This stunning 8,24-acre property offers 8,245 square feet of luxurious and elegant ambiences, including 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, refined living areas, and all sorts of incredible amenities that make it a dream home for anyone. It was designed in 2011. Offering wonderful views of both the mountains and the ocean, it combines the comforts of California with a spectacular design inspired by Balinese and Asian architectural styles. An expensive koi..
The post Breathtaking Property in California, USA appeared first on HomeDSGN.
14 Ways To Protect Your Home When Going On A Vacation
Whenever you have to leave for a trip or a vacation, you don’t want to be worrying about your home. To make sure nothing bad happens, below are 14 ways you can protect your home while you’re away.
Put your kitchen in order
Before leaving, it’s a good idea to clean out the refrigerator. If anything is due to expire while you are gone, throw it out. Remember to empty trash cans, too.
Put dry goods such as cereals, pasta, nuts and other foods in containers that are airtight, if possible. Wash, dry, and put away all dishes.
Clean your house
Put away stray items and vacuum. Toss any fresh flowers or other things that will spoil. Also, change the bedding as well as your linens. When you return home, you’ll find these little things amazingly comforting.
3. Do your laundry
It is not a good idea to come back to piles of old laundry after your vacation. Moreover, clothes, soiled towels and sheets can get smelly and mildewed if left unattended for a long time. So, better to have it washed before leaving.
Water the plants
Give your plants a good watering to ensure that they won’t dry out while you’re gone for the weekend. If you’re going to be gone longer, get an automatic waterer or ask either your neighbor or friend to water your plants.
Spray some insecticide
This is to make sure no bugs will be creeping all over your home while you’re gone. In spraying insecticides, make sure to focus on key areas.
Check your appliances
Go through your home room by room and make sure all your appliances are turned off. Unplug the television, computers and gaming system. If they are on a surge strip, you can turn it off at the switch itself or unplug from the wall socket.
Stop newspaper delivery & arrange to have your mail picked up or held
Newspapers in your drive and mail stacking up in your mailbox are clear signs that you’re not home. Have a friend or neighbor pick up your newspapers and mail each day or have the post office hold it for you.
Put lights on a timer
Nothing tells would-be burglars that you’re not at home faster than a home that is completely dark. Light timers are available for a small fee and can turn off and on lamps for you.
Turn off the thermostat
If your home will be empty including pets, turn off your HVAC unless there’s a chance of freeze. If so, set it to 55 degrees. This will maximize energy savings.
Close the curtains and blinds
Closing blinds and curtains can also save energy and is a good way to prevent people from looking in and seeing what you’ve got inside your home.
Check faucets, fixtures and pipes
Who wants to go on vacation only to be faced with the need for water damage restoration? Be sure to inspect all faucets, pipes and fixtures to ensure that there are no leaks. You can also turn off the water supply for extra insurance. Just don’t forget it when you come back!
Close your garage door and lock it
Burglars are often able to get access to the rest of your house through your garage. Close the garage door and lock it from the inside.
See Also: 7 Common Mistakes Making Your Home Prone to Burglary
Check to make sure all doors and windows are locked
It’s estimated that 30% of all home burglaries occur because someone forgot to lock a window or a door. Be sure to check the windows and doors in each room of your home before leaving. Aso, make sure you don’t have any valuables in sight.
Neighbors or friends should have the required info they need
If they are going to look after your house while you are away, make sure they have the keys to everything, including your phone numbers (or alternative numbers) to reach you if there’s an emergency situation.
Even for small trips, make each of these steps part of your routine. You will feel much safer and you’ll have peace of mind knowing that you did the necessary steps to protect your home.
The post 14 Ways To Protect Your Home When Going On A Vacation appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
Wonderful Reconstruction in North Northumberland, England
This wonderful house is located in West Woodburn, Northumberland, on the border of the National Park, in England. The owner was involved in every stage of this self-build project with the help of Dan Kerr of MawsonKerr Architects to create a sustainable and accessible house for his parents who previously resided in a traditional farmhouse and wanted to continue living on the same site, but wished to have an outstanding..
The post Wonderful Reconstruction in North Northumberland, England appeared first on HomeDSGN.
