This has been a week of heavy stories. Many of my friends and family are struggling financially. Each hit makes them feel a bit more overwhelmed. The stress can be enormous at times. This piece had several proactive steps to take while unemployed. Good points to remember:

The real question is, do you have the discipline to put your new found free time to good use?  With the time you have on your hands, you can finally start to write that novel, or spend more time with your family and reconnect with the kids. There is time to finally think about what you want out of life and your career. Money can’t buy that kind of personal time away from the pressures and demands of a full-time job.

Even if you are unemployed, you still have a skill set. The key to getting ahead in any economy is to recognize your strengths and use them to your advantage. Use your spare time to understand your strengths better and work on your personal mission statement.  Knowing what you bring to the table is going to allow for more confidence and creativity when it comes to looking for work. It will also be a big help in determining what kind of work you go after on the next job search.

An extended unemployment might be exactly what you needed. Your former industry might have been the worst career choice that you ever made. If you were pushed into it strictly because you needed a job, it could have been something you regretted during your entire career. No matter how high up you go in a company, it is going to be tough to get by when you have no passion for your work.  This is a chance to level-set and decide where to go from here.

Read more at: The Psychology of Well-Being

Patience? What’s that? In today’s fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants world, patience means waiting an extra three seconds for your screen to refresh. But often, waiting some situations out is what’s required. Not doing something is an action in and of itself. Here’s what others have to say:

A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.
Gertrude Jekyll

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.
John Updike

A man who is a master of patience is master of everything else.
George Savile

A show that no one thought had a chance has just finished its fifth year: Charmed. I think it’s tougher for the younger networks, so I think they have a little more patience for the sake of the show. But who knows?
Aaron Spelling

A wise man is superior to any insults which can be put upon him, and the best reply to unseemly behavior is patience and moderation.
Moliere

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Affliction is the wholesome soil of virtue, where patience, honor, sweet humility, and calm fortitude, take root and strongly flourish.
David Mallet

Alcohol gives you infinite patience for stupidity.
Sammy Davis, Jr.

All commend patience, but none can endure to suffer.
Thomas Fuller

All men commend patience, although few are willing to practice it.
Thomas Kempis

As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human kind.
Cleveland Amory

As for goals, I don’t set myself those anymore. I’m not one of these ‘I must have achieved this and that by next year’ kind of writers. I take things as they come and find that patience and persistence tend to win out in the end.
Paul Kane

As I pass it, I feel as if I saw a dear old mother, sweet in her weakness, trembling at the approach of her dissolution, but not appealing to me against the inevitable, rather endeavouring to reassure me by her patience, and pointing to a hopeful future.
Thomas Edward Brown

Beware of him that is slow to anger; for when it is long coming, it is the stronger when it comes, and the longer kept. Abused patience turns to fury.
Francis Quarles

This was a fascinating people on quiet people - not shy or introverted folk. Nope. We’re talking naturally quiet people who are very much involved with their life. What do we have to learn from them?

Enlarge AP

Quiet People are different from loners or introverts or recluses.

And quietness is not the same as shyness. Those who are shy keep to themselves and shy away from others. Quiet People, however, find it easy to be around other people. They can be quite social and sociable. They go to parties. They can have lots of friends. They get elected president — Calvin Coolidge. They become a famous singer — Peggy Lee. They sit on the Supreme Court — Clarence Thomas. They just don’t talk much.

There are two kinds of Quiet People, says Nicholas Christenfield, a psychology professor at the University of California, San Diego. “There are people who wish to talk, but are too timid to do so” and there are those who “simply choose not to say much.”

Christenfield specializes in researching human communication. He is exploring the idea of “volubility,” the opposite of quietness. But in his studies, he has found two basic notions of why people remain quiet, “which my research has attempted to untangle,” he says. “One is that their minds are less fertile, and fewer expressible thoughts occur to them.”

The other idea, he says, “and the one most people intuitively embrace, is that their minds are at least as productive, but their threshold for saying things out loud is much higher. In this case, the average utterance of a Quiet Person should be of higher quality than that of a talkative one. They have had mediocre thoughts, but declined to share them.”

Read more at DailyGood.

Thinking outside of the box as far as trash and recycling is critical in this day and age. Repurposing is a term often used for pre-cycling - both suggest a way to re-use something that was considered junk prior to it reaching recycling stations. I repurposed an old scarf with a hole in it and used it a way to keep my curtain tied during the day…just one small example.

