2 Days left in official summer!!!

Wow, what an end to summer it has been. We had a trip to NYC (first for the whole family), and managed to head back North a few days before hurricane Irene! We've had some hot weather since then, but believe it or not, also had to put the heat on on September 16th because it got so cold. I cannot remember another year EVER when when I've had to have the heat on so early. And then today, another beautiful day.

What prompted me to write today was a reminder that mother nature can be harsh. We took a road trip to Montreal (the whole family thankfully), and returned around 2:30 in the morning last Tuesday. When we got to the driveway, all we could see was branches and huge tree parts. Our 55+ yr old maple had apparently been hit be a twister (unknown in these parts). The neighbour across the road said he actually saw the clouds down to the ground, and a vortex like shape pass through. Luckily, the huge portion of the tree that fell ended up right on the driveway - no damage to the house, and no damage to the car (since we were in Montreal). After many hours of having the debris chopped up - I realized this was a message. That coupled with feeling a minor earthquake yesterday (only the 2nd I have ever felt, and all within one year!!!)

The message is - mother nature is powerful. If you want to do anything to mitigate the force of mother nature, the time to do it is now. I know that I should have trimmed (in a big way!!!) the tree back many times over the years - but did not. If I had stayed on top of the maintenance, the tree would probably be fine now.

The same lessons hold true for skin care. Read this article and see if there is anything that can apply to you! Also be sure to check out to good info at this useful site.

   J

So many spam comments on my website blog!!

I recently set-up a wordpress site to share information about skin care products. This can be found at http://undereye-cream.com/. It is amazing how flexible the internet is to share information and to get user feedback, but with that flexibility also comes a downside.

There seem to be a ton of people whose main objective is to get backlinks to their material through simple brute force techniques. I have started to get higher volumes of spam comments on my pages, most of them from http://www.facebook123.com/. There typically have a sentence or two, often quite cryptic and non related to the page they are commenting on. In wordpress I have it set up to moderate the comments, so thankfully I need to approve each comment before it gets posted as "visible"

I would imagine that a web site that starts to post a profusion of bogus comments, probably starts to look bad over time.

A better way for users to generate valid backlinks, is to do the work by writing and contributing valid quality content to other sites. While this does take significantly more time, the impact is much more positive in the long run. Check out sites like ezinearticles.com, streetarticles.com, qondio.com and squidoo.com to name a few. Make sure that you are publishing good quality - because over time, you may be locked out, or if not, certainly ranked to a level where you articles value will diminish.

Here is an example of an article that provide good "non-sales" type information - but then helps the reader to find more information if they are so inclined:
http://ezinearticles.com/?A-Simple-Approach-to-Under-Eye-Care

Happy Blogging!

J

I like to know what I'm putting on my face

The cosmetics and skin care industry can be a strange and scary place. Even the fact that there have to be cautions about dangerous chemicals and animal testing, sets of all sort of red flags for me. The way I look at it, our bodies were made to thrive and survive - but sometimes they just need a little help. This help should not be in the form of a replacement of everything natural, or by spreading extracts from animals in and on my skin.

That is why I was pleased to hear about a company called LifeCell, and to find a write-up about how they came to be, and how the fundamentals of their products work.

It is sort of sad that the products that end up making it to us are those that are chosen by the large corporations. These are typically designed to maximize profit (I understand that), but in so doing, they often block other innovative solutions from reaching us. That is where the power of the internet comes in! It makes more options available to us, without having to have them worked through the corporate pipelines!

It I can find a product that has solid fundamentals and a good track record, I'm not really concerned now about getting is stocked in the local store - you can get just about everything online now.

Labor Day Trip

Well, Labor day is alway a good weekend to spend that little bit of extra time outside. This weekend I plan to make a trip to a beach that is a few hours away from here. It won't be long before the leaves are changing!

Being on or near tha water always makes me calm.

I can't believe that the kids are going to  be back in school next week.

Here is how I put the squeeze on those damaging rays from the Sun :)

Squeeze ....!!!