August 17th
Birdcage Walk
We are often warned against allowing considerations of an author’s personal circumstances to influence our view of his or her work, but it is impossible to read Helen Dunmore’s Birdcage Walk without dwelling on the unhappy fact that she died last March, less than three months after the novel’s publication in the UK. What is more, Dunmore brings her death into the picture herself, offering a gloss to the book by including an afterword in which she says that, while she was not consciously aware that she was dying as she wrote this, the last of her fifteen novels, she nonetheless believes that somewhere in her creative self she did know. “The question of what is left behind by a life haunts the novel,” she tells us. And it is through the book’s several created individuals that she expresses her melancholy fascination with the way most human beings, despite productive, busy lives of consequence and influence in their own time, simply vanish from history.
Birdcage Walk is, in fact, marked by death and loss throughout — beginning with a brief note on Bristol’s late-eighteenth-century building boom, which collapsed when war broke out between England and France in 1793. It left unfinished hundreds of houses meant to constitute grand terraces on the slopes of Clifton, overlooking the river Avon, creating “a roofless spectacle of ruin” that lasted years. Dunmore moves then to our own day, to a lonely man strolling with his dog through an overgrown cemetery; he comes across a grave marker, raised on July 14, 1793, commemorating Julia Elizabeth Fawkes, its inscription reading in part, “Her Words Remain Our Inheritance.” Never having heard of this woman, our man’s interest is piqued, and further research reveals that she was a politically engaged writer married to one of Bristol’s almost forgotten, highly prolific, radical pamphleteers — and that not one word of her own writing has survived. Aside from her gravestone, the only relicts are two scraps of a letter mentioning her, written after her death. The letter, written in a state of high emotion during the harrowing days of the French Revolution, is by an unknown person. Sadness washes over the lonely dog walker: “It was all dead and gone, and no one left to know what any of it had meant.”
On that bleak note, we enter the eighteenth century itself. It is June 1789, and an unknown man — whom, alas, we shall come to know only too well — is digging a grave deep in the woods for the wife he has killed. Make that his first wife — for some three years later we find him, John Diner Tredevant, married to Julia Elizabeth Fawkes’s daughter, Lizzie. He is a developer and builder, deep in debt, trying to pay his workmen to finish the terrace of houses in Clifton by the Avon Gorge that will, he believes, make his fortune. Lizzie, swept up in sexual passion, married him against the advice of her mother, and she is beginning to see what a mistake this was. Diner, as he insists on being called, is moody, volatile, oppressively controlling, and pathologically jealous. He questions his wife’s every move, does not like her to have friends over or to leave the house, and, it emerges, sometimes follows her when she does go out. Most particularly he resents Lizzie’s mother and her second husband, Augustus Gleeson, the two of them outspoken supporters of the revolution in France.
Julia and Augustus bear a strong resemblance to Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin in their manner, interests, and work (Julia “working so hard she hardly had time to eat or speak,” and Gleeson writing away, “buzzing like a fly at a window through which he would never escape”). The similarity is further brought home in that Julia dies in childbed, from puerperal fever — horrifically described — as did Wollstonecraft, though in this case an infant son, named Thomas after Tom Paine, survives, rather than the future Mary Shelley. We are reminded that while Wollstonecraft and Godwin are famous, they were only two among the many men and women beavering away promoting radical causes — for the rights of women and of workers, for freedom of speech and assembly — during this time, writers and speakers who made a difference but whose names are now lost to history.
Augustus, cerebral and scribbling, is not much given to childcare. Thus Lizzie, with the willing help of her little maid, Philo, takes over the care of the motherless child, her half brother. This is a cause of further resentment and outbursts of temper on the part of Diner, who claims that the child will wear his wife out, squandering the attention she properly owes him, her husband: “I was careful not to inflame Diner’s suspicions by signs of tenderness for the baby,” she tells us. “Instead, I cleared away the feeding things, rattles and cradle as evening came on, and gave Thomas back to Philo as soon as I heard the door. I did not speak of the baby to Diner unless he asked. You would rarely have guessed, from our conversation, that Thomas was in the house.” Thee atmosphere in the house becomes increasingly dreadful, the women on pins and needles, creeping around trying not to arouse Diner’s ire. Dunmore is brilliant in evoking an atmosphere of domestic tyranny, the fear, the uncertainty, the impotence of the victims. It is exceedingly painful, all the more so as Lizzie has absorbed her mother’s views on the rights of women and yet must knuckle under to this monstrous bully for the sake of the child.
