Happy Halloween! This is my favorite holiday and also my favorite weekend of this year. I'm ear-deep in horror flicks. It's been a lot of fun this year with Netflix Instant. Should have got this sooner!! So I'm couch-bound this weekend, watching movies and also awaiting the ding dong of the clock so I can start my novel for NaNoWriMo. I'm spazzing and then not. I have an idea for a novel (a pretty good one I think) but then I've been thinking about this idea for a couple of months now..... should I do something else? Am I bound to carry on with this once I start? I'm not sure what I'm going to do and I guess I'm just going to leave it to the OMG, I got write something heebie jeebies when the time comes. Ummm, and it's only hours away now!!!!!!!!

I'm participating in NaNoWriMo for the first time. This is an annual writing challenge which draws thousands and thousands of people. I had heard of NaNo several years before, but never did do it. It seemed like something always came up. Basically, just life. I realized this year that life is always going to come up and decided to take a risk and go for it.
The goal is to write 50, 000 words in the 30 days that make up the month of November. You have from the very first minute of November 1st until the very last minute of the 30th to get those words in. They don't have to be perfect words and you don't have to finish your novel. You just got to get them down. 50,000 words seems like an overwhelming amount of writing to me - yikes! But, if I don't try I will never know if I could do it or not. And that is one major thing that is on my bucket list is to write a book. So here goes........

clipped from imgfave.com

I'm a big hairspray user - have to have it to keep my bangs from misbehaving.

After spraying hairspray in my bangs  for several days, I notice that there are specks in my bangs. Even after shampooing them real well. Hairspray buildup is what it is. What I do to take care of the problem is cheap and easy-peasy. I keep a box of baking soda in the shower. When I still have shampoo in my hair, I use about a quarter-size amount of baking soda and rub it with my bangs between my hands and then rinse off as usual. No more hairspray specks!

clipped from bestwellnessconsultant.com 1996 McDonalds Hamburger I teach a workshop titled Healthy Choices for Children.  It's a class for parents seeking solutions to how to improve the way they eat. It's about the alternative food market, organics, and the top ten food additives to avoid and why, menu planning and more.  It's a 3 session fabulously informative interactive class. Below is my absolutely favorite prop. People are always astounded when I share this. I have used this as show and tell for a very long time. This is a hamburger from McDonalds that I purchased in 1996. That was 12 years ago. Note that it looks exactly like it did the very day I bought it. The flecks on the burger are crumbs from the bun. The burger is starting to crumble a bit. It has the oddest smell. Ladies, Gentleman, and children alike - this is a chemical food. There is absolutely no nutrition here.

clipped from www.cnn.com Papers: Wife says 'balloon boy' was hoax Washington (CNN) -- The wife of a Colorado father at the center of the "balloon boy" saga told authorities that the giant helium balloon was specifically created for a hoax to draw media attention, according to court documents released Friday. Mayumi Heene told Larimer County investigators that she and her husband, Richard Heene, knew that their 6-year-old son, Falcon, was hiding at their Fort Collins home the entire time, even as police and military scrambled to search for the boy, according to the documents. The admission by Mayumi Heene was made October 17, just two days after the balloon was released, according to the documents. The couple hatched the plan about two weeks before the incident and "instructed their three children to lie to authorities as well as the media regarding this hoax," according to the documents. Their motive? To "make the Heene family more marketable for future media interests."

clipped from www.examiner.com 'Mermaid Girl' Shiloh Pepin has died at the age of 10 Defying all odds from birth “Mermaid Girl” Shiloh Pepin died on Friday afternoon at Maine Medical Center. “Mermaid Girl” was featured on TLC numerous times and appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show about a month ago. The “Mermaid Girl” was born with a syndrome called Sirenomelia, a rare congenital deformity in which the legs are fused together, giving the appearance of a mermaid. Most babies born with Sirenomelia die within days. "Mermaid Girl" Shiloh Pepin died on Friday at the age of ten oprah.com Shiloh Pepin recently celebrated her 10th birthday and appeared on the Oprah show on September 22, 2009, stating she liked her legs and loves the pool, which she had a specially designed wet suit for. Shiloh explained to Oprah she did not want her legs separated and was a seemingly very happy young lady, also when asked by Oprah if she di mind being called “Mermaid Girl” she stated no with a smile.

New year coming, new time in my life starting, new blog. Today is the start of Out Flying A Kite, hence known as OFAK. This is the first post and I am simultaneously writing this post and building the blog.The first thing to do when you want to start a blog on Blogger is: get a gmail account.

Go there, figure out your email name and set up the account. I find that checking the availability of your name is the hardest part. With millions of users, lots of Gmail account names are already taken. Be creative or add numbers. That's what I ended up doing - I added the year number 2010 to mine.

After you set up your email account, come back to Blogger and log in with your Gmail information. Create a blog, which requires making up a name and web address. You might want to think about this before you jump in. You can always change your name easily, but to change the web address, you will have to create a new blog. If you have done much in the way of changing the template and personalizing things toward a specific name, this means your previous work will have to be changed. This can be time consuming. Also if you happen to have readers/followers, you could lose them in the switch. So it's easier and smarter to just pick something and stick with it.

First off, I found a template I liked. Blogger's generic templates are so boring. And there are tons of creative people out there who like to make and share templates. So a lot of work right there has been done for you. My favorite site for finding templates is BTemplates. They keep up to date with the new templates being put out and have an easy to find your way around website. Clicking on demo beneath the template will give you a full-size view of what it looks like live. Click the download button beneath it and you can save the template to your computer. Once you find one you like and download it, it's easy to change your blog template. Go to Layout on your Blogger dashboard and click the edit HTML. Click browse and upload the template you just downloaded. Be aware you can't just click on the folder, you must click on the XML file and then click upload. You will probably be asked to confirm deletion of some modules. It's ok, you can always reinsert modules later. After you save the template, go to view blog and see if it's what you want. If it is, now is the time to play and figure out what things you want on the sidebars of your blog.

Go back to Layout and click on the Page Elements tab. There you will be able to pick and choose different modules. Blogger has a lot of them already pre-made. To me, my favorite is adding HTML/Java. With this module, you can put in different things you find out on the web. As I said before, it's play time. Put in things, check them out on your blog after you save them. Keep or remove them until you get the design you like. The design you created. Fun! Fun!