Before and After: March 2011

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Shaklee’s EARTH DAY SPECIAL!!!

I am so excited to let you all know Shaklee is offering…

FREE SHAKLEE MEMBERSHIP with only a $30 order!!

That is our BEST Join Free Offer yet!

A Shaklee membership gives you…

15% discount (off retail prices) on product purchases

Special promotions, offers and discounts

Unconditional money-back guarantee

Access to MyShaklee.com, Shaklee’s center for health and wellness news and information from Shaklee’s Health Sciences Team, and product experts

There are NO MINIMUMS to maintain your membership! :)

SHAKLEE WANTS TO HELP 50,000 FAMILIES GET HEALTHIER IN THE NEXT 7 WEEKS!

I am on a mission to help them! :)

Consider this: one family deciding to convert to our non-toxic biodegradable household cleaners keeps the equivalent of 5,000 bottles of conventional "ready-to-use" glass cleaner out of landfills. What would it mean if 50,000 families did the same? A great big thanks from the planet, and from people all over the world who share this wonderful home we call Earth.

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If you have been considering becoming a distributor, you can now get more!!! Contact me for more info.

***NEW MEMBERS WILL ALSO RECIEVE A HOUSE OF GRACE SPECAIL***

GO HERE TO ORDER!!!!

Have a great week!

Bonnie

How to Organize Your Bill-Paying System

Welcome to Week 7 of our Organize your Life series!

If you are just joining in, please link up your blog here so we can all help motivate each other!

I am reading and using the book called, Organize Now! by Jennifer Ford Berry, to help me organize my life and before we get started today, I would like to share a message form Jennifer!

Hello everyone!

I have been following along with your posts from House of Grace and I told Bonnie I had to stop in and say hi! First of all, I am very inspired by all of your great ideas. Organizing is truly my passion so I love reading how the book is changing lives. I thank each and every one of you for purchasing and sharing your experience with Organize Now!

I have a section on my website for posting Reviews of Organize Now. Please feel free to email me your favorite post about a chapter in the book and I will post your link to my site. Just include the name of your blog and the URL in your email.

I am also on Facebook and Twitter and would love to connect with all of you. If you have any questions while reading the book please feel free to contact me.

Happy Organizing!

Jennifer Ford Berry

Thanks Jennifer for that message! I hope you will all head over to her site and follow her (I do)! I also hope that when you link up here, you will also head on over to Jennifer’s facebook page leave your link there too! (again, I do!)

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You can buy the book here…

This week is Organizing Your Bill-Paying System!

There are a lot of different ways to pay your bills!

Some people have paper everywhere and hope they paid everything on time and others have a system that works for them.

Having a system, even a simple one, can make your bill paying a lot smoother!

GOALS FOR THIS WEEK!

Set a Pay Billing Schedule!

You should pick a day that you pay your bills whether weekly or bi-weekly AND PUT IT IN YOUR PLANNER!!! This is important and you don’t want to forget to pay a bill, especially a mortgage payment. We have a system that works for us. My husband brings in the mail and I sort it. I immediately THROW out ALL junk mail. Then, I place all the incoming mail in a file and the bills in another file. I pay most of our bills and I actually really like paying them the day we get them. I know, that is not a real schedule, I will try to pick one day for that! But we do schedule our mortgage and credit card bills. My husband is in charge of those biggies. My husband gets paid bi-weekly and he pays our mortgage after one check and the credit card bill after the other. That way, we make sure the big one are taken care of! Our system in a team effort, ha! This works for us.

I showed you HERE, how I file my mail. I keep my mail “file” box right in my kitchen, where I pay my bills.

Set up a bill paying section.

Get all your stamps, envelopes, calculator, address labels, etc together. I have a drawer in my kitchen where I keep all my stuff together. But, besides my magazine subscription bills, I can’t remember the last time I sent a check in the mail. I told you all last week that we do everything online. I LOVE paying bills online!!! It saves me time because I don’t have to fill out a check and envelope (not that it’s hard, it is just one more thing!). It saves my money because I am not buying envelopes and stamps. Also, I can trust that my check will not get lost in the mail. I can also see how much money is in the account.

