Cards Direct Giveaway!

I am so excited about this!  You’re familiar with Cards Direct, right?  They are a company that specializes in personalized, beautiful greeting cards for all kinds of occasions.  And with fall fast approaching, the holidays are just around the corner! (I know I can’t believe it either!)  Have you ever wanted to send out those beautiful Christmas Cards or  other Holiday Cards that other people seem to find the time to do?  What about some stunning Photo Cards of your family portrait?  I never get around to it either, but I think this year is going to be different.

From their literature:

CardsDirect offers the very best in personalized greeting cards for business or personal use.  Over 2,000 card designs are available in categories that include holiday cards, birthday cards, thank you cards, photo cards, baby shower invitations, Baby Announcements and many more!  With free personalization and custom imprinted verse, CardsDirect offers an easy online ordering process and top quality cards with the best selection, customer service and pricing found anywhere.

So here’s what they want to do.  They would like one of my readers to have a great card giving experience this year and they’re going to give one of you 25 greeting cards, up to a $50 value!  All you need to do to enter is leave a comment.  If you’d like to Tweet it, or post it to Facebook, let me know in a separate comment on this post and that will get you an extra entry.  The contest will end on September 30th 2010 and is only open to US residents (sorry!). On October 1st, I’ll randomly pick a winner and you will get your redeemable code that day.

Exciting, right?

Full Disclosure: Cards Direct did agree to send me a gift of cards to thank me for helping them to bring their great product to you.  Full disclosure policy can be found here.

Gold’s Gym Dance Workout

So, part of the Mean Girl Cleanse Exercise this week talked about Being Impeccable With Your Word which really resonated for me because I have not been impeccable with my word to myself. One of the things I committed to at the beginning of the summer was moving my body more and while I certainly did improve in that area, I didn’t reach my goals exactly and the last couple of weeks I’ve been really slacking off.  I’ve felt guilty about it and that’s only made it worse.  You know how that goes right?

So yesterday I was thrilled when this came in the mail!  It’s Gold’s Gym Dance Workout for the Wii, by Ubisoft.  I love to dance and really don’t do it like I used to – you know,  back in the day – (yeah, I said it).

So, this morning when I woke up and once again the weather wasn’t cooperating for pool cardio, I decided to give this a whirl.  I popped it in the Wii and went through the instructions.

It’s compatible with the Balance Board, but not necessary.  I don’t love the balance board because… well, I’m unbalanced.  Seriously though, it’s just not big enough to dance around on. I was surprised by the idea of using two controllers, but I picked them both up, filled out my profile info, picked a trainer and started to play.  Also, a much appreciated feature or lack thereof is that your avatar doesn’t get all “fluffy” when you put your real weight in – Hello Nintendo, I’m talking to you.

I did some Latin dancing and some boxing, both of which were a great workout and a lot of fun.

Then I started to explore some of the mini games.

Here I am, dodging the bulls in Matador.

And here I am practicing my sword fighting moves.  So Jedi.

All in all there were great, fun workouts and lots of instruction if you run into a problem. There was plenty of content to keep your workout varied and keep you (me) from getting bored.  Boredom is my worst enemy, but this looks like it might be a great tool for keeping myself on track.

I was selected by Ubisoft and Clever Girls Collective to be part of the Ubisoft Champions social media program. While Ubisoft provided me with this game to review, the opinions I’ve expressed here are solely my own and represent my honest viewpoint. Ubisoft and Clever Girls Collective promote Blog With Integrity

Giving Up Gossip

Not familiar with the Inner Mean Girl Reform School?  Check out this post!

Week 1 in the Inner Mean Girl Cleanse is about giving up gossip.  The discussion questions were:

1. What’s the cost of gossip?
2. What’s the benefit?
3. What’s the truth?

I don’t often participate in gossip and most of the people I know don’t either.  I’m not perfect and occasionally I do have moments where I feel slighted and my first reaction is to resort to hurtful words – but when I really look at it, it’s more about my feeling of inferiority that makes me want to pull someone else down with me and then I feel guilty for having that kind of spiteful reaction.  And that, in a nutshell, is the perfect explanation of my particular inner mean girl. She is all about the fear of not being good enough, of being inferior in some way or another.

So. I know that gossip isn’t good for me, or anyone else and I’m pretty good about dealing with it.  (again, not perfect, but pretty good).  I know I’ll keep working on that and continue to realize what and why I’m saying.  However, there was something very interesting about this week’s lesson and that was the realization that I’ve become more involved with celebrity gossip than I ever admitted to myself!  We all love a good snark, right?  Some clever repartee, maybe? Well, there are a couple of celebrity gossip sites that I read and I realized that participating in, reading about, or passing along information that’s not nice isn’t just bad if you know the person, it’s bad period.  And it’s not about the celebrity, it’s about me.  It’s more of the same feeling of inferiority, or superiority over said celebrity.  We don’t look to feel superior to someone if we’re already feeling good about ourselves, right?  It’s all tied together.

