Before I graduated from high school, my English teacher had each of us write a letter to ourselves describing where we would be five years in the future . With a bright future in front of us it was easy to fill up the page with our dreams of finishing college, getting a great job, and, for some, starting a family. However, when I received that letter in the mail five years later I realized I had strayed very far off of the path I had set for myself. Not that I am not happy with my life, I am, but I realized that without those goals in front of me it easy to let time and life carry them away. Without goals and something to work towards, it is easy to stay where we are and just let time slip away. So I would ask you, what goals do you have for yourself?
Sit down and write out where you see yourself five years from now. Do you want to start a new career? Perhaps you see yourself in management? Do you still want to be living in the same location? Or even the same state? Once you have it all written down, it’s time to make it happen. Break your five-year plan down into one year plans , and if you are super detailed, monthly plans. Determine what you have to do over the next five years to get you where you want to go. Think about whether you have all the leadership skills to get you to the next level at work and, if not, what you can do to enhance. If you want to be a leader and eventually work in management, find out if your company offers a management training program that can help you sharpen your skills.
Don’t think that just because you write down your goals you have to stick to them. Pull them out every once in awhile and reevaluate them. As you change, so will your goals. Goals are a good way to feel like you’ve accomplished something and keep you moving steadily into the future.
There are fifteen Presidential Libraries in the United States, scattered from California to Maine. The two in California are Nixon and Reagan; in Texas, you’ll find three, Lydon Baines Johnson, George Bush, and George W. Bush. The rest of the states have one each: JFK in Maine, FDR in New York, Gerald Ford in Michigan, Herbert Hoover in Iowa, Harry S. Truman in Missouri, Dwight D. Eisenhower in Kansas, and William J. Clinton in Arkansas. That’s fourteen listed. If you want to find the library of the 39th President of the United States of America, then you’ll need to go to Atlanta, Georgia. The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum is one of the many sights you might see while staying in luxury at a number of hotels in Atlanta.
The museum and library are hosts to a number of interesting events. If you’re looking for something different to do, then you might try out a President’s Library. Recently, they held a performance by Gene Griessman who played the role of Abraham Lincoln. In future events, Bill and Sue Wills will portray Lyndon & Lady Bird Johnson on February 27th, at two in the afternoon. The show will focus on their lives together of “Lady Bird” and the “Master of the Senate.” On March 4th, there will be a lecture and book signing of Betty Glad’s “An Outsider in the White House,” a book considered by some to make significant contributions to diplomatic history and presidential studies. It’s not all lectures and plays at the library and museum, there’s photography, too: On March 17th, a photographic exhibition titled Life Through the Lens — Photographs by Senator Howard H. Baker will open, featuring a collection of fifty large-format photographs.
Many cities offer a variety of attractions to its guests, and Atlanta has more than most, from The World of Coca-Cola Museum to the Georgia Aquarium to Underground Atlanta. Take time, too, to investigate a little Presidential history for Jimmy Carter.
The idea of New York is one that is radically open and flexible, and simultaneously it is extremely determined, an ultimate always already that refers to itself with an unusually vibrant, and sometimes aggressive dexterity. It’s one of the most attractive things about the city, making it seductive and elusive. Just when it seems that you’ve got the city figured out, it becomes something else altogether different. From a distance, geographical or temporal, its faces are consistent and do reveal an order, although at the time it might seem all too random.
The business hotels in New York are great places from which to contemplate how this all fits together. Even if there are no answers, which are probably misleading anyway, there is a sense that these ideas all collapse into each other and constantly expand to become something else. Every point of view gets caught up in the fold, and if you were to see this visually represented, it might look something like Hypermusic/Ascension, the inner text of the site-specific monodrama presented at the Guggenheim in March.
This collaborative dream team, composed of Lisa Randall, Héctor Parra, and Michael Ritchie, has put together this new opera that utilizes an experimental score. The attempt is to capture something of the 5th dimension, and this is a tall order. As part of the museums Contemplating the Void exhibition, tall orders are very welcome here. Interventions into the space have produced some fantastic experiments, with works by Cai Guo-Qiang, Matthew Barney, Nam June Paik, Jenny Holzer. This is a good opportunity to participate as an observer, and to push the barriers of quantum theory until it begins to look like waking life.