Write paid.

After you pay your bills, write paid on it! You don’t want to double pay a bill! To make it easier to pay bills, try to only have one credit card! The less bills to pay the easier!!

Record your bill.

It is good to keep track of all your expense, so record what you just paid. This is also a great time to check your balance!

File.

To keep things organized, FILE your bill after you pay it! Keep a file for all paid bills.

I keep my paid bills in a file cabinet. This makes it easy to file and find later if I need to look at it again.

For more tips, please read, Organize Now! I have been getting a lot of emails from people telling me how much they like this book. If you are looking for a helpful yet simple book to get your life in order, I highly recommend it! :) I am not getting paid to promote this book but if you order through my link, I will get a small percentage.

Thanks! :)

PAST POSTS!!!

To read the 1st week’s post, on Organizing your Mind, click HERE!

To read the 2nd week’s post, on Organizing your Schedule, click HERE!

To read the 3rd week’s post, on Organizing your Cleaning Schedule, click HERE!

To read the 4th week’s post, on Organizing your Priorities, click HERE!

To read the 5th week’s post, on Organizing your Personal Information, click HERE !

To read the 6th week’s post on Organizing your Finances, click HERE!

Do you have a bill paying system?

How do you organize them?

How has this series helped you?

Please grab a button if you are linking up!

Please link up your Bill Paying System BELOW!

Have a great day! :)

Bonnie

TODAY IS THE LAST DAY FOR THE CINCH SPECIAL!!!!

Also, don’t forget that you can get a FREE SHAKEE CINCH SAMPLER KIT (over $100 value) with the purchase of a Shaklee membership (a $19.95 one time fee to save you 15% off ALL orders including your first order) or ShakleeDistributorship ($39.95) AND a $70 order at member price (MN). To get this special, place the products in your cart, and then it will tell you that you qualify for the free Cinch Sampler Kit at the top. After that, sign up as a member or distributor. You DO NOT need to place the sampler kit in your cart…it is automatic, just make sure to check if you qualify. Please note, if you become a Gold Ambassador, you do not need to place an order to get the free kit. Please email me at donahuewellness@hotmail.com for any questions. ***Plus, I will let you know of ALL OF MY NEW MEMBER SPECIALS!!!*** You can read about my Cinch results here and my sister’s amazing story here.

DEEPWATER HORIZON'S UNCOUNTED VICTIMS

(Killer whales. Photo by Pittman, courtesy NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons.)

A new paper in Conservation Letters calculates that the numbers of whales and dolphins killed in BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster could be 50 times higher than the number of carcasses found.

The authors—a high-powered list of renowned cetacean researchers from Canada, the US, Australia, and Scotland (including Scott Krause, who I filmed years ago for a documentary about North Atlantic right whales)—write of a general misperception of the Deepwater Horizon impact:

Many media reports have suggested that the spill caused only modest environmental impacts, in part because of a low number of observed wildlife mortalities, especially marine mammals.

(Atlantic spotted dolphins. Photo by Bmatulis, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Compared to the 1989 Exxon Valdez, with its iconic oiled otters and high body counts, the Deepwater Horizon seems, well, not so bad.

The authors point out that "only" 101 dead cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) were found in the Northern Gulf of Mexico as of 7 November 2010. The number's misleading though.

The issue arises when policymakers, legislators, or biologists treat these carcass-recovery counts as though they were complete counts or parameters estimated from some representative sample, when in fact, they are opportunistic observations. Our study suggests that these opportunistic observations should be taken to estimate only the bare minimum number of human-caused mortalities.

(Humpback whale. Photo by Whit Welles Wwelles14, via Wikimedia Commons.)

