Lots of people find it tough to move away from home for the first time.  For many it is through University or college, the advantage being you are surrounded by people who are experiencing exactly the same thing.   However for me it was a gap year, spent in a small town in Turkey on the South Western coast.

It was actually quite a scary time for me, I was intending to work for an Travel firm who ran adventure courses like mountain biking, sailing and orienteering plus a load of other things.  It seemed like a great chance to get some practical experience on my CV before starting my Leisure based degree in Nottingham.

It’s not something you can prepare yourself for I guess, but I found it incredibly tough at the beginning.  The people I worked with great, they really looked out for me and I got a gentle introduction into what was my first employment.   I have to say I nearly quit after two weeks though, being incredibly homesick and missing my friends.  But then it changed.

It was a realization I guess that if I gave up,  the next time I tried it would be worse.  The other thing I did was to stop behaving like a tourist and embrace the lifestyle of the locals around me.  I had previously spent the first two weeks sitting in my room, with my laptop signed in to a British VPN in order for me to watch UK TV.  Instead I started mixing with my colleagues and socialising.   I soon made lots more friends and became much more confident.

So perhaps my message is that when it comes for you to move from home, just embrace it.  Meet people, experience your new surroundings and realise it’s a whole new chapter to your life.

I tossed my graduation cap as high as I could.  This is it.  I am ready to take on the world.

Idealistic, driven, and impatient: qualities ascribed to fresh graduates.  I was all that but I have never really felt them peak because I was offered an entry level job by my alma mater.  Go figure; after the contract expired, there were no vacancies for regularization.  With enthusiasm, I set out and joined millions of fresh graduates looking for entry level jobs. This list of what I consider to be my best practices may help you as it did lead me to fill the only vacancy on a position hundreds of others sought for.

Be ready.  Against everyone’s advice, I drafted a detailed resume even if the only highlights were my two-month stint on my first job and my educational accomplishments.  I thought I can never hold something back if it means my employment.  I was never late for an interview, I answered the questions honestly, and I took the battery of tests faithfully.

Be determined and be patient.  I got the second job I want at first try.  I failed my third and moved on.  I knew there were others out there.  I believed that the pitfalls prior are ways to give time for better options.  I was right.

Be humble.  I recognized that I am a starter in the workforce so an entry level job is the right thing to yearn for.  That feeling of being equipped to assume something past an entry level responsibility I dismissed as a product of idealism.

Be resourceful.  Technological advances widened the potential for employment.  I registered to various job sites; I read the classified ads regularly, I sought referrals from friends, and handed out resumes to recruitment centers.  I never stopped until I got my first successful call.

Note to the fresh graduate: the path is wide and steep at the same time.  Be prepared and good luck on your endeavors looking for entry level jobs.

Growing up, I always loved Sunday mornings. Not so much for Sunday school but more because after my parents returned from church, we always had a nice Sunday lunch. Sometimes this was a full on roast with roasted potatoes and vegetables. Other times it was more like an all day breakfast with lots of bacon, eggs, sausages, fried tomatoes, french toast and so on. Either way, my father also made us some freshly squeezed orange juice. More than the food, this is what I loved!

Now that I have liberated myself from my parents, I make myself juice every day. I spent and still do spend time looking through juicer reviews to help me decide which which machine(s) are the best. My own health is something that I’m not prepared to cut corners on. So I see it as an investment, in me, when I spend money on juicing appliances. The thing is, I know I’m going to use them! It would be a waste of money if I just bought them and left them sitting in my kitchen.

One of the things that I love about juicing is that my own son loves it too. More than drinking juices, he loves making them. This sort of education is something I’m more than happy to encourage. Too many children eat absolute rubbish and have no idea where their food comes from. With my son, this is a situation I am trying to avoid. He helps me in the garden and we pick vegetables together. I take him shopping and let him choose the fruit we buy. Then together we juice and blend up our fresh produce to make flavorsome health drinks to enjoy together.

I didn’t know too much about dietary health until later in life. If I can educate my son about healthy foods from a young age, I feel I will have done well as a father. I want him to have every opportunity to enjoy a happy and healthy life.

If you enjoy a sandwich for lunch, or even dinner the choice at Subway is better than ever. and if you can get your hands on Subway coupons the already great prices are even better too. What you might not know though is that Subway serve breakfast now too.

 Subway prides itself on being the “healthier” alternative to fast food burger joints and they carry that theme on in their breakfast menu. And they may just offer the best breakfast deal in your town as their year round $3 breakfast special gets you your choice of several of their different 6” breakfast subs – Egg and Cheese, Bacon, Egg and Cheese or Black Forest Ham, Egg and Cheese – and a 16oz Seattle’s Best coffee or a 20 oz soda. Not a bad way to start the day right, and certainly a really great price to start the day!

One thing that I have struggled with in my life is my body image, despite growing up in a loving family with two doting parents and siblings for whom I’d do anything.  Maybe it was the media, maybe it was my self-impressionable ways, but I have always had a hard time finding value in what I saw in the mirror.

