If you are looking to add a little comfort to your outdoor space and incorporate it into your living space you have plenty of options. Your very lucky if you have some outside space to call your own. Why not use outdoor rugs to decorate your outdoor space.
Whether your outdoor space is a deck, patio, or pool you can create useable outdoor space at a great price. If you live in a part of the world where you can use your outdoor space all year round you’re a lucky person. If you’re like the rest of us and only get to use it for part of the year. The choice of outdoor rugs is even more important because they will stand up the moisture, snow, and rain.
Remember turning your outdoor space into useable space is very much like decorating a room in your home. It needs its own personal touch and style. Choose comfy furniture, add some accessories such as potted flowers, some garden ornaments, and even some candles. Candles set a wonderful relaxing mood outdoors. If you live in an area that is prone to wind purchase the hurricane style candles.
Use ornaments and candles to define your outdoor area. Both are very pleasing to the eye. Now that you’ve got ideas about how you are going to use your space don’t forget about the flooring. Outdoor carpets work very well and there are so many choices available in color and texture. They’ve come a long way from only a few years’ ago.
What type of decor you’ll have to work with will depend on what type of walls you have to work with. You might have real walls or you may have to build imaginary defining walls. You may have a fence to work with, a hedge, a tall tree, or a row of plants. If there are no real walls you can use your outdoor carpet combined with rows of plants or ornaments to define your space.
If you’ve got room install a few magazine racks that have some garden magazine in them or home decor type magazines. Place them in a handy spot where you or your guests can easily grab one and relax reading.
Remember your outside space should be cozy and comfortable. Choose outdoor rugs that compliment the rest of the space and add a touch of warmth and color to the area. Treat it like an extension of your home.
Besides a wonderful selection of outdoor carpets there are many fabrics that are now available to withstand outdoor conditions like rain so you can go all out with your decor. Don’t stop at the rugs, add some throws, some pillows, and anything else that strikes your fancy. You might want to consider a large umbrella which can protect you from both rain and sun.
Not only will your outdoor rugs define your outdoor area they will provide cushioning for the feet and provide protection from the concrete. There’s nothing else that will dress up a deck as much as an outdoor rug. They are designed to deal with water and moisture so you don’t have to worry about mold or mildew and they will stand many hours of sunshine before beginning to fade.
You can use outdoor rugs to decorate your outdoor your space and what’s even better, is it is very affordable. So why not get started right now? Picture you and your friends enjoying a wonderful evening on your new outdoor space.
About The Author
John Murray makes it easy to go through the carpet buying process and provides tips to keep your carpet lasting long. To learn more and receive your free mini-course visit: http://www.carpets-guide.com.
Direct Answers - Column for the week of December 13, 2004
I’m in a long-distance relationship that is five months old; of those five months we have spent a total of 15 days together spread over a two month period. As in all relationships it was wonderful in the beginning. We spent long hours on the phone getting to know each other and catching up on what was going on in each other’s life.
About two months ago I noticed his calls were not as frequent as they used to be. He says it’s because he’s busy. I accept this because I know his job is demanding, but somehow I feel it’s not too much to ask for a phone call a day. As it stands now, we haven’t seen each other in three months, and if I don’t call him, I don’t think he’ll call until a week passes without a word from me.
He says he loves me. I want to believe he knows what love is. I’m willing to do what it takes to make our relationship work, but I feel I’m giving 95% and he is giving 50%. How can I make him open his eyes and see what his blasé attitude toward our relationship is doing to me?
Sydney
Sydney, in Dean Koontz’s novel “Odd Thomas,” a couple goes to a county fair. In the back of an arcade tent they find an unusual machine. The top of the machine is glassed in. Inside the glass is a realistic-looking gypsy fortuneteller complete with colorful headscarf.
Another couple stands in front of the glass. They feed a coin into the machine, and the woman asks if she and her boyfriend will have a long and happy marriage. The boyfriend pushes the answer button and a card falls into a brass tray. The card reads: “A cold wind blows, and each night seems to last a thousand years.”