So how many more whales, dolphins, and porpoises actually died? That problem is tough to figure to begin with and is compounded by a dearth of data in the Gulf—a fact that will work greatly in BP's favor when the time comes to levy fines.

The Gulf of Mexico is a semi-enclosed subtropical sea that forms essentially one ecosystem with many demographically independent cetacean populations. Some of these cetacean populations, such as killer whales (Orcinus orca), false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens), melonheaded whales (Peponocephala electra), and several beaked whale species, appear to be quite small, are poorly studied, or are found in the pelagic realm where they could have been exposed to oil and yet never strand. Small, genetically isolated populations of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) could have experienced substantial losses either inshore or offshore.

(Mother and calf bottlenose dolphins. Photo by M. Herko, courtesy NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Two methods of extrapolation could shed light on how many cetaceans BP's disaster killed:

Compare abundance before the disaster to abundance after—but since we don't know the population size of whale and dolphins species in the Gulf before hand we're unlikely to notice anything short of "the most catastrophic decline" and maybe not even that.
Count the number of carcasses recovered—knowing that many will evade our count, having sunk, decayed, been scavenged, or drifted away. So adjust the counts upward to estimate total mortality. This approach is used to estimate bird deaths at power lines, where, in at least one instance, we now know that bird body counts underestimate total actual deaths by a whopping 32 percent.

The authors worked the two methods as best they could and added something more.

Given the magnitude of the spill and complexity of the response, quantifying the ecological impacts will take a long time. To contribute to this effort, we examined historical data from the Northern Gulf of Mexico to evaluate whether cetacean carcass counts in this region have previously been reliable indicators of mortality, and may therefore accurately represent deaths caused by the Deepwater Horizon/BP event.

(Sperm whale. Photo courtesy NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Their methods and analysis suggest that an average of 4,474 cetaceans died in the northern Gulf every year between 2003 and 2007 from all causes, human and natural. Yet since an average of only 17 bodies were found in those years, the body count represented only ~0.4 percent of total deaths.

Consider, for example, one sperm whale being detected as a carcass, and a necropsy identiﬁed oiling as a contributing factor in the whale’s death. If the carcass-detection rate for sperm whales is 3.4%, then it is plausible that 29 sperm whale deaths represents the best estimate of total mortality, given no additional information. If, for example, 101 cetacean carcasses were recovered overall, and all deaths were attributed to oiling, the average-recovery rate (2%) would translate to 5,050 carcasses, given the 101 carcasses detected.

Those are chilling numbers. Period. But also in light of the relatively tiny populations of cetaceans in the Gulf. Especially since most if not all cetaceans are highly social, and since oil and chemical dispersants likely injured, sickened, or killed entire clusters, schools, pods, matrilines, or groups at the same time—and may still be doing so.

The authors describe the near-lethal affect of the Exxon Valdez disaster on one well-known and well-studied pod of killer whales in Alaska.

In the ﬁrst year after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, the AT1 group of "transient" killer whales experienced a 41% loss; there has been no reproduction since the spill. Although the cause of the apparent sterility is unknown, the lesson serves as an important reminder that immediate death is not the only factor that can lead to long-term loss of population viability.

(Pilot whale mother and calf. Photo by Clark Anderson via Wikimedia Commons.)

The paper:

Rob Williams, Shane Gero, Lars Bejder, John Calambokidis, Scott D. Kraus, David Lusseau, Andrew J. Read, & Jooke Robbins (2011). Underestimating the damage: interpreting cetacean carcass recoveries in the context of the Deepwater Horizon/BP incident Conservation Letters : 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2011.00168.x

Only 1 More Day for Free Cinch Sampler Kit

DO YOU NEED TO LOSE WEIGHT???

FREE CINCH SAMPLER PACK OFFER EXTENDED! ONLY 1 MORE DAY!

I just wanted to send you a quick reminder that March 31st the last day for this special!

