I'd have to go with what James Arthur Ray says, that if I can get all five pillars of my life in harmony, then I have achieved success. The five pillars are mental, physical, emotional, financial, spiritual. He says "balance is bogus!" You'll never get your life fully in balance, because when something is balanced, it's static. Harmony is a more apt word because sometimes we put effort into one or two areas at once, while the others stay in the background, like an orchestra.

And as within, so without. As above so below. Regarding the fact that this harmony is also an indicator of success with the world at large.

CNN has offered kudos to an "armchair astronomer" for spotting a new space object amongst a million photos taken by robot.

I love stories like this because they are a celebration of the kind of progress humans can make by using the internet.

Here is what happened: Two astrophysicists were overwhelmed by the amount of data collected by a robotic telescope. There were a million photos to catalogue. They decided to see if the public was interested in volunteering to help identify the images, so they made a tutorial video then posted all the images online and said, 'here you go, have at it!'

In a year, 150,000 people volunteered to sift through these images, most saying that it's addictive!

So an elementary school teacher was looking through the images and asked on a support forum, 'hey, what's this thing?'. The scientists think she found "a cloud of hot gas punctured by a central hole some 16,000 light years across and illuminated by the "dying embers" of a nearby quasar."

Yay internet! It has given the astute public access to fascinating space records we wouldn't have been able to see twenty years ago, and opportunities for involvement in science we wouldn't have had twenty years ago. And the internet gave these two overwhelmed astronomers the means to finish an astronomical project quicker than expected.

This past Saturday was Gaia's "Global gathering event." I drove north about 45 minutes to Boulder and attended our local party! It was a trick figuring out where exactly it was, because there aren't signs that say "This way to Eben Fine park!" But I had been there before and never knew the name of the park.

It is along a river with rocky embankment, and when I entered the parking lot I saw a young man emerging from the river with an inner tube. I think innertubing's a popular thing to do for young risk-takers (did I say whippersnappers? Am I showing my age?)!

There was an enclosure with picnic tables reserved for Gaia, and I could tell because of the giant vinyl sign that said "Gaia". Once I entered, the only face I recognized (from her avatar, the old one, not the current vector caricature) was MsCaprikel! I made a beeline for her to find out who everyone was. Later there were formal introductions, AA-style: "Hi, my name is ___ and I want to change the world! Here's how!" Funny, I never took my turn!

So there was a band playing, and I'm not very knowledgeable about this, but I think it was jazz or some kind of jazz fusion! I found out that my friend Jaxxon was playing guitar. (and now that I see his profile page, I found out he stole my name! See there, under his photo? Yeah, ok, he doesn't use two l's in thepixelator.) So we are both in the web development world, but he was so busy grooving on his guitar with his group Sacrebleu that I never got a chance to speak with him.

I had a short chat with Gaia's very own Siona, who sends emails to all in the name of Gaia. She handed me her card and it read, "You are beautiful". Thanks Siona!



Can someone tell me the other Gaia members in my band photos?

I had a little fun playing with the settings on my digital camera, and even though it was dark in the enclosure and we had lots of backlight, these images turned out pretty good. Jaxxon is on the guitar, and I think it's Jake standing and examining something on the right. He's on the web development team, too.

My two children went to play in the park behind the enclosure, and they had a good time playing on the swing. They were playing with another boy whose mother is a massage therapist in Boulder, and she had joined in the party. Perhaps she will join Gaia soon! Cobalt captured her smiling in one of her photographs. Let's see, she'll be Dancing Bird if she joins!

I also chatted with Matthew and I didn't know it at the time, but also his wife Ayako. Matthew kept me and my kids entertained with a nice sleight of hand trick. Ayako has traveled to Central America.

I also talked about camera settings with Cobalt, who just happened to be in the area for the gathering, as she lives in Arizona, I think. And, while she was asking her (adult) son if he wouldn't mind going out of his way to stop at the Gaia party, her son admitted that that's where he had wanted to go, too. Cobalt captured some really great images of that day!

I talked with a woman that Cobalt photographed, but I didn't get her name. She was wearing the constellation bandanna and she had a really cool method for giving a burst of inspiration into someone's life. She had a "cootie catcher" but "it's NOT a cootie catcher". You choose colors, numbers, and such and then at the end the folded paper is opened to reveal an inspiring and insightful comment. Mine was about Action! No more sitting around wishing, it's time to act, Jessica!

