Aida Nikolaichuk’s amazing vocals definitely befuddled the Judges. To them her voice sounded so beautiful angel-like but yet commercial that they thought that she is lip-singing. At one moment, they even asked her to stop her performance. And then, they wanted her to sing the same cradle song but acapella (sing without music) to make sure that she is really singing live. No need to mention, that she got all four “yeses”. It’s hard to believe that she did not have a singing career before.

Around four inches tall, these adorable shoes come in a wide variety of styles from ultra haute couture to sporty and casual to the breast cancer collection to help fund the ongoing research to find a cure. ”Just the Right Shoe” is available at fine department stores, specialty and gift shops, as well as online. Shoes are released in group collections such as Badd Girl, Posh Pumps and Stepping Out, with approximately two new releases each year. Prices for these delicious delights range from $10 to $40. Retired shoes can demand a pretty penny. Collectors are grabbing them up as soon as they are released, with a few collectors trying to own them all.

The best tip to owning them all, especially the most sought after retired or soon to be retired shoes is to frequently shop the home page for Just the Right Shoe. They have a retired page listing all the shoes. If they are unavailable, and you just have to have the shoe, then go to one of the following options.

Join a club or group of collectors. As a rule, clubs have an inside look at what is happening within the line and often have insider information. Some collectors decide to let go of some of their collections, for whatever reason, and building a friendship with other collectors can sometimes lead to adding their shoes to your collection. It certainly cannot hurt.

Purchasing your shoes from a regular specialty shop can lead to advanced information of which shoes are going to be retired as well. If you deal regularly with a specific dealer, they may even be able to help you acquire a specific little gem that you simply cannot live without.

A typical search on the internet will produce more results than you can look at in a day on Just the Right Shoes including retired lists, designer shops that carry the little treasures, collections for sale. One Just the Right Shoe retired site had shoes listed as low as $12.50. EBay has a large number of people selling their collections of Just the Right Shoe, including the children’s line and shoe and purse sets.

Whichever route you choose, Just the Right Shoe is the perfect shoe for every shoe enthusiast!

1. Choose a live tree. Shoppers can go “green” by purchasing potted evergreens with the roots intact. At the end of the season, you can plant the tree in your yard instead of carrying it to the curb with the post-holiday garbage.
2. Decorate with energy-efficient lights. Stringing lights can make your house look beautiful, but it also can use a lot of electricity. Be sure to select LED (light-emitting diode) lights to minimize the eco-impact. They use as much as 90 percent less energy than traditional alternatives. (Check out this blog for more green Christmas decoration ideas!)
3. Beautify your house naturally. Lights can be nice additions to your landscape but natural décor is both lovely and energy-efficient. Consider substituting natural pine wreaths, garlands and pine cones for some of your electronic decorations.
4. Buy recycled paper products. Christmas cards and wrapping paper can produce a mountain of waste in your home. However, many stores and online vendors now offer attractive recycled versions of both at affordable prices.
5. Send “cyber” greetings. Save a tree by eliminating Christmas cards and sending good wishes to friends via the computer. You can buy or design your own online cards for delivery by email. Social networking sites also makes it easy and fun to package family news and photos in an electronic message, replacing the traditional holiday letter.
6. Select edible gifts. Instead of adding to the after-Christmas clutter, consider giving appetizing gifts that are guaranteed to disappear. Family and friends are sure to welcome edible delicacies, including homemade cookies, mouth-watering candies, gourmet cheeses or specialty wines.
7. Give the gift of charity. Some of us truly don’t need anything, so use the holiday as an opportunity to give to others. The American Red Cross, Save the Children, World Vision and others offer holiday catalogs that let you buy items for the needy in the name of a friend. You can help the poor by donating seeds and gardening tools, water pumps, farm animals, emergency food, school supplies and more.
8. Wrap your gifts wisely. Instead of using costly paper, adorn your presents with reusable trim. Colorful scarves and cloth can be attractive gift coverings. Fill new socks, shoes or boots with holiday goodies. Newspaper comic pages also can be an alternative to traditional wrap.
9. Set a “green” dinner table. It can be tempting to use plastic utensils, paper plates and foam cups to save time when you are cooking a big dinner, but that choice also produces more waste. Celebrate in style with real plates and silverware instead.
10. Recycle after the holidays. Save this year’s wrapping paper, bows, bubble wrap and boxes for next year. Take your used tree to a composting location. If you receive new electronic gadgets, recycle the old ones instead of sending them to the landfill.

