Two-in-One Rockin’ Cruisin’ Duck & Honey Pony Combination Stroller
July 11, 2008 by sheerah77
FAO Schwarz is having a sale. Check out the toys we bought for the baby!
Honey Pony Combination Stroller
Two-in-One Rockin’ Cruisin’ Duck
Jessica Whiskey River Bull Ride
July 5, 2008 by sheerah77Short Ride
Long Ride
Making History
July 5, 2008 by laceyrae
By Tiffany Thompson, Staff Writer
Thursday, July 3, 2008 July 03, 2008 01:34 pm
— History was made Tuesday in the city of Locust as Assistant Police Chief Frank Hartsell purchased the first legal bottle of malt liquor in the city.
After making the purchase, which was part of the grand opening and ribbon cutting celebration for the city’s new ABC store, Hartsell then donated the bottle to the Locust Historical Society and Museum.
The store opening came after residents of Locust voted in February to allow the sale of alcohol within the city limits.
“I want to thank the people of this town who came out and voted for the alcohol referendum. They are the ones who made this possible,” said Joe Bishop, chairman of the Locust ABC board.
Other members of the Locust ABC board include Lee Timberlake and Mike Harwood. Former Councilman Harry Fletcher is the store’s manager.
“We have a great staff here. I couldn’t be anymore pleased with the way this store has come together and the people we have working here,” Fletcher said.
After nearly five months, two of which were spent waiting on approval for the ABC site, the store finally opened. It will be open Mondays-Saturdays from 10 a.m.-9 p.m.
The store is in West Main Plaza on N.C. 24-27 beside Stanly Community College (SCC) Crutchfield Campus.
Locust Mayor Harold Greene, along with several members of the Stanly County Chamber of Commerce and the state ABC board from Raleigh, were in attendance at the ribbon cutting.
“I want to thank the city for voting for the sale of alcohol. Now the dollars our residents spend on alcohol can stay in the city and benefit us,” Greene said.
The opening of the store came just in time for the Fourth of July holiday, so Greene reminded everyone to have fun, but stay safe and obey the laws.
Contact Tiffany Thompson at (704) 982-2121 ext. 24 or snaponline24@carolina.rr.com.
Refinement of the frontal lobes can continue into the early 20s
July 2, 2008 by sheerah77Brain storm: some brain areas are mature by the end of childhood. But the frontal and parietal lobes, responsible for such things as planning and self-control, continue maturing through the teenage years
The frontal lobes
The frontal lobes play important roles in a variety of higher psychological processes - like planing, decision making, impulse control, language, memory, and others. There is mounting evidence that neuronal circuitry in the frontal lobes is shaped and fine tuned during adolescence, and that experience plays a prominent role in these changes.
The frontal lobes play important roles in a variety of higher psychological processes - like planing, decision making, impulse control, language, memory, and others. There is mounting evidence that neuronal circuitry in the frontal lobes is shaped and fine tuned during adolescence, and that experience plays a prominent role in these changes.
Until scientists began to employ MRI imaging a few years ago, the teenage brain was thought to be largely finished. After all, brain size usually doesn’t change that much after childhood. Many assumed it only required fine-tuning in preparation for adulthood.
“Now we’re finding out how wrong we were,” says Richard Restak, a neuropsychiatrist and author of “The Secret Life of the Brain”. “The teenage brain is a work in progress that we’re only beginning to understand.”
From the thickening and then thinning of gray matter to the development of the all-important frontal lobes, the brain undergoes dramatic change during adolescence. What parents once blamed on hormones is actually “a grand upheaval of the brain,” says Barbara Strauch, a medical science editor and author of “The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries About the Teenage Brain Tell Us About Our Kids”.
This upheaval affects everything from schoolwork and sleep patterns to teens’ propensity for taking risks.
Risk-taking: Blame immature frontal lobes
All parents want their children to explore the world. But what if the family curfew has become a joke? What if a teenager exhibits behavior that not only worries an adult but also can be dangerous to the kid?
Ron Dahl, a pediatrician and child psychiatric researcher at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, says a desire for thrills and taking risks is a building block of adolescence. The frontal lobes help put the brakes on such behavior, but they’re also one of the last areas of the brain to develop fully. Located right behind the forehead, the frontal lobes actually grow larger than adult size in puberty. But the process is far from complete; refinement of the frontal lobes can continue into the early 20s.
“This is a crucial stage of development,” says Mel Levine, director of the University of North Carolina’s clinical center for the study of development and learning, “because the frontal lobes enable a person to know where they’re heading as opposed to having no idea of what the consequences will be.”
In calm situations, teenagers can rationalize almost as well as adults. But stress can hijack what Dahl calls “hot cognition” and decision-making. The frontal lobes cannot cope.
Dahl points out that studies are far from complete, but he and other experts contend that higher levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine make teens hungry for stimulation, including risky behavior.
Academics: “Wow! It suddenly makes sense”
Besides the frontal lobes, other key areas of the brain are transformed during adolescence. The corpus callosum, a thick bundle of nerve fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain, enlarges. The anterior cingulate gyrus, which helps us stay focused, matures, as do key areas in the cerebral cortex that recently have been linked to language development and spatial reasoning. Such development may explain why things will suddenly click for a struggling geometry student: The brain finally can make sense of the subject material.
Several experts contend that music, math and sports can help structure the brain faster and better than simply hanging out or watching television. “The adolescent brain exhibits a tremendous plasticity,” Restak says. “Indeed, the adolescent’s choices determine the quality of his brain.”
Time: Teens really do need extra sleep
But even the best choices, inside or outside of the classroom, will do little good if a teen is too tired. Levine recommends that parents set up a daily schedule at home and stick to it. Instead of telling a teen he can watch television after he does his homework, try saying, “First, spend two hours every evening on brain work. After that, you can watch TV.”