This is the BEST SHAKLEE SPECIAL that I have EVER seen… Seriously!!!

The testimonies are coming in…

I am hearing great stories from people (men and women) losing weight already!!! You will notice a difference after a couple of days!!!

I personally know people losing 2 to 6.7 pounds a week!!! This program works if you follow along!!!!

You will keep your muscles and burn your FAT!!! You will lose those unwanted inches!!!

Isn’t that what we all want?

When you sign up as a new Member or Distributor with a minimum $70 MN order (a Healthy Home Kit qualifies!), or as a new GOLD Ambassador with the purchase of a GOLD Premiere, GOLD Ambassador or a Super GOLD before March 31st and get a Cinch Sampler Pack, a $101 retail value, for FREE!*

ATTENTION CURRENT MEMBERS:

If you are a current Shaklee member and want take advantage of this deal, simply upgrade your membership to a distributor with a qualifying order ($70MN order) or to a GOLD and you will get this Cinch Sampler Kit FREE!!! (over $100 value) Plus, you will be able to get another product (up to $100) for free with your next $100 within 30 days! SWEET!!! That’s a whole lotta savings!!! :)

The Cinch Sampler Pack Includes:

* 1 canister of Cinch Vanilla Shake Mix
* 1 box of Cinch Peanut Butter Crunch Snack Bars
* 1 box of Cinch Pomegranate Energy Tea Mix
* Program Guide

Also included: three months of introductory membership to CinchWellness.com. (Charges will apply in fourth and subsequent months.)

Check out this video!

"Cinch is very easy! The weekly measuring keeps me motivated, and I am still going strong! On my journey to attain my pre-cancer weight, I have found myself again." Nancy says.

Here is Nancy, 53 pounds healthier*

In June 2006, Nancy was diagnosed with cancer—stage four malignant metastatic melanoma. Treatments for the cancer were successful but left her with some extra pounds. As grateful as she was to be healthy again, Nancy wanted to get her old shape back, too.

“Over the next three years,” Nancy says, “I tried several popular diets. Nothing worked for me; I even gained weight on one plan. My thyroid was checked in case the cancer treatment had changed its function, but it was normal. I thought I would just have to learn to accept being overweight.”

Nancy was familiar with Shaklee because her father has been taking Shaklee vitamins for 40 years. And she recalls that “learning about the Cinch Inch Loss Plan seemed like an answer to my prayers! I needed to find ‘me’ again.”

At 200 pounds, Nancy started the Cinch program. She followed the plan diligently, tweaking it a bit to make it fit her schedule: a shake for breakfast, half of a Meal-in-a-Bar for lunch, and a sensible dinner—plus a 3-in-1 Boost tablet with each meal and Cinch Energy Tea Mix each afternoon. Now she is 53 pounds lighter.

“I went from size 16 to size 10 and lost 29½ total inches,” she says.

“Cinch is very easy! The weekly measuring keeps me motivated, and I am still going strong! On my journey to attain my pre-cancer weight, I have found myself again. Thank you, Cinch, and thank you to the Shaklee Distributor who took time to come talk to me. I FEEL GREAT!”

*Results not typical. In a preliminary clinical study of the Cinch Inch loss Plan, participants on average lost 15.4 pounds in 12 weeks.

From my online Wellness Newsletter.

Check out my weight loss story HERE!

Before.

After only 3 months! (you can even see it in my face!)

Read about my sister’s weight loss story HERE!

Picnik
collage

For my information about why and how this programs works, go HERE!

To get this special, place the products in your cart, and then it will tell you that you qualify for the free Cinch Sampler Kit at the top. After that, sign up as a member or distributor. You DO NOT need to place the sampler kit in your cart…it is automatic, just make sure to check if you qualify. Please note, if you become a Gold Ambassador, you do not need to place an order to get the free kit.

Please contact me for my new member specials or if you have any questions!