1. It’s Easier to Cope When You Have Co-Conspirators: You cannot possibly be the only person in the family that feels the way that you do when the holidays come along. If you are spending time with the in-laws, there is a very good chance that you have a brother-in-law or sister-in-law who dreads holiday feasts just as much as you do. One of the best ways to survive this holiday season is to line up co-conspirators who recognize the challenges and can help you make things different this year. When you have someone on your team, you can come up with a strategy on how to deal with the most difficult members of the family and how to steer antics in a different direction.
2. Get the Critical Family Members Involved: If you are hosting the Thanksgiving dinner gathering, you might think that the last thing that you want to do is ask someone who always criticizes your turkey for being too dry to help you. If you give your relatives assignments, they are much less likely to be critical of you. Ask your mother-in-law to bring that dish she has always been begging to teach you to cook. When you do this, she will be able to boast about her moist turkey or her homemade cranberry sauce and you do not have to hear tips on how the meal could have been better.
3. Assigned Seating Can Save the Meal: You might think that assigned seating is something for elementary school. If you have family members that act like grade school children, why not assign their seating so that your dinner can go off without a hitch. If you have an Aunt Debbie that despises her sister-in-law Judy, make sure that they are seated at different ends of the table. If your Grandma Molly likes to bring up awkward conversation, you might want the newer family members to be sat away from her eye line. If you have children, it is a good idea to have the little ones right the name cards for the seating. If they see that their precious little niece or granddaughter took time to participate, they are much more likely to go with the seating plan.

Everyone deserves an award when their family leaves. After you survive the day or even the week with your family in-town, sit down in your favorite pajamas, enjoy an extra piece of pie, and be thankful for the fact that you only have to survive the holidays one time each year.

We all have things to recycle, but why not try and up-cycling some of them. At least, it can be fun project especially if you want to teach your kids how to apply imagination into making some useful stuff.

Among the numerous items, plastic milk jars and some similar-looking juice containers can be easily converted into plant containers. Most simple way is to cut container in half, make some drainage holes on the bottom, fill with some dirt and plant the seeds. The top part can be used as a cover to create the green-house affect to keep moister and protect your seedlings and plants from temperature fluctuations. The same method can be used to root some plant cuttings too.

You can also cut the milk jars slightly more diagonal to make a cute plant display. Decorate it with your children by painting it, again, make some drainage holes on the bottom and it’s ready for flowers.

You can even make a self-watering planter from those milk/juice container by cutting the container in roughly 2 halves. Inserting the top part upside down into the bottom part with some ropes connected one into another. Fill the bottom part with water and the top with dirt. Ropes will transport water from lower part into the upper part where your seedling will be growing.

 This DIY project come from here.

Our poor Regina looked so skinny as if we starved her. She could not control where she vomited, sometimes it was in the most unexpected places including my husband’s office on his table or even in our bed. She constantly stalked us in the kitchen to get more food after letting it go. We did not know what to do anymore. We have one more cat and 4 dogs, and can’t afford to pay that kind of money for vet services that are essentially useless. I went to two different Vet places with intend to help my beloved cat Regina who was like a child for me (we do not have kids).  I wish that they were more result-oriented and less commercial. Just because we have a sick cat, it does not mean that we want to run all kinds of tests on her. The good experienced Veterinarian should be able to give us the list of tests that are likely to pin point the cause of the illness. Instead, they try taking advantage of the situation or so it seems just because we are not in touch with medicine.

As I mentioned earlier, $1200 later Regina was still sick and the cause of that was still unknown. This was so devastating.  Fortunately, even though this continued for a long time, she was still able to function somehow for couple of years. When things were worse than normally, we gave her some Pepcid with her soft cat food (she wasn’t able to eat dry cat food any longer). Sadly, this became Regina’s new norm.

We knew that she probably won’t recover but hoped that she will live longer. Unfortunately, few days ago her condition deteriorated. She positioned her body really low on a floor and meowed loudly. I realized that she did not go to bathroom and her tummy felt stuffed. I gave her 1ml of Lactulose (medicine from constipation that was given to her by vets). It worked pretty fast but we saw some blood in her feces. The next day we took her to Riverview Animal Clinic. I want to give them a credit; they took us in pretty fast without appointment and without a long wait. They treated us very nicely and seemed very knowledgeable. After looking at Regina, they immediately suspected that mostly likely there is a problem with her liver. They took her urine and blood and run a test. Results were just horrifying over 68,000 of White Blood Cell Count! Their computer showed error message twice because it would not accept that kind of number. Vet said that usually animals don’t live with those parameters; Regina’s liver and kidneys were working on low percentage. Obviously, over time her body slowly adjusted to changes and was able to function but at the same time started to over-produce white blood cells thinking that it was infection, eventually killing itself. Vet estimated that she probably had a week of her life left. We decided that it’s best to stop her suffering and euthanized her. I wish that I could have her for at least a little longer, because we really loved her, but unfortunately it was her time to go.