Not satisfied with the answer, they drop in another coin, and the woman again asks if they will have a long, happy marriage. This time the card reads: “The fool leaps from the cliff, but the winter lake below is frozen.” On the third try they get a card which reads: “The orchard of blighted trees produces poisonous fruit.”
Eight times the couple drop in a coin, and each time they receive a similar answer. They bicker and move away. Then the second couple, who clearly love each other, step forward and deposit a coin. A card falls which reads: “You are destined to be together forever.”
Sydney, we asked the gypsy fortuneteller your question. A card dropped down. It read: “A cold wind blows, and each night?”
Wayne & Tamara
Young Hemingway
I work with a girl, and this girl couldn’t be more different from other girls I’ve met. Besides her eyes, her personality is one of the best I’ve ever seen, and she is gorgeous.
I recently graduated high school. I didn’t date because I know how school relationships usually turn out, so I just skipped the drama. I also believe I matured mentally faster than most of my classmates. I am not trying to be cocky, but I am pretty charming and believe I know how to make a relationship work.
You might be thinking, “Why not ask her out?” That’s the problem. She is 24 and I am 18. Do you think asking her out is a good idea?
Brandon
Brandon, you have yet to handle the matador’s cape, but you feel ready to enter the bullring. We admire your bravado, but bravado gets many a novice bullfighter gored.
When you avoided high school relationships, you also avoided the experience gained from them. At 24, this woman has a third again your life experience.
If your bravado is sufficient to strut into the ring and face the bull head-on, ask her out. We just hope emergency medical technicians are standing by.
Wayne & Tamara
About The Author
Authors and columnists Wayne and Tamara Mitchell can be reached at www.WayneAndTamara.com.
Send letters to: Direct Answers, PO Box 964, Springfield, MO 65801 or email: DirectAnswers@WayneAndTamara.com.
Debt levels are at an all time high in the UK. The younger generation tend to be feeling the pinch the most, but parents are increasingly being required to bail them out, often at great expense to their own limited mortgage or retirement savings.
It has become almost accepted as a fact of life that graduates will begin their careers with a considerable level of personal debt. The Association of Investment Trust Companies found that on average students expected to graduate with £7,208 of debt, while parents believed it would be nearer to £9,741, however the real average was found to be currently running at £13,501. Graduates then need to service credit cards, take out a mortgage, then cover the payments, repay university loans, not to mention the pressure to start saving earlier, and save more, for their retirement, whilst the basic state pension increasingly becomes inadequate. The government revealed in June that student debt for 2003-04 was seven times higher than they were in 1994-95 and the Student Loans Company has shown that debts owed to them has risen to more than £13bn.
It is not only students who face financial difficulties early in life. Consumer Credit Counselling Services ? Scotland, has indicated that young adults in general, under the age of 25, now account for more than 10 per cent of the estimated 32,000 people who have fallen into severe arrears on non-mortgage debts of more than £1 billion.
Malcolm Hurlston, Chairman of the Consumer Credit Counselling Services (CCCS) said, “It is noticeable that young people are accounting for an increasing proportion and the number of them seeking assistance has risen by about 25 per cent over the past two years or so.”
Analysts have been bracing themselves for news of a sharp increase in adverse debt levels from the major high street banks following report figures of a 21 per cent increase in bad debts levels at Lloyds TSB. City analysts expect HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland to declare that bad debt charges have risen by around 20% in their personal banking businesses, and Barclays, HSBC and Alliance & Leicester are all expected to tell a similar tale of rising loan defaults. Citigroup analysts are expecting bad debt charges from its retail banking division to rise about 24% in the first half of this year to £230m, while last year HBOS’s provisions for bad debt rose from £1bn to £1.2bn.