About a year ago, I started working with a body image coach to try to heal my relationship with food, my body, and my spirit.  It has been a fascinating experience working through the thoughts and feelings in my mind and realizing that true joy comes from being aware of and being at peace with your body.  I always felt like I was working against my body and mind, but now I realize the true way to peace is to work with them.

I am at a better place in my life now than ever before.  It’s amazing how changing my mindset has opened up so many new doors in my life.  I am no longer afraid of new experiences and taking risks.  I finally feel at peace.

I was pretty naive and trusting about the mental health system. They are doctors, right? They just want to help, right? I had some bad experiences with some questionable doctors and mixed experiences from my hospitalization in 1999, but I had no idea how bad it could be until my second hospitalization. As bad as I feel my 2003 experience was, I know that there are much worse examples out there. I was lucky in that only sutures were needed. I walked out of the hospital alive and with with my mind and spirit intact.

I found no concise and comprehensive information about rights, complaints, agencies, or procedures. Information I was given was vague and contradictory. I found I had to figure it out by myself and have done a great deal of research in this area. I want to make this information available to others so they don’t have to start from scratch.

Additionally I believe that the system does not adequately protect patients and needs improvement. If a hospital has the legal power to lock someone up against their will for “treatment”, then there should be some effective mechanism to ensure the hospital follows the rules that come with that power. Today this is not the case. Hopefully in the near future it will be.

I feel that the public and many patients are not aware of how frequently patients are mistreated. The system is designed to “ensure public confidence” by sweeping such information under the rug. Most medical disciplinary information is kept confidential by law. Wouldn’t do to learn too much about your doctor. Better to keep you in the dark so that you don’t worry about it. When I went in for neurosurgery, I knew more about my automobile mechanic and garage than I did about my surgeon and the hospital. When I went in for borderline personality disorder test, I knew more about my home wiring than where this test could end me up. This did not help my confidence.

In addition to the protections afforded by law, many hospital staff adhere to the unwritten and rarely acknowledged “white wall of silence”. This is where the staff cover for each other to ensure their jobs remain safe. This is done at the expense of the patients.

It may require significant public outcry to change the system and make it more responsive to ensuring patient safety. If you are reading this, do your best in participate in communities to help the cause & if you are about to be a mental health patient, do your research well.

The internet has really come a long way. As a blogger, I can say that such is a tried-and-tested fact. Through time, I have seen it prove itself to be a valuable tool in man’s life in so many aspects—may it be in the field of communication, entertainment, information and even commerce.

Say for instance in business and commerce. I know for a fact that the competition among various businesses in different fields are really getting more intense and cut throat. Everyone can sense that. That is basically why it is very important for a business executive to find an edge over the competitors.

Assuming that you are a business executive (since you are reading this blog entry), let me give you my two cents’ worth.

One such way that will work for you is internet marketing. As a matter of fact, more and more internet marketing companies are getting into business nowadays. Actually, an seo agency has a lot of tools that will help establish and maintain a strong online presence for your business. One such tool is social media marketing.

As its name suggests, social media marketing works in such a way that your business will be marketed through the use of social media. Your business will be linked to social media networking sites. As you may know, more and more people are already getting into the social media networking sites like Twitter and Facebook among others. Thus, that is a wide pool of potential customers that you can tap to boost your sales.

Essentially, these internet marketing companies will determine the best social media networking sites for your business and establish your presence there.

When was the last time you went on a real adventure (urban downtown bars do not count.) With that in mind why not consider going camping one weekend instead of hitting the club?

By camping I mean real camping, not the kind where you go to a camp site that offers bathrooms and restaurants and a drive in movie theater. Real camping means going out into the woods some place. Pitching a real tent in a real open space. Cooking your food over a fire pit dug into the ground. Actually having to rough it a bit and make your own brewed over the fire pit coffee in the morning rather than going to get one from a vending machine.

Real camping does not have to mean you go through hell though. There is a more “civilized” way to enjoy a real camping holiday. Go into any camping equipment store and you will find tents (at fairly reasonable prices) that are more like little houses and sleeping bags that are more comfortable and cozy than any comforter. You can buy a camping toilet, and even a disposable camping shower to make hygiene easier. And yes, you can even buy solar chargers that will help ensure that your smart phone stays juiced up so that you do not lose contact with the “outside world” altogether (or miss out on your daily dose of Angry Birds or some other such diversion after lights out!)

Camp cookery can be a great experience as well. If you shop a little before you go you will find that you can buy specialist cooking woods that come in lightweight chips that you can use to whip up a great fire pit dinner without having to spend hours searching for miles for enough dry (and pest free) wood to get a half decent camp fire going.

I wasn’t even born when my dad and my uncle had the crazy idea to start a wine of the month club business.  For some reason the two of them actually made it and have been making plans, as they tell me repeatedly, for one of my cousins and I to take over one day.

The thing they seem to be forgetting is the simple fact, that I might not want anything to do with it.  Why do they think they get to decide not only what I do for a living, but where I am going to live and everything else with my life? They got to make their own decisions, yet they think I should just take over their business and what, live next door?