As I left the park, I chatted with two men who were loosely related to Gaia, as one of them said he had attended a Matrix workshop recently and was told about Gaia Community there. He had me laughing when we were talking about gutters. I said, "my husband and I run a gutter company. Would either of you like our card?" Blank stares**cricket**cricket**

I broke the silence, "Well, gutters are something you only think about when the snow melts and rips them off your house, or if they rust out and start leaking." Then the one man said, "Or if they save your life! You know, like if you're on the roof and you slip and fall and you catch yourself with only the edge of the gutter, then it comes undone from your roof and it slides you down to the ground safely!" His body language was even funnier, as he acted out this whole pretend fall-from-the-roof. 

Then a fox emerged from the woods and trotted across the parking lot! After that, we saw two bats flying around because, of course, it was dusk. "That's when they (foxes and bats) come out to hunt!" said our animated friend. The fox went to check out the garbage, but was foiled by the bear-safe trash bins.

I had a bit of inspiration tonight and created desktop wallpapers for the people signed up to my Live on Purpose web site. Here is a preview:


Up until tonight I was struggling to match an appropriate quote to another image that I took, of some huge pine trees in boxes for replanting. I just couldn't come up with anything. So instead, I went to read other blogs, the best inspiration there is for a blogger.

I found a great entry on What's My Purpose? and I left my comment there, not knowing that my own comment would become the quote I needed! His entry was about how Olympians are living their purpose, and the more people who live this way, the happier the world becomes. As we search out our purpose, we transform ourselves.

As I searched my folders of photos, I found the butterfly image, taken on Lookout Mountain CO and realized butterflies are THE symbol for transformation. Voila.

If you want access to seven sizes of this image saved for different screen resolutions, go to Live On Purpose and sign up for the newsletter!

A small brown mouse came out from the crack between the wall and the floor. I heard it rustling. I finally saw it walking. It didn't seem scared at first. It casually walked along the wall.

I informed my husband we had a mouse and we should caulk up the hole. He asked, "Do you have caulk?" "No, I don't have caulk!" "Then we can't caulk the hole." "Some other day, then."

I went back to my computer. The mouse came back and showed itself to me. I grabbed a kitchen timer that would act as a cup, a receptacle for it.

I played "cat and mouse" with the mouse for five minutes.

My two year old hollered with enthusiasm. It was great fun.

I caught the mouse with the little kitchen timer and slid him onto a piece of paper. I heard him scratching at the paper.

"Go tell daddy" I told my small son.
"Okay." he ran upstairs and told him in mixed English and Spanish, "Mouse! Vente! Vente! Mouse!" (vente=come here) While pulling on his hand.

When he came downstairs, I asked, "What should we do with it?" "Take it outside, I guess" he answered, as he tried to take the package from me.

As he tried to gingerly get both the paper and the timer, his grasp was not tight enough. I realized this, and said, "He'll get out that way," as the mouse squeezed out between his fingers and jumped to the floor. He ran with great purpose to his hiding spot and we never saw him again.

Mousey gets freedom.

I really do believe our purpose gets greater, feels stronger, when we suffer adversity first. Else, how can we appreciate it?

One of my favorite one-liners. I can't remember the name of the movie, but it was a gymnastics movie, where the girls backstab each other in competition.


girl 1: "Why do you have to be so nasty?"
girl 2: "They don't call it gym-nice-tics!"



Here's another one-liner from Bend it Like Beckham, a movie about family life in India and how girls are rarely integrated into sports. The daughter is trying to persuade her mother to let her follow her soccer passion and her mother simply wants her to be a homemaker.

"C'mon Mom, anybody can cook a full punjabi dinner, but who can bend a ball like Beckham?"

I'm coming into my own. That's a phrase that means I feel I've gained sufficient experience in this life to garner my foray into being the giver of advice, not the taker of advice.

I used to hang out at the Smithsonian art museums when I was a teen growing up in Washington, DC. There was a set of paintings there that depicted the three ages of man. The security guards at the museum tend to use their spare time studying the artwork, and a lady security officer told me all about the meaning behind the paintings. In his youth, a man gains experience and learns. In his middle age, he teaches, and in his old age...oh, man, what was it?

I'm so apolitical that I didn't even consider going in person to see Obama make his nomination acceptance speech tonight. I was quite happy to see it on TV. The entire Democratic convention has been in Denver, just a 20 min. drive from my place, for this week, and it closed lots of streets downtown and obstructed the normal flow of traffic.

That football field stadium was packed tonight and the crowd was very emotional in response to Obama's speech. It felt like I could feel the emotion through the TV! I got chills when he was finishing up the speech during the last five minutes.

I've already had enough of his team playing up the family man approach by dolling up his little girls and having them say I Love You Daddy every opportunity they get. It reminds me of the children's show, "Corey in the House" (meaning the White House) where the president's daughter is trained to be oversweet on TV but she's demanding off-air.

And I'm so apolitical that I forgot that it's a cash cow if you have a hand-made Obama tee-shirt to sell to the convention-goers! Rats. I have Photoshop.