Keith Stevens, of the chartered accountants firm Wilkins Kennedy, said: “Creditors profit by lending money to people and collecting interest, and the longer they can keep that cycle going the better for them. Unless borrowers own property of significant value, it’s often not in creditors’ interest to call in their debts.” He also continued that he believed some creditors were increasingly taking a hands-off approach, allowing debtors to pile up large amounts of debt, and then collecting interest and penalty charges for as long as borrowers were able to continue paying. This has lead to an increase in the number of borrowers filing for bankruptcy themselves when previously they would have been forced into it earlier by their lenders.
House repossessions have also significantly increased over the past year, with the Council of Mortgage Lenders announcing 4,640 home repossessions during the first half of 2005, compared with 3,070 for the last half of 2004. Government figures show that there has also been an increase in the number of homeowners being taken to court for mortgage arrears.
Some of the major banks and financial service providers have taken the initiative and started to help police the growing adverse debt problems with HSBC announcing that it will share their full credit record, of both positive and negative information, on its personal customers with other regulated financial services companies through the Experian, Equifax and CallCredit credit reference agencies, in efforts to keep tabs on its consumers’ debt.
Michael Geoghegan, Chief Executive of HSBC said: “It is no more in the interests of a customer to borrow more money than they can afford than it is for a bank to lend them the money.” The move has been widely heralded by analysts, as Michael Geoghegan added, “It is the only way to ensure that lenders properly understand the full financial exposure of customers before they let them sign up to debt that some simply can’t afford.”
This all comes amidst media pressure for financial firms to become more responsible. One case widely featured in the news concerns a couple who took out the £5,740 loan at 34.9% APR for house improvements, but they were already in arrears on two prior mortgages, and became unable to keep up the loan repayments. Over the course of the 15 year loan term the amount repayable had escalated to £384,000. Attempts by the loan company to still enforce the huge debt, eventually had to be fought off by the couple through the law courts.
The couple urged others considering taking out a loan to seek advice and to, “obviously read the small print and ask the questions that perhaps you don’t think about at the time, and just make sure you know exactly what the consequences are should anything go wrong”.
There are currently many sources of information to help consumers make decisions regarding their finances and debt levels. Financial comparison sites like Moneynet can provide impartial information on loans, mortgages, adverse credit, etc, to find the best product for individual circumstances. Consumer help sites like the National Debtline provide free confidential and independent advice on how to deal with debt problems, and the Citizens Advice Bureau are there with trained volunteers to help with legal, monetary and other problems, through a free, independent and confidential advice service.
The more help and information that is available to consumers and the more responsible the lending agencies become, the safer finance will be for the most vulnerable who are looking to borrow money, to prevent them getting into un-repayable levels of debt, however these services can only be of help if people actually use them.
Malcolm Hurlston of CCCS said, “We are advising about 4,000 people in Scotland and I would estimate that our figures represent only about one in eight of those who need help”.
Financial education is something needs to be provided at an early stage to make people realise the importance of taking on the accountability for their own finances, as well as highlighting where to access help for when it is required. Budgeting is a subject many school leavers have little practical knowledge of, but one which they desperately need to be made aware of before they start to control their own finances.
Where there is existing advice or help, this must be made available and known to all in order to prevent more people getting too deeply into debt, or falling prey to loan sharks like the recent case of Mark Washington Johnson who has been jailed in Birmingham for nearly four years. Mr Johnson was found guilty of charging up to 8,000 per cent interest on loans, taking Social Security benefit books or National Insurance numbers as “security” for the unauthorised loans and then piling on default charges for missed payments. If we are to prevent this sort of abuse occurring to the weakest members of society then public awareness needs to be raised and the most vulnerable people given the assistance best suited to understand and control their own money.
Resources:
Financial and legal advice - Citizens Advice Bureau
Mortgage and loan comparisons - Moneynet
Richard lives in Edinburgh, occasionally writing for the personal finance blog Cashzilla, drinking too much coffee, and considering the possibility of there being intelligent life on Earth.
