Mushroom Hunting

    Every Sunday for the last month my fiancé and I have headed out to his family's old farm house in search of morels. His family has about 50 acres of land, 25 of which is open pasture and the other 25 is densely wooded. Once we cleared the pasture and got into the woods we would let the dogs off their leashes so they could get their exercise in while we were searching for mushrooms. We have unsuccessfully searched for mushrooms no less than four times. Zeb swears that he used to find them out in the woods every year growing up. I have a hard time believing him considering we have yet to find one. Not even one.

    Yesterday we were supposed to go mushroom hunting again, but I decided to skip out this time around. Wouldn't you know it, he came home with morels. He only found 6, but still at least he found some. There may be a couple of reasons why we hadn't had any luck finding morels in the last month. For one, I think we started looking a little premature. Their growing season is supposed to start in mid-April and sometimes can extend through mid-June. Many morel hunters also say that their growing seasons begins just around the time the Mayapples get their blooms. I think another reason that we didn't have much luck finding morels in the last month is because they have not had the right growing conditions. In order for morels to grow a number of things must be JUST right. The best conditions for morel growth include soil temperature of 65 degrees, air temperature of 65-80 degrees and high relative humidity. I think we haven't really begun to see morels yet because there hasn't been much rain and the temperature has been on the lower end of the spectrum. Tomorrow is supposed to get up to 66 degree and on Wednesday it's supposed to be 75 degrees. Hopefully between that and the rain we got this last weekend we will be able to find some more morels. If not this weekend, there's always next weekend.

Mmm, mmm, mmm!

Modern Day Kitty Genovese

March 13^th 1964, Kew Gardens, Queens, New York

It was around 3:15 A.M. when Catherine "Kitty" Genovese had arrived home work. As she was locking her car she noticed a man standing in between her and her apartment which was approximately 100 yards away. Instead of heading towards her apartment she decided to head to the nearest police call box just down the street. She never made it to that police call box. The man standing in her path had followed her and overcame her, stabbing her in the back twice. Kitty called out "oh my God, he stabbed me. Please help me! Please help me!" Not long after her scream for help a light came on in a nearby apartment building and a man opened the window and called down "let that girl alone." This deterred her attacker, but only for a minute. As Kitty rounded the corner to her apartment the man was waiting for her where he began stabbing her again. Once again she cried out for help, "I'm dying! I'm dying!" This time lights came on and the windows were opened in several apartments which startled her assailant. He got into his car and drove away. Kitty had managed to crawl to the back of her apartment building and make it in to the stairwell before her attacker returned to finish the job he had started. It was at 3:50 A.M. that the police received the first phone call regarding the attack of Kitty Genovese. They arrived two minutes later only to find her dead.

After completing the investigation the police concluded that there were no less than thirty eight victims who either saw or heard this attack. The police also stressed that had someone made a phone call, from the safety of their home, when the first attack had taken place Kitty might still be alive. Instead her attacker was given three chances within a thirty five minute span to kill his victim and he ultimately succeeded. The Kitty Genovese murder has gone down in history as well as in psychology. In 1968, four years after the gruesome murder of Kitty Genovese, a study produced results which were coined "Genovese Syndrome" or the bystander effect. This study found that the more people that were present the less likely there were to help a person in distress. They say the reasoning for the bystander effect is the diffusion of responsibility; since other people are present there is less pressure on them to take action; and a need to behave in a socially acceptable manner; because no one else is taking action they perceive it to be unnecessary or inappropriate.

Some things never change. Just last week, a little over 46 years later, a man was stabbed to death in Queens, New York, in broad daylight. As the man approached a woman being attacked, the attacker turned and stabbed him. Shortly after, the woman and attacker took off running in different directions as the man collapsed face down. As seen on a surveillance camera, it was not more than a couple minutes after his collapse that a steady stream of people began walking past him without helping. One man took a picture of him on his cell phone, while another shook him as if to wake him up. But the man lay there dying, in a pool of his blood, for nearly an hour and a half before authorities were notified and arrived on the scene. At this point it was too little, too late.

I am amazed and saddened by people's indifference. I could not imagine walking past someone who lay there dying, in a pool of blood, and not helping them or calling for help. What is this world coming to?