In the past when you would sell your house, most of your homes value would come from the square footage and whether or not there was a pool. While those things are still important today, more and more value is being put on the improvements that the previous owners make to the home. Things like landscaping, updated appliances, new tile or carpeting, and new windows. Whether you are investing in your current home or have plans to sell, investing in new windows is a sure fire way to increase the value of your home. Dual, or double paned, windows are not cheap; however the advantages far outweigh the cost. Because dual pane windows are formed from two panes of glass with a small space in between that is often with a non-toxic gas such as argon, they are better at insulating. This will product items in your home from sun damage as well as severely limiting the amount of heat that comes in during the summer and out during the winter. As a result you will see a significant difference in your heating and cooling bill . Another, advantage to dual pane windows is noise reduction. This is particularly important to those who live on high traffic streets and who have to constantly live with sound of traffic. Dual pane windows are remarkably easy to clean and are available in various styles and designs. With the outsides of your windows complete, you can then tackle the task of improving the insides with some custom wood blinds that can protect them from the inside. There are many things that you can do to dress up your new windows, such as blinds, shades and shutters. For more tips and ideas visit the Next Day Blinds website , there you will find a list of products, samples, and suggestions to finish off your new window look. Make the investment in your home and in your windows, there is no way to loose.
She was in New York because her cousin had told her that she knew some people who were looking for singers. She wasn’t a singer, but had a feeling that she might like to be. This was back in those days when it was easier to try things in public, and no one would remember your experiments, so it was possible to grow in outward directions. New York has shifted in many ways since those days, but there are still great luxury hotels here where you can hole up and make some decisions about these kinds of life changes. In those days, the only real improvement over today was in the freedom of choice in expression.
So she was in New York, living in the glory days of Nico, who became a certain kind of role model for her, and a stuttering dream for me. Everything stuttered then, because we were always wide awake and getting wider as the day wore on. My face was usually somewhere tattooed on the inside of her head, and she said she would focus on that, and sing to that. She hadn’t started singing yet, but when she did start, that’s what she was going to do. There weren’t very many of us in those days with our strange combination of genuine heart and deep suspicion.
Or perhaps it’s better to say that everyone in those days had that strange combination. But people of our tribe didn’t talk to each other, because of the mistrust, and that can make it difficult for a tribe to ever get to know their own numbers. For a few short moments, though, she had my number in her brain, and I had hers, and those numbers were the only numbers that would matter. Nico would perform at the Knitting Factory, and when we would go, we would float, close to the bodies we’d been born with.
My good friend Mike is visiting me this weekend from Sacramento, California and we have had a great time. Today we spent most of the day in Tempe. He has only been to Phoenix once before and that was actually only for a day. He’s not at all familiar with the Valley so I wanted to take him around and visit some of the standard popular areas. Of course one of these had to be Mill Avenue in Tempe, and it was a beautiful day to be down there. We actually started out with a stop at the Wild Flower Bread next to Changing Hands Bookstore because he wanted to find a book on gluten free cooking for his mom. It was nearing lunch so I had one of their salads and he had a chicken sandwich.
After he found the book he was looking for we headed down to the Mill Avenue area and parked close to Tempe Town Lake. There was some kind of an event happening at the beach park there was a live cover band playing though I don’t know the name of the band. There were quite a few people down there and we listened to the music and walked along the water’s edge. We also walked up Mill Avenue stopped in at some of the shops. There’s a place that sells bamboo based clothing and I bought a cool t-shirt there. Around the corner there was another small store where Mike bought a small ASU themed toy basketball and hoop for his sons.
Mike love’s hotel lounges and we were going to stop at one of the Tempe hotels but needed to get back into Phoenix because we had tickets for a show at Space 55 downtown. We spent quite a bit of time walking along through old town and thought about getting some food at Monti’s on our way back to the car, but like I said, time was short so we didn’t do that either. Mike’s leaving tomorrow and while we had a great time, it’s always kind of sad to have guests like this because the more fun you have the more emphasis it puts on the departure. Oh well, I’ll visit him this summer.