A New Diet For a Baby
by: Yana Mikheeva
It seems nothing else can be invented in this eternal sphere of baby’s nutrition. Juices, fruits, semolina However, science moves forward. Unfortunately, ecology too. There’re more and more babies today, who cannot bear protein food that we think is so necessary for a growing organism. But, alas, almost all babies don’t “accept” cow’s milk now, and many of them even “refuse” from the most hypoallergic one - soy milk. Now even formulas for premature babies are prepared with minimum protein.
It is proved that great protein load while the first year of life leads to adiposity, cardio-sclerosis, nephritic pathologies and hypertension in future. We have quite opposite attitude to classic babies’ paps now. Substances, damaging a baby’s alimentary canal were found in them.
So, scientists have to re-invent a baby formula again and again. These changes touched not only modern adapted milk formulas, but also supplementary feeding - the first “adult” food in a baby’s ration. So, alas, we have to refuse from old approved methods and meet new ones.
First of all, let’s talk about changes in a routine of feeding. It’s not a secret today that inner biological clock of a human organism is highly individual. And as all people are divided into “larks” and “owls” according to a routine of sleep, as every one of us has own periods of highest intellectual and physical activity and slackness, pain resistance etc. These external displays are conditioned by work of internals: nervous, locomotive, immune systems, and, of course, digestion system. We, adult people, eat not according to a routine, but when we want, not thinking about all these difficulties. And, as it turns out, it’s right.
However, we’ve been refusing our babies in this right for a long time. We nursed them according to a strict schedule, in spite of the fact that a baby had just fallen asleep and just didn’t want to eat. Of course, such training can teach to a routine. But whether this forced regulation of bio-clock according to a formal schedule will be good for a baby? And the damage is clear: a baby eats unwillingly and little, and in “untimely” hours he feels hunger and problems with digestion begin
Now it is considered that free feeding is better. This doesn’t mean that the routine will change from day to day to a baby’s liking. A baby will just determine his hours of feeding by himself for some certain period of time, and will keep to them, believe it. Probably, these hours will slightly differ from those that were imposed on him. The only difficulty is that a mother will have to learn to distinguish a hungry cry of a baby from any other.
Traditionally, pediatrists recommended giving juices to babies since they are 3 weeks old. But recent researches showed that this is of little benefit - allergic reactions are too frequent, alimentary canal is not ready for such food yet, and juices can hardly fill up lack of vitamins in a baby’s organism. It will be better for mother to eat more fruits and drink natural juices - then a baby will receive all vitamins with mother’s milk. Now we recommend acquainting a baby with fruit juices only when he is 4 months old, beginning from several drops. On no account give some “exotic” juice to a baby as his first juice, moreover super-allergenic - citrus. (This concerns first fruits too). Apple is least allergenic and contains gentle pectic substances.
Now some words about paps. Now pediatrists reject hard many usual paps: a substance called glyodine was found in them. This is mucopolysaccharide, which is situated in some herbs’ shells (rye, oats, wheat, barley) and causes necrosis (gangrene) of bowels fibers, due to which absorption of nutritive materials occurs. Modern science rehabilitated only rice, buckwheat and corn paps. And classic semolina turned out to be the most harmful.
A baby, which “sits” only on usual semolina, will suffer from chronic gastritis, colitis and have susceptibility to oncological diseases of intestines, as experts consider. There’s another big minus of semolina: it is rich in phytin. Phytin changes a baby’s intestines medium the way that calcium and vitamin D, which come to a baby’s organism with food, are not absorbed, passing along a baby’s organism as a useless transit. And this is a straight road to rachitis. Doctors also see harm from notorious semolina in deterioration of iron absorption. That’s why rachitis is often accompanied by anemia.
Of course, this doesn’t mean semolina is prohibited for ever. You can include it into a baby’s ration when he reaches 1 year old, when normal work of intestines is regulated already and its fermentative system its mature enough. But you shouldn’t start a baby’s supplementary feeding from cereal paps - this is one of new concepts of baby’s nutrition.
Read more about baby nutrition at http://www.womanspassions.com