Growing up I was always interested in fashion and like most girls in particular designer shoes. The only problem was that I could only look at them in magazines and watch on TV as celebrities walked the red carpet. They always looked so stunning and in a way I suppose I wanted to be just like them.

The older I got though the more I grew into myself and became very much my own person, wanting to look like the celebrities was no longer something I aspired to, this didn’t stop my love of fashion though. The first job I worked I used my first paycheck to buy a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes. Its hard to explain the feeling owning a pair of these iconic shoes. Wearing them gave me a feeling of confidence and achievement, the days of cutting pictures out of magazines seem a long way off. The memories were great but finding my independence cannot be bettered.

The last decade or so has seen a move away from conformity, a desire to be different. This has become particularly apparent to me because of the trend for parents to give their new babies names that are somehow different, as if by doing so the children are somehow special.

My business is the manufacture of personalised christening gifts which, by definition, include the name of the baby being christened. The popularity of ‘traditional’ names has been in decline, being replaced by ‘made-up’ names, or by traditional names that are spelt in a different way. Just how some of the children given odd names will react when they grow up is not yet known, but various experts are expecting an adverse effect. Looking ahead, some even predict that today’s ‘liberated’ children will swing back to the other extreme and will name their own children using more traditional names.

There are several human traits that suggest that neither children nor adults wish to be ‘liberated’. Instead most like to conform and to belong: for example football supporters like to wear their team’s shirt, a sort of clan uniform that tells the onlooker that that person is a member of a group.

Liberation, or being different, may be attractive for a while, but most are happy to conform.

I’m in my early 20′s and I have to tell you, I’m not happy at all. People my age have been in school for 12 years plus 4 years for college and we get out to find unemployment near an all time high. We worked hard in college, racking up debt, only to find that possibly all our efforts have been wasted. I would have been better off if I had skipped college and gotten a burger flipping job out of high school! At least that way I wouldn’t be in debt like I am.

A lot of people my age are participating in the Occupy Wall Street protests and I can see why. I haven’t been there myself but I am tempted to go. There are a lot of crazy people there but a lot of sensible ones too and I would probably fit in somewhere. The longer this bad economy goes on, the more likely I will be to join at some point. Watching our politicians at work is really a joke and someone needs to speak up.

What is so worrisome now is that even if I did find a job it wouldn’t be very secure. I have several friend who are afraid they are going to have to file for unemployment because their jobs are on the chopping block. This makes it very hard to optimistically look for work knowing that even if I am lucky, any job I find might be short lived. Everywhere I go and everyone I talk to has stories about how hard a time they are having right now. It’s really sad and I feel unlucky that all this is happening at a time in my life when I should be venturing out into the workplace, getting my feet wet, and figuring just what it is I want to do with my life. As it is, I am just struggling to survive.

My parents were very hard working people and instilled good moral fiber in my being while I was growing up.  But one thing I lacked was a decent background into the world of finance.  They had no real idea themselves how to run their finances properly and passed this bad trait down to me.  My lack of knowledge landed me deep in credit card debt, to the point where I needed some debt relief or I was going to drown in bills.  I hope that I can learn from both my mistakes and theirs and ensure my son fully understand the dangerous financial world out there and learns how to take advantage of it, not get taken advantage of like me.

We all thought life was so plush and nice when we were little kids, not knowing just how difficult life will really be in the real world once we are adults and out on our own.  My whole life I always heard my parent talking about paying bills and staying afloat.  Not until I got older was I able to appreciate it.  I always head about getting benefit for medical and dental, and now that I got stuck with large bills for my sleep apnea problem I can finally see what my parents were always talking about.  I do find that through experience though we all grow for the better.

Finally I’ve got my own place!  After years of first living under my parents’ roof, and then sharing a room with a spoilt brat in college, I have a place I can call my own.  Better yet, I finally get to decorate it the way I want – liberated at last!

I am lucky enough to be able to afford to rent a home and not just an apartment.  This is a great luxury I know for a recent college grad, but I am thrilled about it.  Unfortunately, there is one downside I have to deal with – it comes with a lot less kit than the average apartment.

I actually have to buy my own refrigeration.  It goes without saying that I have no clue how to go about doing this.  Usually when I buy something I just login to Amazon and see what looks good.  But for this purchase I’m looking at spending a thousand bucks, that is some serious money for me.

I’ve starting poking about various websites that have refrigerator reviews.  There is certainly no shortage of them out there.  It’s tricky to know what to make of them all however, as a lot of them are targeted at housewives shopping for a family and kids and such.

I just want a reasonably priced refrigerator that will store enough stuff for myself and my future girlfriend(s) – plus of course plenty of cold beer for when my buddies drop by!  It should look somewhat classy, as I don’t want to scare off the ladies with an ugly piece of junk in the center of my kitchen.  I may not be sophisticated, but maybe I can fool themJ

My folks have had a couple of Frigidaire refrigerators over the years; I don’t really ever remember them breaking down or anything.  To me that is a good sign!  I think I will probably just end up finding a Frigidaire unit that has good refrigerator reviews and ordering that one.

No need to over complicate matters, right?