There are no words to describe how bad we are missing her. She was one amazing and beautiful cat with a friendly personality. Our princess Regina, rest in peace. We will always love you.

Being that it was outside and we figured most the cost was labor anyways, we decided to go with the lowest bid. Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but we should’ve known we’d have a little bit of problems with the work being done. But oddly, it didn’t quite come where we had expected.

Our original bricks were installed by the previous owner of this house and although he was a pool installer, we felt that the work was very poorly done. The pavers were cemented to the ground, but just a smudge to keep it down as if it was meant to be temporary. They were popping up and coming apart in lots of places and we didn’t like how they had aged at all.

So the first thing the installers had to do was to remove the old pavers, which took just a few hours. Underneath them was the old original patio which was really just a concrete slab with imprinted lines on them to give it the appearance of large tiles. We actually thought it looked better than the new pavers that the owner had put in.

So after the old bricks were removed, the new tiles were installed. First the installers put down sand as the base to keep the bricks in place. We also had the border around the pool redone at the same time. If there was to be a problem, I had thought the problems would be around the pool. But that was done perfectly and it turned it excellently.

The bricks were installed quickly enough and to seal the cracks between the bricks, they used sand which is supposed to harden and keep everything from moving. Sand naturally has its side effects. For days, we were dragging this stuff into our house. I am cleaning this up from the house – it’s become a cleaning nightmare.

We were told originally that the sand would simply harden and keep the bricks in place but instead, it has dried and become a messy beach on the back patio. About a week or two after the project finished, we had our first rain. As the rain hit the bricks, we had little explosions of sand all over the patio. After the rain stopped, the patio looked like we were carpet bombed. Since then we live like in the sand box. Needless to say, we are pretty unhappy about it. We called our contractor to talk about this problem, but of course, he has yet to make the time to come back and take a look at the problem or talk to us about solutions.

And now that the sand has finally dried, we have a new problem. Ants have decided to use the sand to make an anthill on our patio. Not fire ants – thanks God – tiny little ants are scooping up the sand and making a mound near the pool. A perfect topper for this project, I guess.

However, I could never understand why some brands like Colin Stuart have missing shoe sizes. I normally wear US size 5 or 5.5, but this particular brand runs really small, so obviously I need size 5.5 because the next full size up 6 would be too large for me. I know because I tried and had to return them back. This is especially true for boots and pumps. Due to the confined nature of those styles, feet in boots and pumps feel extra cramped and uncomfortable.

At the same time, the next full size fits too loosely and might end up looking like “pencils in the cup”. In my opinion, that look is okay for cowboy boots only.

The same goes for Colin Stuart shoes in US sizes 9, 10 and 11. No half sizes. In order to maximize sales, it’s important for any footwear company to provide the half size as well.

I am very disappointed in that brand and will never order it again.

Sometimes I have no choice because my husband loves to watch them and we are in the same living room. One of his favorite brain-draining shows is Operation Repo. If he starts watching it in my presence, I beg him for mercy and ask to change the channel. I am probably allergic to all members on that show, especially to that blond woman with tattooed eyebrows and pierced lip. What a “looker”. But it’s more than that. She is nasty, even to her coworkers and her own family members. Although we are pretty sure that the show is fake or re-creations, it really just makes her behavior worse, doesn’t it?

The other two shows that he watches are Jersey Shore and Bad Girls Club. Before I only suspected that those kinds of people exist and now I know they do. It’s a scary reality. I feel that I am devolving just watching them drinking, fighting, cursing and all that “fun”. 

It almost seems like the dumber you are and the less civilized you act, the more likely you are to appear on your own reality TV show. It’d be very hard find to reality show that features people who are even somewhat normal or well behaved. Society is actually creating a disincentive to be productive.

How does this affect kids? They probably think it’s cool to act like that if it’s on TV. Is it ok to be nasty to each other verbally and physically? Why TV breeds the very kind of teen behavior that is frowned upon by society? Ratings are important and no one wants to watch boring stuff, that’s why.

Another show that he loves to watch is a Fear Factor. Contestants are eating and drinking bugs and do some other gross things for the sake of money. Poor insects and animals, what did they do to deserve that? They don’t get any rewards for that. It seems that the True TV show The World’s Dumbest Daredevils encourages some people to do crazy things and film it just to be on that show. The “award winning” show is Jackass. What a wonderful example to youth with the “classy” guys acting like, you know, Jackasses. And the list continues as TV adds more and more of so called True TV and Reality Shows.

When I ask my husband is there anything else on TV? The answer is “No, there is nothing else”, because the rest is boring. It feels like we pay for so many channels and there is still nothing to watch. As an alternative, he would switch the channel and watch something like Star Wars or something else that we saw only thousand times. How sad.