Water

Water is the principal component of the human body. As a matter of fact over 2/3s of the human body is composed of water. According to Better Nutrition our blood is 82% water; our brain is 75% water as well as our muscles being 75% water. Water is also a main component in all of the bodily fluids. As you can see water is necessary in order for the body to function. Water helps to carry all the essential nutrients throughout the body, water also aids in circulation and digestion, in addition to flushing the body of all the toxins. Not only does water help ensure that your body functions properly it also provides the body with an array of other benefits. Water is a natural appetite suppressant. Increasing your water intake can help with water retention problems. Also, consuming enough water also helps to keep your skin hydrated. Water also helps to reduce the risk of developing kidney stones. Water helps to reduce sore muscles and muscle cramps in addition to lubricating the joints.

Now we're aware of how important it is to drink enough water each day. But exactly how much water is enough? According to the Mayo Clinic there is no clear cut answer on how much water is enough. The amount of water a person needs to consume each day depends on a number of factors. Among these factors are your health, your level of activity, and where you live. Doctor's generally recommend that a healthy adult, with an average level of activity, in a temperate climate should consume 8 or 9 cups a day. There are three ways to ensure that you have adequate water consumption. The first of these is to use the replacement method where you try to replace the amount of water you expel. If using this method it is important to know that the average adult usually expels 1.5 liters of water through urination and an additional liter through breathing, sweating, and bowel movements. Using the replacement method it would be safe to assume that you would need to consume 2 liters each day to make up for what you lost (this figures that at least half an ounce of water would come from your food intake). Another way to ensure adequate water consumption is the 8 by 8 rule. It's pretty self-explanatory, drink 8, 8 ounce glasses of water each day. The final way to ensure adequate water consumption is to abide my dietary recommendations. The Institute of Medicine advises that men drink 3.7 liters of water a day and women drink 2.7 liters a day (this figure includes water from beverages and food).

Enrollment

    In the fall of 2006 I moved to Springfield to start my college career at Missouri State University. It didn't take long for me to decide that it wasn't the place for me. In the spring of 2007 I transferred to Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri. While I was up there I began having back problems. When I came home for the summer I went to my family doctor who ordered an MRI then sent me on to an orthopedic specialist. After reading my MRI the specialist informed me that surgery was needed and it was most likely going to be the first surgery of many. Great, just what I wanted to hear. After hearing this news my family and I decided that it was in my best interest to transfer to MSSU and stay local in the event that more went wrong with my back.

    Seeing as my transfer to MSSU was a last minute decision I waited until the last minute to enroll. I just went to admissions and a student enrolled me. And that's the way it went for the next two years. I was never assigned an advisor until the fall of 2009. Only then did I get an advisor because I specifically asked for one. I know this is somewhat my fault, but c'mon, they can do better than that. Because I never had an advisor I hadn't taken some of classes that were prerequisites to other classes. I also hadn't even begun to take any classes for my major.

    It's like I've hit a brick wall, because I do not have all the prerequisite classes to my major classes I cannot carry a full course load. Not even close. The fall of 2009 I took 17 hours and this spring I am taking 19 hours all in an attempt to play catch up. But it's too little too late. This summer I can only take 7 hours and this fall I can only take 9 because you guessed what I am taking this summer is a prerequisite for what I'm taking this fall. What I'm taking fall of2010 are prerequisites for pretty much every other class I have to take. Annoying!

    My advice: if you don't have an advisor make sure you're assigned one ASAP so you can avoid the situation I've gotten myself in to (with a little help, I might add)

Fishing

We have spent the last couple weekends fishing; unsuccessfully at that. Two weeks ago I decided that I wanted to go fishing on our days off. So off we went to Academy and bought the tools of the trade along with our fishing licenses. In the state of Missouri you must have a permit in order to "pursue, take, possess, and transport fish, live bait, mussels, clams, crayfish, frogs and turtles. There are a number of licenses they offer; ranging from a one day license to a year license to a lifetime license for both residents and non-residents. We opted for the year license. The next day we headed to Jolly Mill to try our hand at fishing. We fished for a couple hours unsuccessfully before packing up and calling it a day. This last weekend we had intended to fish at Kellogg Lake in Carthage but had forgotten our fishing poles and had not realized this until we had arrived. After we finished our errands in Carthage we decided that we would just go down to Wildcat Park and fish there. Once again we caught nothing.

We plan to go fishing again this weekend, but this time around we have done a little research. Tomorrow we plan to get up bright and early and head Cassville Missouri with our final destination being Roaring River State Park. According to the Missouri Department of Conservation Roaring River State Park is a trout park. Roaring River State Park is also ranked a white ribbon trout area; which means that it is stocked with trout intensively. The trout areas are ranked white; being the highest rank, red, and then blue being the lowest rank.