And, of course, Diner is no ordinary bully. He is also a murderer. Bit by bit Lizzie begins to detect something off about his explanation of what had happened to his first wife, Lucie, a Frenchwoman who, he had told her, returned to France and died there. In an ingenious maneuver that increases the nigh-unbearable tension, Dunmore presents Lizzie with evidence that Diner murdered the woman, but the clue comes in a manner that some readers will be able to understand, while Lizzie cannot. I will say no more about that unraveling, except to say that it’s real nail-biter.
The novel, which is animated by a current of gothic horror, depicts the social ferment, the ideological passion, and, ultimately, the smashed visions of the late eighteenth century; it is rich in details of material life — and death; and it powerfully conveys the emotional urgency of its characters. We feel that the lives of these fictional beings are just as real as those of actual people whose ideas and exertions contributed to the tenor of those times, lives that are lost to us now in the murk of the past. We feel, too, Dunmore’s deepened awareness of this and believe she did indeed have an intimation at some level that she, at least in body and mind, would soon be part of the past. Her finest books, among them The Siege, her last one, Exposure, and this one will, I hope, keep both her memory and those of her characters alive for as long as people read novels.
The post Birdcage Walk appeared first on The Barnes & Noble Review.
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How To Quit Your Job (with romantic worst-case scenarios)
You’re reading How To Quit Your Job (with romantic worst-case scenarios), originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
If you feel sick with the prospect of being an employee for the next 20 to 30 years of your life then I hope that what you will read will put you a minute closer to showing the teeth to the crazy idea of scheduling the best years of your life to a time when your body is frail.
Free beer on Fridays is not enough freedom
I always thought to be ‘successful’ meant having a permanent job, earning 40k, working for 7,5 hours a day and then spending the rest of your time in cool places doing the things you really ‘love’ doing.
When I finally made it through the muddy and cold waters of internships and low-paid entry jobs and I got my first permanent job, I instantly realised how wrong I had been all along.
I would not only do my 7.5 or 8 hours Mon to Fri but I would add a 2-hour commute plus another hour getting ready and planning for work. Only this way I could deliver my work to the highest standards. Because any negative feedback at work would make me feel anxious for weeks or even months.
But it didn’t end there. The roles I was doing were designed to continuously get me promoted to the next level, which was great in the sense that my companies cared about my career progress, but this meant I needed to work overtime to make sure I excelled on the long-feared wintery appraisal.
Instead, watching others climb ahead of me would effectively make me feel like a loser. In this context, seeing my colleagues getting promoted while spending their weekends partying until dawn made me jealous. “I don’t have any energy for that, I am so wiped out during the weekend that all I want to do is stay at home quietly and do productive activities” I used to say to myself.
But wait, I was too tired to do anything productive!
“I am investing my whole life in the benefit of somebody else and I don’t have enough time to do the things that really enrich me, like playing guitar and learning languages.” I thought.
“Will this go on until I’m 65 or before (as long as I die before that age)?”
Reading the four-hour workweek by Tim Ferriss didn’t help, for it made aspire that freedom to design your lifestyle but didn’t really convince me to pursue it, which in turn made me more frustrated.
Life puts you where you belong
Unexpectedly, I met someone who had recently done what I wanted to do so bad. He wholeheartedly encouraged me to quit and follow my dream. I was almost convinced.
A final kick by the most important person in my life put me straight in that meeting room handing over my notice and negotiating the end of my contract. I felt the wings popping up from my back.
The first thing I did was going on an amazing road trip to celebrate such a milestone in my life. I don’t go on a road-trip every day, but I still celebrate that decision EVERY SINGLE DAY.
This post commemorates the first year of my life after-employment. I must say my 7 years of higher education (bachelors and two masters’ degrees) didn’t teach me half of what I have learnt in the past year. And I have been able to not only support myself but also…
- Create a brand
- Design a range of awesome service products
- Deliver a talk to an audience of local entrepreneurs
- Move to an amazing location in Spain on a protected natural dune.