I realized that I was clicking through on links that were stories about who was getting divorced, who cheated on whom, what the wronged spouse got in the divorce settlement and because my focus is on improving my outlook in that area, I was able to see that I lot of what I was following on Twitter and Facebook were just gossip sites.  Interesting.  If you had asked me if I was “into” celebrity gossip, I would have emphatically told you that I had better things to do with my time. And then I might even have gone into a diatribe about what a waste of paper People, The Star, the Enquirer and the NY Post, really are.   Hmm…  Is that gossip about gossipers? So I hid those particular sites from my Facebook newsfeed and I’m not clicking through on gossipy news items on Twitter and apparently I was spending an awful lot of time on that. Yikes.

Christine Arylo talked about a different form of sneaky gossip in her post: You May Be A Gossip and Not Even Know It.

As an aside, part of the discussion was about “Being Impeccable With Your Word” and I realized it had been far too long since I picked up and re-read my copy of the Four Agreements.  Seemed like a good thing to do.  Have you read it?  Are you reading it now?

(affiliate link)

So why don’t you join me (affiliate link)? C’mon – it’ll be fun. Maybe we’ll learn a little bit about how to stop being so mean to ourselves.

I am participating in the Inner Mean Girl 40-day Cleanse as a Self-Love Ambassador. To thank me for my participation, I will receive a self-love gift from the founders of the Inner Mean Girl Reform School

SimpleMind Xpress

I’ve been talking a bit about my experience with the 31 Days to a Better Blog Challenge and I thought I’d share a little bit more about how I’m implementing some of the ideas.  On day 11 we worked on coming up with 10 post ideas; basically taking previous posts and expanding upon them in future, planned posts.  This is commonly referred to as mind mapping and it’s something I do on a regular basis for not only my blog, but other areas of my life as well.

Apparently it’s genetic, because when my father was here in June, I noticed him doing the same thing, but on his iPhone.  Intrigued, I asked him what he was doing and he told me about the app he was using.  It sounded great, so I asked how much it was.

It’s free.

I immediately downloaded it for the iPhone and it works beautifully on the iPad too. It’s called Simple Mind Xpress by Simple Apps and it’s a free download in the iTunes App Store. It works exactly like you would expect it to, exactly the way I used to do it on paper. Except it’s prettier.  You can choose from different color schemes and drag and drop all over the page, making room for new ideas or putting similar categories closer to each other.

You can save your map to your desktop, save to your camera roll, cut, copy, or export to the paid version of SimpleMind which is only $6.99 and I might just upgrade to support the development of this kind of app. I just love it.  There’s also a desktop version that I haven’t really explored…

And then I put them into one of my favorite plug ins, “Post Ideas” and when I’m in the mood to write, theoretically (if I’m following my own advice), I’ve got quite a few relevant topics to choose from.

*This is my opinion only, I received no compensation, monetary or otherwise, I just liked the app and thought you might too.

Broken Link Checker

Recently I participated in the SITS version of Probloggers 31 Days to a Better Blog which was one of the best things I’ve ever done for my blog.  One of the most eye opening exercises was Day 27 which was “Go on a Dead Link Hunt“, which I had never done because the idea of going through posts dating all the way back to 2002 was more daunting than I was willing to deal with.  Fortunately Kat recommended the Broken Link Checker plug in (duh Christine, of course there’s a plug in – has anyone else noticed that I look for more difficulty when there are simple solutions?!).  As is usually the case with WordPress, installation of the plug in was a breeze and it started looking immediately.  The results show up right in your dashboard and by the time it was done, it had found close to a thousand dead links. I’m still not done going through them, but this has been so worth it.  I’m chunking the task, doing a bit every time I get some down time, but I could not believe the dead links!  The vast majority were links to blogs that no longer existed, which was sad – but some were to news stories and opinions that I may or may no longer agree with and some were to photographs that seem to have disappeared over the course of server changes, and subdomain to primary domain and every thing in between.

I’ve deleted quite a few of the posts.  (how did I ever post 4 and 5 times a day?!) Memes, quizzes, silly little filler things, I’ve made some of the posts private as I didn’t want to completely delete them, but they weren’t relevant any longer.  I fixed links, created forwarders when necessary and at this point, I have less than 100 left.  Yay me! *update* they’re all fixed now!

One of my favorite results was concerning a post from February, 2004.  We had a wonderful trip to the Florida Keys and I had the gallery stored under a domain name that I no longer own.  I was able to find the gallery on an old hard drive and it’s now connected and online once again. If you’d like to see, it’s here.

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