Throughout my research I have found a lot of helpful information that should make tomorrow's trip a success. Among this information is how to identify trout and then differentiate between the different types of trout; rainbow and brown trout. Rainbow trout can be identified by the pink streak that runs the length of their body, as well as their forked tail with dark spots. A brown trout can be identified by its yellow abdomen, red and/or orange spots, and its slightly forked tail with faint to no spots. It is important to be able to identify the different types of a daily limit of four trout per person. If any of the trout you possess are brown trout they must have a length of at least 15"; there is no length limit on the rainbow trout.

In addition to finding a good place to fish and how to identify the different types of trout I also learned a few things that will improve my chance of catching a fish. One of these ways is by wearing polarized sunglasses. Polarized sunglasses reduce the glare and make it easier to spot trout under the water's surface. I've also learned that it is best to use very thin line when fishing on a clear, sunny day because often the larger line can be seen by the trout and will scare them away. Also, that the best bet for catching trout is when the water level is low is in deep holes where they will often pool up.

Hopefully next week's blog will be about how many trout we caught. J

Do It Yourself Landscaping

    So, we started our landscaping project last weekend. Well, sort of. Our backyard is at two different levels. The higher level runs the length of our neighbors house and extends about two and half feet. At the edge of the higher level they put railroad ties that served as a divider and also kept the dirt from washing away. I'm not sure exactly how long those railroad ties had been there, but they were in bad shape. Several of them had begun to split and fall apart; so last weekend we started out our lovely landscaping adventure by pulling out all the railroad ties in the backyard. That in and of itself wasn't too bad. Surprisingly it only took a couple hours to dig them out, load them up, and haul them off. At this point I was saying to myself "ahh, maybe this won't be so bad after all." Wrong.

    Our plans were to spend every Saturday during the day for the next month or so working in the backyard. Well, you know what they say: plans are made to be broken; and we would sure hate to disappoint. We did not work on the backyard this weekend because we had much more pressing issues to tend to: city wide garage sale in Neosho. As much as I dislike going to garage sales, I must say it sure does beat landscaping. Since we did not make time to work on the backyard this weekend we have decided that we will spend a couple hours out there each night this week playing catch up.

    This week is going to consist of leveling out the backyard, and well, after looking at today's progress, I think we will be doing good to even get that done. Although leveling out the backyard is time consuming and hard manual labor the up side is that it doesn't cost much. Once we get the yard leveled out we start getting into the costly part. We have to build a retaining wall where the pulled out the railroad ties. We could go the cheaper route and just use railroad ties, but that just seems like a huge waste of time and money to me. I really don't ever want to do this again, so I think we're going to opt for stone retaining wall blocks. After we get the retaining wall in place we're going to have to have a couple loads of river rock brought in to cover the walkway from the back patio to the grass. Because the dogs constantly run and play here it is nothing but dirt; I'm sure you can imagine what my floor looks like after the dogs come in from the rain or snow. Once we get the retaining wall and river rock in place then we have to seed the yard and start our flowerboxes. That part doesn't sound so bad.

    Right now I am just so overwhelmed. I am very much so one of those instant gratification people and it is driving me insane that my yard is torn up. Hopefully we make big strides in the next month or so…

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is something that has just started to explode in the last couple years. Social media is promoting your product or business through social media outlets. According to the Social Media Marketing Industry Report Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogs are the top four social media outlets. It is no surprise that Facebook ranks among the top social media outlets. Facebook boasts over 400 million users; 50% of which log on each day. Facebook also boasts over 3 million active pages; with 1.5 million of those belonging active businesses. In addition to having over 3 million active pages, 20 million people become fans of these pages each day.

My fiancé works at Grow Marketing in Joplin, Missouri which is currently the only marketing firm in this area that offers social media marketing. Offering this service to their clients gives them a huge leg up on the competition. Social media marketing is beneficial to companies in a number of ways. One of these ways is marketing. The main way that social media helps to market a product or service is through brand awareness. Letting people know what and who you are is a big benefit of all the different social media outlets. Someone may have seen your TV advertisements or billboards a thousand times but once they start to interact with your brand through social media, they really begin to understand your business.