If you’ve come to Florida and its many beautiful beaches, why go to a water theme park? Isn’t there enough water all around us, anyway? Well, the oceans don’t have River Rapids or the Tree Top Drop, but Shipwreck Island Waterpark does. This park has a little something for everyone: thrill rides, family rides, even toddler rides, for that matter. There are size restrictions on some of these attractions (48 inches for the Tree Top Drop, for instance), so a visit to the theme park’s website may help to determine who in your family may ride which ride. You’ll also find that this Panama Beach, Florida, water park sells its tickets according not to age, but to height! For guests fifty inches or taller, it’s thirty-two dollars. For guests between thirty-five and fifty inches, it’s only twenty-seven dollars. Anyone under thirty-five inches, the park is free! Apparently, there are some advantages to having a shorter stature!
Once inside the park, there’s a generous array of rides from which to choose, and they’re divided into categories based on the amount of excitement one might receive. In the thrill ride category, you’ll find River Rapids, Tree Top Drop and the Pirates Plunge; the latter two look especially daring, considering the heights involved. The family rides include everything from White Knuckle River to Lazy River, from the Ocean Motion Wave Pool to the the Great Shipwreck, Flume Zoom, and Skull Island. The tadpole rides is presumably for those on the shorter end of the scale (or at least the very young), with names such as Silly Sub, Pelican and Frog.
If you’re planning a trip to Panama City Beach, then you might want to find a room, grab your swimsuits, and head out to the water park! Of course, you might actually like to go to the real beaches, too. They’re not bad, either!
For many businesses, the tight economy has put them in extremely difficult situations. Many companies are experiencing cutbacks, layoffs, and downsizing, which for many is just the tip of the iceberg. While many of these cuts are necessary to keep the business running, one thing that should not be cut is employee training. It is an often under-appreciated aspect of the workplace that is too often cut to make way for other less important things. While it may seem justified at the time, there are several reasons, for both the employer’s and employee’s sake, why this should not be so.
One of the reasons that employee training seminar are often cut is that employers do not see the benefit for them and for the business. However, research has shown otherwise. Employees who receive in-depth, personal training are more likely to stay with a company. This is important in an age where people often bounce from job to job every few years. Also, employees who are properly trained, know what they are doing, and know what is expected of them are not only going to be more productive but they will also be more efficient. This will not only help improve the profit margins but will also make payroll dollars more effective.
While your business is getting a boost, employee training tells a hard working employee that a) they are valuable enough to train and b) they have some job security in a time when there is not much to hold on to. Building employee morale and knowledge are just a few of the ways that you can help build their loyalty to you and your company. When morale is low, productivity decreases.
Before you cut employee training out of your businesses budget, think about how much you are willing to risk not only with current employees but future employees as well.
For something different, when choosing hotels in New York City, the boutique variety may be the way to go. It’s a unique way in which to experience one of the world’s great cities, and one of the best ways to relax after exploring all that Manhattan Island has to offer, from the neighborhoods of Soho and Tribeca, to Downtown Midtown and Upper Manhattan. All of these places offer great places to stay, but also excellent places in which to experience the culture of the city, from cuisine to clubs, from theater to perhaps one of the most famous parks on the planet, Central Park.
Central Park started out when New York City was only a half million strong (as compared to today’s population of eight million plus) around 1844, one hundred and sixty-six years ago. The editor of the Evening Post, William Cullen Bryant, wanted to establish a green, open space in the city; otherwise, the fast-growing town would eradicate the natural surroundings. The land was purchased for five million dollars between Eighth and Fifth Avenues and from 106th to 59th Street. In 1857, a competition was held in order to design the new park.
As the 19th Century continued, engineers and architects tried to figure out a way to turn the purchased land, which was muddy and swampy, into a place people actually wanted to visit. The solution was to bring in topsoil from New Jersey, about five hundred thousand cubit feet of it. Boulders were blown apart with gun-powder. Bridges and arches, thirty-six in all, were constructed, as well as six bodies of water.
Today you can enjoy over 843 acres of parkland, including woodlands and lawns (136 and 250 acres each ), as well as seven bodies of water (150 acres). You may dine at the Tavern on the Green or visit the Belvedere Castle (created in 1872 — at one time you were able to go to the castle to view the Croton Reservoir, but this reservoir was filled in to become the Great Lawn decades ago. The Park is one of the key features of the city, with about 9,000 benches and 58 miles of paths for pedestrians. Check out the Carousel, as well as all the sculptures (51 in all).
Central Park is an excellent tonic for whenever the city’s concrete and skyscrapers become overwhelming, a fact for which you may thank William Cullen Bryant.