I would love to help!! :)

Bonnie

How not to whitewash a floor

1. Remove lid to a gallon sized can of white stain

2. Balance lidless can of white stain on the edge of the bathtub

3. Knock over can of white stain onto freshly laid wood flooring

4. Use spackle knife to scrape puddles of white stain back into can

5. Vigorously rub paper towels over entire area

6. Think positive thoughts. Perhaps you have just discovered a new inventive whitewash application.

7. Realize that no, you have not.

8. Retrieve the belt sander.

THE RADIOACTIVE OCEAN: A PRIMER

(The "Baker" explosion at Bikini Atoll, Micronesia, on 25 July 1946. Credit: US Navy, via Wikimedia Commons.)

The compass of news the past few days has swung to a new North—to the rising measurements of radioactivity in the waters off Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant. What does it mean?

You can see in the illustration below the transmission of radionuclides—in this case from deep-sea dump sites—through the physical and biological webs of ocean and atmosphere.

Clearly, the process is dynamic and far-reaching, with the contamination carried by waves and winds and life itself.

Radioactive pollution in the ocean is nothing new. We've been loosing the stuff offshore since 1944. Here's how.

1) Nuclear weapons tests:

For example, at Bikini Atoll between 1946 and 1958, the US detonated 23 atmospheric nuclear bomb tests, including the first hydrogen bomb, which exploded far more violently than predicted and contaminated a swath of ocean 100 miles/160 kilometers away from the epicenter. The fallout affected inhabited islands, fishing boats and fishers at sea, and, obviously, a lot of marine life.

(Points X marks where contaminated fish were caught, or where the sea was found to be excessively radioactive, after the 1955 hydrogen bomb test at Bikini. B=original "danger zone" announced by the US government. W="danger zone" extended later. xF=position of the Lucky Dragon fishing boat, whose crewmen were sickened by fallout, one of whom died. NE, EC, and SE are equatorial currents. Credit: Y. Nishiwaki, 1955, for the government of Japan, via Wikimedia Commons.)

France exploded ~193 nuclear tests in the atmosphere and in the waters of French Polynesia between 1966 and 1996. The tests began after the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty outlawing detonations in the air. I wrote about this in my book THE FRAGILE EDGE:

The [first] bomb was exploded aboard a barge in the [Moruroa's] lagoon, sucking water into the air and raining dead ﬁsh, corals, cephalopods, crustaceans, mollusks, and all the once living components of the reef onto Moruroa’s motu [islands], where their radioactive forms decayed for weeks. Confounded by this result, the French hastily arranged to explode their second bomb seventeen days later from an air plane 45,000 feet above the featureless South Pacific, some 60 miles south of Moruroa. Without people or equipment to witness, record, or analyze this distant blast, virtually no data was collected, making its detonation more an act of pique than science. Two days later, as described by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

An untriggered bomb on the ground [at Moruroa] was exposed to a "security test." While it did not explode, the bomb’s case cracked and its plutonium contents spilled over the reef. The contaminated area was "sealed" by covering it with a layer of asphalt.

(Top: Moruroa Atoll. Bottom: Fangataufa Atoll. Both atolls are part of French Polynesia, site of French nuclear tests. CORRECTION: The medium-dark blue waters marking the center of the lagoon of Fangataufa Atoll mark the deep crater created by bomb explosions. Credit: NASA, via Wikimedia Commons.)

2) Sinking of nuclear-powered submarines:

So far, eight nuclear-powered submarines have sunk or been scuttled: two American, four Soviet, two Russian.

Four sank in the North Atlantic, three in the Barents Sea, one in the Kara Sea north of Siberia.

Another accident in 1968 sank a diesel-electric Soviet sub carrying nuclear ballistic missiles in the North Pacific 1,796 miles / 2,890 kilometers northwest of the Hawaiian island of Oahu.

(Salvaged wreck of the Russian nuclear submarine K-141 Kursk, via Wikimedia Commons.)

