets for a while.
This is just one of the many activities I enjoy doing with my two sons, and they both enjoy the walks, searching for critters and looking at them after we catch them. It encourages their creativity, teaches them about animals and insects, and gets some exercise all wrapped up in one fun walk.
-Justin Germino
While visiting Cabo in the first week of June my wife had asked for an original Jose Luis Serrano art piece for her Birthday, since her Birthday was coming up on June 24th, I decided to spring and purchase her a piece of this very unique clay / ceramic art. His famous Tree of Life series all consist of small ceramic clay figurines arranged to tell a story on a set background, his unique trademark is found in each of his creations and touches like the way the sun and moon are shaped and each intricate flower and decoration that adorns each piece. The pieces are not cheap, but not super expensive either, this piece which is about six inches in height was about four hundred American dollars.
Much of his art is amazing to look at and you can tell hours were spent on each finely detailed piece that was created and pinned to the final creation, this was the piece I had purchased for my wife:
So if your interested in ceramic clay art, check out Jose Luis Serrano’s work, he is truly a talented artist who hails from Metepec, Mexico.
-Justin Germino
I still to this very day am so thankful that I am blessed with my two beautiful sons and I cherish each and every day that I spend with them. My oldest who is five and a half is so bright, creative and artistic that he makes up his own board games using papers, action figures and I can’t help but see the similarities between his Mother and him every time I look at him.
My youngest who is two and a half is so strong, fierce and loves to wrestle, battle and channel his energy into physical activities. I often will spend half hour sessions just wrestling with the kids in the living room, where I become little more than a human jungle gym, but it is quality bonding time.
So today on Fathers Day, while my family celebrates and takes my Father in Law and myself out to dinner, as a Father I just sit back an think about how good it is to actually be a father, and I never knew it would be and feel like this. Though it is difficult raising children, nothing could be more worth it in life.
-Justin Germino
I have only 20 or so followers on Associated Content, but they are quite devoted. Nearly every article that I get published on Associated Content lately, I at least get five or six comments from my regular readers. I can’t figure out why I get hundreds of page views on my blogs per day, but I am lucky to get one or two comments on my other blogs, yet my Associated Content constantly garners comments 50% of the time per pageview.
I attribute this effect similar to the Entrecard Drop Response, people drop on you and expect you to drop back on them. Associated Content publishers comment on your articles, expecting and hoping you will do the same back on their articles, but Associated Content pays only an average of $1.50 per thousand pageviews, so the ten to twenty reciprocal comments/views you can get are virtually negligible to your earnings.
In the meantime I have now reached a Clout Level 5 five with over 5,000 pageviews for my seventy or so articles published, I earn about $2.00 per month in pageview performance at this time, which is peanuts, but it can grow in the future, plus I do make an average of $2 – $3 for each upfront payment article I write.
When my blog earnings start dipping from lack of advertisers and opportunities being available, I find myself falling back to associated content to keep up my earning supply a little bit. There are some people who have made more than a thousand dollars on Associated Content, some possibly earn a hundred or more per month between writing articles and pageview performance.
Overall though, at least four months into Associated Content I have earned more on my 3rd month blogging than I have in my 4th month of Associated Content, and I think blogging still has higher earning potential, but Associated Content may be a good way to augment your earnings.
-Justin Germino
In an effort to save money and cut spending and budgets, some cities including Maricopa are cutting back on Truancy programs, in the case of Maricopa they are completely pulling the program entirely. Truancy programs are designed to help catch kids who skip school or hang and lurk about in public places instead of attending school.
By pulling officers away from this vital assignment we are encouraging and making it easier for kids who get dropped of at school to simply leave the premises and make their way around town or back to their houses. Even if not caught, these programs were a deterrent for most kids for trying to pull it off.
With many parents working and having nobody at home to look after the kids, kids can easily skip school and spend time at home with parents completely unaware in most cases. But truancy officers who monitor the schools and surrounding streets and local businesses (especially eateries) they had a high success rate of returning kids to school and catching them.
It is a sad day as more and more funding is pulled from making sure our kids are attending schools and getting education, it is bad enough that the schools themselves are losing funding for books, simple supplies but now Cities are cutting back on the ability to even enforce that kids attend school.