Read what this company is doing to deal with trashable items:

What can you do with a bag of garbage? While you might think it’s not good for much more than landfill material, Al Braun, co-founder of Better World Materials in Kearns, Utah, has other ideas: His company is converting waste products into building materials.

The company takes items that recycling centers often reject—milk jugs and cereal boxes, for instance—and uses machinery to grind them down into a woodlike substance that can be used for building materials such as railroad ties, foundations, and boards.

Braun began developing the process 20 years ago, after seeing how much garbage ended up scattering across his native Hawaiian island as debris after a hurricane. He’s spent hundreds of thousands on his mission, but he’s now developed a process that can convert most forms of rejected recyclables into building materials.

Currently, the company is focusing on railroad ties, but that will change soon: Better World recently signed a contract with TuffShed to produce planks that can be used for shed foundations. Better World is also aiming to build plants to convert trash into construction materials in 15 states. If that happens, the company will need a lot of raw materials to process—but the company’s CEO, Dalyn Judd doesn’t believe that should be a problem.

“Are we going to run out of garbage?” he asked the Salt Lake Tribune. “I don’t think so.”

Source: Gimundo

Look at me! I'm a railroad tie!

Many of us are feeling a definite pinch in our pockets with a tenuous economy looming overhead like a black cloud. Many are in debt or are having difficulty finding a decent job to make ends meet. So today, we send some thoughts on prosperity your way:

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.
Mark Twain

Poverty is the worst form of violence.
Mohandas Gandhi

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.
Mother Teresa
Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them.
Mother Teresa

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.
Mother Teresa

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.
John F. Kennedy

Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.
Muhammad Ali

Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes.
Khalil Gibran

Poverty is a veil that obscures the face of greatness. An appeal is a mask covering the face of tribulation.
Khalil Gibran

In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge. The young they keep out of mischief; to the old they are a comfort and aid in their weakness, and those in the prime of life they incite to noble deeds.
Aristotle

Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.
Coco Chanel

Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache.
Mae West

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.
Confucius

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.
Barack Obama

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
Henry David Thoreau

I worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.
Groucho Marx

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.
Bill Cosby

Poverty is the mother of crime.
Marcus Aurelius

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
Woody Allen

A friend of mine talked to me about her lack of motivation. It went a little something like this:

“Even things I like to do can sometimes fill me with a sense of dread. I don’t get it. Is that depression talking? Or do I just need a vacation or something?”

Most of us experience this sensation from time to time. So how do you look forward to life when you’re…just not?

1. Stop future tripping. If you’re living in the moment, you’re not worried about this afternoon’s meeting or this evening’s dance class. Stay present, breathe and be aware that your life is now.

2. Just say no. There is a time to push yourself and a time to embrace your inner sloth! If an event really seems too overwhelming, no is a fine answer (especially dedicated to women out there!) The more you say no when you need to, the more likely you are to say yes when you want to.

3. Take a hard look. Why does something seeming that normally fill you with joy instill a sense of fear? What’s really going on. When I bugged my friend about what was really going on, she had this to say:

“I just want a day to do nothing. Watch movies, eat good food, relax, get a massage or take a bath. I’m tired of doing. I’d like to receive instead.”

What would you do if it started raining money? Make a mad dash for it or do what these Chargers fans did and help out? Great story on people coming together for the sake of one woman:

At a recent preseason football game between the San Diego Chargers and the San Diego 49ers, it began raining money.

The Chargers fans gathered in the stand where the dollar bills dropped were initially delighted with the surprising change in weather. But the money wasn’t theirs to keep: A waitress had tripped on a stair, and had dropped about $1,000 in bills of various sizes.

Fans who’d seen the waitress fall immediately began calling out to those in the lower seats to alert them to what had happened. “All my customers began screaming over the railing to the people below: ‘That’s the servers’ money,’ ” the server, Heather Allison, told Signs on San Diego.

Immediately, the crowd began working together to help Allison, collecting the stray dollar bills from the stands and passing it to a security guard. Within ten minutes, the guard returned the money to Allison. “It was all there,” she said.

Allison, a mother of four, even pocketed $170 in tip money.

She wasn’t surprised that the crowd had come together to help her out. “Chargers fans are amazing,” she said. “We’re like a family.”

Source: Gimundo

Pride goeth before a fall, it is often said. But sometimes pride is just the ticket to reminding you of your worth. What do the famous minds of our time and times of yore have to say on the topic?

