Before you visit garage sales, thrift stores, flea markets, antique malls, estate sales and auctions for pieces to transform, clear out your own spaces to see what you can discover.

Start a mosaic tile treasure chest with the "bits n' pieces" you already have. Save broken dishes, jewelry, keys, small toys, game pieces and glass figurines.

Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing. ~Phyllis Diller

De-cluttering your home isn't really as hard as you might think. Before you take the plunge to get started, you first need to create an action plan. Take the time to get a realistic view of your clutter. Try to create a written plan and zoom in on the most cluttered space and start there.

Former Vice President Al Gore and a nonprofit climate group have begun to recruit 10 million advocates to seek laws and policies that can cut greenhouse gases.
Please sign the petition for a global treaty on climate change @
http://wecansolveit.org/page/s/globaltreaty

225 Water Street Creative Arts & Holding Company
225 Water Street
Jordan, MN 55352

http://www.225waterstreet.com

• Did you know that hard-plastic bottles of water actually leach toxins and require 1.5 million barrels of oil to make each year. Instead try buying larger jugs of water and fill a thermos made of lined aluminum, stainless steel or glass.

• If every American recycled one-tenth of their newspapers, we'd save 25,000.000 trees a year.

• A single quart of motor oil disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000.000 gallons of fresh water.

• For every $10 spent buying things, 10% goes to packaging that gets thrown away.

• Plant a tree. http://www.arborday.org/

A piece that was shared with me...thought it was worth sharing. Wish I knew who to credit for this but the original wasn't sent with the author.

Count Your Blessings

Protect Future Generations
Children receive four times the exposure than an adult to at least eight widely used cancer-causing pesticides in food. The food choice you make now will impact your child's health in the future.

Support a True Economy
Although organic foods might seem more expensive than conventional foods, conventional food prices do not reflect hidden cost borne by taxpayers. Other hidden costs include pesticide regulation and testing, hazardous waste disposal, clean up and environmental damage.

To Taste Better Flavor

Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else. ~ Ivern Ball

Every year, we make a vow to re-invent ourselves through silent resolutions. It's a noble gesture and some of us work very hard to turn those promises into a habit.

It's been said that you only have to do something for 21 days to make it stick.

Trying to regain our creativity can be somewhat difficult as we get older. Our childhood days of writing, singing, dancing and making up wild fantastic stories have been pushed to the wayside. Our time is now filled with housework, family obligations, bills and the like.

Creativity is basically making something out of nothing, and unless creativity is actively nourished it can't present itself. If we could just reach back into our childhood and recall some of the fearless skills we all once had, we could begin to develop our creativity and weave it into our everyday lives.

As of late, we have had a number of loved ones leave this planet.

When these unexpected things happen we may not be prepared for what we must achieve to celebrate their lives.

Organizing our memories from boxes of photographs can be very healing and stressful at the same time. Often we may know the people and locations in the photographs and what they were doing at the time. From experience I can tell you that it sure helps if the names, dates and locations are noted on the back of the photos.