Early research indicates that too many timed deadlines, at school or at home, reward impulsive behavior and do little to accentuate the frontal lobes and develop other crucial areas of the teen brain.
Melatonin, an important brain chemical, can wreak havoc in an adolescent’s world. Melatonin helps make us drowsy, and in teens it’s secreted later at night. Sleep specialist Mary Carskadon, professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, says such changes in melatonin production push teens to stay up later. Her surveys and field studies show that teens average 7 1/2 hours of sleep a night. She maintains that for brain development, nine hours should be the goal.
“Most teens are very sleep-deprived,” Carskadon says. “That’s when problems in the development of the frontal cortex and many of those synapses emerge. We are only now learning about the [effect] of sleep on learning and memory. And what’s more important during adolescence than learning and memory?”
Parents: You can help new brain cells connect
In childhood, brain cells grow quickly, like new stalks on a plant. As adolescence accelerates, there’s an overabundance of new connections in the brain. As teens mature, some connections are pruned away, increasing the brain’s efficiency. The chance to help shape this pruning makes parents more crucial, not less.
“This is a sensitive time, when feelings are becoming linked with rational thought,” Dahl says. “The stakes are very high, and parents need to feel that it’s OK to be monitoring what their adolescents are doing.”
When Strauch was researching her book, Primal Teen, she often brought her two teens along. As a result, she found herself more empathic.
“There’s so much going in the brain, and it should give us hope,” she says. “We should not really give up on any kid. They may be sitting in a lump and sleeping until noon and have pink hair, but there are all kinds of changes going on under that pink hair.”
Tim Wendel, the father of one teenager, is the author of “The New Face of Baseball”, a look at 100 years of Latino baseball players, to be published next month by HarperCollins.
bees
June 29, 2008 by sheerah77.
Not sure where they all came from but these bees drank all the liquid out of the feeder and left.
bees, originally uploaded by shee_rah77.
THE SPOILED UNDER-30 CROWD!!!
June 24, 2008 by sheerah77If you are 30 or older you will think this is hilarious!!!!When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning … uphill BOTH waysYadda, yadda, yadda
And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it!
But now that… I’m over the ripe old age of Thirty, I can’t help but look around and notice the youth of today.
You’ve got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia!
And I hate to say it but you kids today, you don’t know how good you’ve got it!
I mean, when I was a kid we didn’t have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!! There was no e-mail!! We had to actually write somebody a letter…with a pen!
Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!
There were no MP3’s or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself!
Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ’d usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!
We didn’t have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that’s it! And we didn’t have fancy Caller ID Boxes either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn’t know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!
We didn’t have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like ‘Space Invaders’ and ‘Asteroids’. Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever!
And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!
When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy or some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn’t see, you were just screwed!
Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 channels and there was no on-screen menu and no remote control! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel and there was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning. Do you hear what I’m saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little ******!!
And we didn’t have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove or go build a frigging fire..
Imagine that! If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid Jiffy Pop thing and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You’re spoiled. You guys wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 1980!
Regards,
The over 30 Crowd
Funny! But, I do remember having call waiting, microwaves, & remotes.
Deruyter Lake Camp Demolition
June 24, 2008 by sheerah77These are the pictures of tearing down the camp. It took Doug, Luke, Bob and other people’s help to tear it down in 3 days. The Fire place is still standing which Doug hopes to move it on Hinshaw.
Congrads Megan-Class of 2008
June 13, 2008 by sheerah77
Aubrey Whittaker-Recipient of the 2008 Student Community Service Award
June 12, 2008 by sheerah77
Attending Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Community Service:
Broome County Dairy Promotion Team
Oakdale Mall Farm Days volunteer
Broome County Farm Bureau auction volunteer
Teaching people about the dairy industry is important to me. Knowing that I can answer someoen’s question and have an impact on their lives is the best lesson I’ve learned.
Aubrey Whittaker
Whitney Point Central School District
Winken, Blinken, & Nod
June 11, 2008 by sheerah77I have this Dolly Toy Co. wall hanging from 1957 for the baby’s room.
For some reason, I thought it was 3 Men in a Tub, but at closer look that did not make sense we discovered this weekend. So, I researched and found that it is actually “Winken, Blinken, & Nod”, which is a Eugene Field’s poem from 1889.
The original title was Dutch Lullaby. The poem is a fantasy bed-time story of three fishermen sailing and fishing in the stars. Their boat is a wooden shoe. The fishermen symbolize a sleepy child’s blinking eyes and nodding head.
Has anyone else heard of this nursery rhyme? I have not and I asked a few others who have no idea what it is either.
Here is the poem…
Winken, Blinken and Nod
by Eugene Field, 1850-1895.
found in the Oxford Book of Children’s Verse.
Winken, Blinken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe –
Sailed off on a river of crystal light,
Into a sea of dew.
“Where are you going, and what do you wish?”
The old moon asked the three.
“We have come to fish for the herring fish
That live in the beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we!”
As they rocked in the wooden shoe,
And the wind that sped them al night long
Ruffled the waves of dew.
The little stars were the herring fish
That lived in the beautiful sea –
“Now cast your nets wherever you wish –
Never afeard are we”;
So cried the stars to the fisherman three:
To the stars in the twinkling foam –
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe
Bringing the fisherman home;
‘Twas all so pretty a sail it seemed
As if it could not be,
And some folks thought ’twas a dream they’d dreamed
Of sailing that beautiful sea –
But I shall name you the fishermen three:
And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoes that sailed the skies
Is the wee one’s trundle-bed.
So shut your eyes while mother sings
Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
As you rock in the misty sea,
Where the old shoe rocked the fisherman three:
Disney did a cartoon in 1938 of Winken, Blinken, & Nod