-Justin Germino
When it comes to alternative medicine we are talking about a multi billion dollar industry where companies can rush herbal products and remedies to market without having to go through any of the trials and testing done by traditional prescription medications. I was reading several articles in the Associated Press about this subject and was not surprised to found that the results of over 2.5 billion dollars worth of research studies show absolutely no evidence that herbal treatments in any way help cancer patients.
In fact there are many types of herbal and alternative therapies that interfere with modern medicinal treatments of cancer and may in fact make patients worse instead of better. For example it was shown in the studies that people taking Beta Carotene supplements had higher rates of Lung Cancer, and people taking Vitamin E supplements had higher rates of prostate cancer. Some herbal therapies interfere with the bodies hormones and actually feed and fuel the cancer cells making them grow more quickly and rapidly.
Some treatments and alternative therapies that have shown to be effective in helping alleviate symptoms (but not treat the disease itself) are:
Other than the above though there hasn’t been any single proof that herbal or alternative therapies in any way help treat cancer, most would have a placebo type effect if not be worse off than not taking anything at all. In addition during recent testing it was shown that 6 out of 9 herbal supplement pills contained either the wrong dosage of herb that was listed on the bottle, or contained some toxic metals or other substance that was harmful to the body.
I believe that some alternative therapies and herbs are helpful, I have personally used Colloidal silver to treat throat infections, Oil of Oregano for chest colds, and ginseng tea for energy. But I would highly recommend you only rely and use alternative therapies for relatively mild illness or ailments, when it comes to life threatening diseases it is best to stick with what is known and works. Don’t gamble with your life and trust in something that has no medical or scientific proof.
That being said there are alternative therapies that will start curing these ailments, and these include Stem Cell therapies, Immunotherapies, Gene Therapies, but these are all based in science and medicine, and none of them are derived from herbal supplements.
-Justin Germino
I was interviewed yesterday by Ben Spark from I am Not A Famous Blogger in which I was asked about everything from when I started blogging, to my opinions on disclosure and making money with blogs online. Ben Spark had met on SocialSpark as he is an IZEA Insider and I am part of his crew, I was happy to do the interview and look forward to reading more interviews he plans on doing with other members of his SocialSpark crew.
You can read my interview on I Am Not A Famous Blogger and see what Dragon Blogger says about the blogging industry and advice he gives to other bloggers.
FDA announced that people should stay away from using Zicam or other products that have “Zinc” as a primary ingredient for intranasal allergy or cold relief, the zinc has been shown to cause anosmia which is the loss of your sense of smell. This tends to be a long lasting and can be permanent, and highlights the many ways that alternative treatments and remedies are starting to show side effects after they have already had widespread usage in the market.
Now, I am not against alternative therapies and let’s face it, how many prescription drugs have been on the market for years only to have a class action lawsuit and be pulled from having harmful side effects that only show up after thousands of people have taken the product and had ill effects from it. Just remember that herbs, homeopathic treatments, all of these natural therapis have risks associated with them, just because they are touted as natural doesn’ t mean they are risk free.
So stay away from using any product containing Zinc inside your nasal passages just to be on the safe side.
-Justin Germino
Casa Grande will soon have a new and more user friendly Animal Care and Adoption center, this new facility which will at least be temporarily opened at First Avenue, will have room for 36 dogs and 36 cats which is double the number of both species from the former center.
With spacious corridors and more room for the pets the facility is also friendlier and more pleasing to visitors and prospective adopters of pets in need of a good and loving home. This facility will likely euthanize less pets as a result of being able to hold more pets for adoption, the previous center had to euthanize pets as a result of running out of space.
All pets are spayed and/or neutered upon arriving at the adoption center to help keep animal breeding under control, adopting a pet from your local shelter is far less expensive than buying from a breeder and often you can get some quality pure breed pets that were given up because the owner could not afford to keep them, or had to move. The new center will be open in July 2009 and is located at:
Casa Grande Animal Care and Adoption Center
202 E First Ave
Casa Grande, AZ 85122
-Justin Germino