Another way that social media is beneficial to companies is public relations. There may be a lot of negative feedback about your brand or business on the web. There's not really a whole lot business owners can do about that, unless that negative feedback is taking place through social media. Social media personalizes a business and gives each brand a voice. When a customer has a bad experience and publishes that information on Facebook or a blog, it gives the company a chance to ask why, or what they can do to fix the problem. Social media creates dialogue between a customer and a brand.

A third way that Social media is beneficial to a company is market research. Domino's just recently held taste tests to determine what people thought they were doing wrong with their pizza. This marketing research could have been done on Facebook, or another social media outlet, just as effectively. They could have just as easily advertised free pizza to customers who mentioned their Facebook page as long as they posted what they liked and didn't like about their pizza. This is an unprecedented way to do business. There has always been internet, at least in my life time but, it has never been so interactive. Social media, such as Facebook, offers demographic information and "insights" as to what each page's fans are doing on their pages, how many unique visits they get, and they recently began the beta test of a program that will track what people do and where they go once they click on an ads of yours. This is all market research that can be presented to business owners as a tangible return on their investment.

The fourth and final benefit of social media that I would like to discuss is the low cost. Other than consulting fees for things such as front end graphic work on your logo and setting up the basic format of your page, (which are at your disgression) Facebook is free. Ads are free to create and you only pay once they are clicked. If you have a real stinker of an ad and it bombs, it didn't cost you anything. I recently looked at McDonald's Facebook page and they had over 2 million fans. That's 2 million opportunities to market their products for free, to people that have already displayed interest by becoming a fan.

I don't think that anyone can deny the rising popularity of social media in the business world. Traditionalists will always argue that print advertising is better or radio commercial offer a higher ROI, but in reality more and more people are utilizing the internet through computers and smart phones. Take a few moments to compare the amount of time spent on Facebook or YouTube each week as compared to the time spent reading the newspaper or watching TV each week. People are on the internet more and more each day. Traditional media is not dying, but it has to be used creatively along with the newer and more creative social media outlets.

Late Start to the Week

I feel like I am getting off to a late start this week. By this point (Monday night) I usually have about 75% of my homework for the week done. I prefer to do as much as I can Sunday and Monday so that I don't have to worry about fitting all the homework in between work and extracurricular activities. I've also found that doing this I tend not to miss deadlines. However, it's not just my homework schedule that has been thrown off, but pretty much my whole schedule.

My fiancé and I are both creatures of habit. We have a basic schedule that we stick to each week. Seeing as we both work Monday-Friday, 9 to 5, we usually just have a quiet night in on Friday nights, sleep in Saturday, then have the rest of the day and night to do with it whatever we please; which is usually spent hanging out with friends. Sunday, according to our schedule, is cleaning and grocery day. Easy enough, right?

It didn't seem so easy this weekend. Friday after work instead of just relaxing we decided to head down to my parents to borrow some garden tools being that we decided to start our landscaping project this weekend. We spent a couple hours down there visiting before we loaded up the tools we needed. Once we got back in to town we decided that instead of landscaping the next day we would invite my brother and his girlfriend to go fishing (they were in town for spring break); so off to Academy we went to buy the tools of the trade. The next day we got up at a decent hour, did a little speed cleaning, and then headed down to Jolly Mill. We stayed and fished (with no luck) for about 3 hours. Once we made it back home we barely had time to clean up before it was time to head down to my parents for Easter dinner. Needless to say we spent the majority of our night there.

So Sunday we got up about 9:30 ate some breakfast and then headed to Wal-Mart to get our grocery shopping done. We only buy the stuff that we don't need a whole lot of at Wal-Mart and buy everything else from Sam's. After we left Wal-Mart we headed to Sam's, only to find it closed for Easter (I probably should have seen that one coming). That threw my day off completely considering we buy the bulk of our food there. Once we got home and unloaded the groceries we started in on the cleaning. About 30 minutes into it Zeb decides that he does want to go ahead and start the landscaping project this weekend. Between the cleaning and landscaping we were on the go until 8 pm, which left little time for homework.

So this weekend was a case of too much to do not enough time. It would have been fine had it ended with the weekend, but it didn't. It carried over into today. I normally leave work early every Monday to come home and hit the books, but I wasn't able to today. Normally this would have been fine, except that since Sam's was closed yesterday I had to finish up my grocery shopping after work tonight. Once we got home and unloaded the groceries it was time to make dinner. After dinner and clean up it was time for a shower. Which once again left little time for homework. I hate when my schedule gets thrown off, it makes me feel anxious and overwhelmed. Hopefully everything falls in place tomorrow…