A competitor will find a way to win. Competitors take bad breaks and use them to drive themselves just that much harder. Quitters take bad breaks and use them as reasons to give up. It’s all a matter of pride.
Nancy Lopez

A portion of mankind take pride in their vices and pursue their purpose; many more waver between doing what is right and complying with what is wrong.
Horace

All anyone asks for is a chance to work with pride.
W. Edwards Deming

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words “Ich bin ein Berliner!”
John F. Kennedy

All the world wondered as they witnessed… a people lift themselves from humiliation to the greatest pride.
Corazon Aquino

Anger is the enemy of non-violence and pride is a monster that swallows it up.
Mohandas Gandhi

At some point, the pride has to be a part of the whole day-to-day oeuvre. It’s part of who you are and doesn’t need to be discussed anymore.
Sandra Bernhard

Attacks of divine transports are of pride and I accept the part assigned.
Elizabeth Barton

Everyone I know has attention deficit, and they say it with great pride. It’s a bad time to be right.
Joni Mitchell
Besides pride, loyalty, discipline, heart, and mind, confidence is the key to all the locks.
Joe Paterno

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.
William Butler Yeats

Elizabeth Barton

Often when bad things happen in our lives, its hard to see any potential of good coming out of it. Most of the time, years later, we can see it. In this next story, amidst something as invasive as a burglary, some good remained.

Just last week a small church in the town of Greenwood Indiana was broken into; in the process the thieves stole dozens of musical instruments including one that had special sentimental value to many members of the church. That particular instrument belong to the pastor’s son who died in a car crash 4 months ago so it is not surprising that they felt so bad after the guitar was stolen.

Fortunately today the thieves apparently heard to story and felt bad about what had been done. Upon arriving at the church Pastor Schmidt found the guitar abandoned in the alley way right next to the church. Pastor Schmidt says it is nothing other than a miracle from good hearted people who have apparently made some poor decisions in their lives.

Obviously the thieves were not captured in the process but Schmidt says he is grateful that they decided to return the guitar with so much sentimental value to them. The search for the thieves is still on going but for the time being Pastor Schmidt and the entire congregation are happy that his son’s guitar has been returned.

It isn’t every day that groups of thieves hear heartwarming stories like the one from Pastor Schmidt but he claims that his prayers must have been a major influence. Whatever the reason, he was simply glad to finally have back a piece of his son’s memory as it is one of the last things he has to remind him of his late son’s life.

Trent Schmidt

Source: Amazing News

It’s easy in today’s world to think in terms of the “haves” and “have nots.” But one self-proclaimed little guy who knew a bit about gems won big at an online auction. Remember, we can all be hot shots sometimes!

CORTLAND, Ohio - He calls himself “just a country boy,” but a retired home builder from Trumbull County just out-bid the world for one of the most notable diamonds on the planet.

Jerre and Donah Hentosh of Cortland are proud owners of The Golden Eye Diamond. It’s a 43.51 carat diamond, one caret less than the famed Hope Diamond. It’s a yellow or canary diamond. The cut is a one inch long rectangle and its clarity is rated internally flawless.

It was confiscated during an FBI investigation and was sold this week by the U.S. Marshall’s Office in an on-line auction.

“We read about the auction and the stone and I know diamonds pretty well, precious metals, so we decided to bid because we thought it might be exciting and an opportunity,” Jerre Hentosh said.

Jerre says they made several bids and couldn’t believe they ended up with the winning bid. “Shocked, I didn’t have a clue. I thought some big wheels would be there instead of a little country boy like myself,” Jerre said.

“I just thought there was no way that the two of us living in Cortland, Ohio had a chance against people probably all over the world,” said Donah Hentosh.

The diamond was seized by the FBI in 2006 from Paul Monea of Alliance. He was arrested after he attempted to sell the diamond and the former Southington estate of boxer Mike Tyson to an undercover FBI agent.

Monea was convicted of money laundering and is serving a 13 year sentence in federal prison.

Jerre and Donah just learned that the Golden Eye is listed as number four on the list of the ten most notable diamonds in the world.

Donah says Jerre was a successful businessman and they saved their money. “We live pretty frugally and I mean that’s the way were able to save the money we do,” Donah said.

When and if they sell the diamond, they plan to give the money to charities that help the poor.

Source: WFMJ.com