3) Spacecraft and satellite failures, including:

The launch failure in 1964 of an American navigation satellite with an onboard radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG)—an electrical generator fueled by radioactive decay. This fell into the ocean near Madagascar and deposited a quantity of plutonium-238 equal to half the amount of plutonium-238 naturally present in the entire World Ocean.

The failed Apollo 13 mission (1970) jettisoned its Lunar Module Aquarius with the intention that it would crash into the sea and plummet into the Pacific's Tonga Trench—one of the deepest places on our planet—since it was still carrying its RTG with plutonium dioxide fuel. So far no plutonium-238 has been recorded in nearby atmospheric and seawater sampling, suggesting the cask is currently intact on the seabed.

At least four other RTG-powered spacecraft have fallen back to Earth, including one into the waters of the Santa Barbara Channel off California in 1968.

Between 1973 and 1993, at least five Soviet/Russian RORSAT satellites failed to eject their nuclear reactor cores prior to falling back to Earth. One fell into the Pacific north of Japan (1973), another over Canada's Northwest Territories (1978), another in the South Atlantic (1983). The successfully ejected cores are in decaying orbits, destined to plummet back to Earth someday.

(The Apollo 13 Lunar Module, Aquarius, just after jettisoning on 17 April 1970. Credit: NASA, via Wikimedia Commons.)

4) Discharges from nuclear reprocessing and power plants, including:

Britain's Sellafield (aka Windscale), a nuclear storage site, an erstwhile nuclear weapons production plant, nuclear reprocessing center, and nuclear power plant, ~~currently in the process of decommissioning~~ [CORRECTION]. Due to accidents, chronic emissions, and overflows at Sellafield, the nearby Irish Sea is deemed the most radioactive sea on Earth.

The Hanford Site in Washington—home to the world's first plutonium production reactor—purposely released radionuclides down the Columbia River from the 1940s to the 1970s. The contamination travelled hundreds of miles into the Pacific Ocean. Today the radionuclides are used as markers by oceanographers tracking sediment movements on the continental shelf.

(Salmon spawning in the Hanford Reach of the Columbia River, at the site of 30 years of radioactive releases. Credit: US Department of Energy, via Wikimedia Commons.)

5) Ocean dumps:

Dump sites for radioactive waste were created in the northeast Atlantic (1 site), off Europe (3), off the US eastern seaboard (1), and off the US Pacific coast (1).

Between 1946 and 1970, the US dumped ~107,000 drums of radioactive wastes at its two sites, including some 47,800 in the ocean west of San Francisco, supposedly at three designated sites. However drums actually litter an area of at least 1,400 square kilometers/540 square miles, known as the Farallon Island Radioactive Waste Dump, which now falls almost entirely within the boundaries of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary. The exact location of most drums is unknown. At least some are corroding.

(A drum of radioactive waste dumped off San Francisco. Credit: USGS.)

A 1996 paper in Health Physics described some of the radionuclides found in the tissues of deep-sea bottom-feeding fishes—Dover sole, sablefish, and thornyheads—plus intertidal mussels in the waters around the Farallon Islands:

Concentrations of both [plutonium-238] and [Americium-241] in fish tissues were notably higher than those reported in literature from any other sites world-wide, including potentially contaminated sites. These results show approximately 10 times higher concentrations of [plutonium-238+240] and approximately 40-50 times higher concentrations of [plutonium-238] than those values reported for identical fish species from 1977 collections at the [Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Dump Site] .

(Bottom-feeding Dover sole, Microstomus pacificus, a species living within the Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Dump Site. Credit:Linda Snook / MBNMS, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Of course the fallen satellites, the sunken submarines, the leftovers from nuclear bomb tests, and the dumped drums of waste are all subject to saltwater corrosion and the same destructive tectonic forces that triggered the March 11th Sendai earthquake and tsunami.

In an upcoming post, I'll take a look at what might lie ahead for Japan's troubled waters and beyond.