- Get a rescue dog
- Learn how to sing to a ‘cringe-free’ level
- Learn how to play two of the most difficult classical guitar pieces ever written
- Have experienced life-affirming near death experiences while surfing
- Fire a client (and loving the result)
- Get married with the love of my life
- Visit Thailand
- Lose my fear to surfing
- Join a martial arts club
- Work one week in Berlin
- Take two road trips to South of Spain
- Visit Lithuania and work from there
- Learn how to record and edit videos
- Complete a 3-month coaching course that changed my life
- Wake up whenever I want (early anyway)
- Experiment with intermittent fasting regimes
- Fully express myself with my family
I am not a millionaire nor I aspire to be one. I am something more powerful than that. I have seen what is possible when you commit yourself to living on your own terms, and I am fully committed to continuing optimising my lifestyle and thus reminding myself that the sky is the limit.
I am so passionate about growing and consolidating my dream lifestyle that I will never stop. And I promise you, if I run out of money somewhere in the process, I will grab my guitar and busk on the streets rather than work on somebody else’s terms.
Here is how you can get started (this is what worked for me):
- Work with a coach to make you set and stick to your goals
- Create very specific products based on what you know creates value
- Get a website and build your own brand
- Read your email once or less per day
- Put effort on the non-income-generating things you love doing
If you are not exuding joy at your current job but think it somehow is the best thing you can get (as I did when I was in that position), you are wrong. The world has nothing but opportunities ready for you to take them.
Are you ready to commit?
Peru Buesa is the founder and digital strategist at Gozen Media, an agency determined to help innovative ideas and products reach far.
You’ve read How To Quit Your Job (with romantic worst-case scenarios), originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
How To Quit Your Job (with romantic worst-case scenarios)
You’re reading How To Quit Your Job (with romantic worst-case scenarios), originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
If you feel sick with the prospect of being an employee for the next 20 to 30 years of your life then I hope that what you will read will put you a minute closer to showing the teeth to the crazy idea of scheduling the best years of your life to a time when your body is frail.
Free beer on Fridays is not enough freedom
I always thought to be ‘successful’ meant having a permanent job, earning 40k, working for 7,5 hours a day and then spending the rest of your time in cool places doing the things you really ‘love’ doing.
When I finally made it through the muddy and cold waters of internships and low-paid entry jobs and I got my first permanent job, I instantly realised how wrong I had been all along.
I would not only do my 7.5 or 8 hours Mon to Fri but I would add a 2-hour commute plus another hour getting ready and planning for work. Only this way I could deliver my work to the highest standards. Because any negative feedback at work would make me feel anxious for weeks or even months.
But it didn’t end there. The roles I was doing were designed to continuously get me promoted to the next level, which was great in the sense that my companies cared about my career progress, but this meant I needed to work overtime to make sure I excelled on the long-feared wintery appraisal.
Instead, watching others climb ahead of me would effectively make me feel like a loser. In this context, seeing my colleagues getting promoted while spending their weekends partying until dawn made me jealous. “I don’t have any energy for that, I am so wiped out during the weekend that all I want to do is stay at home quietly and do productive activities” I used to say to myself.
But wait, I was too tired to do anything productive!
“I am investing my whole life in the benefit of somebody else and I don’t have enough time to do the things that really enrich me, like playing guitar and learning languages.” I thought.
“Will this go on until I’m 65 or before (as long as I die before that age)?”
Reading the four-hour workweek by Tim Ferriss didn’t help, for it made aspire that freedom to design your lifestyle but didn’t really convince me to pursue it, which in turn made me more frustrated.
Life puts you where you belong
Unexpectedly, I met someone who had recently done what I wanted to do so bad. He wholeheartedly encouraged me to quit and follow my dream. I was almost convinced.
A final kick by the most important person in my life put me straight in that meeting room handing over my notice and negotiating the end of my contract. I felt the wings popping up from my back.
The first thing I did was going on an amazing road trip to celebrate such a milestone in my life. I don’t go on a road-trip every day, but I still celebrate that decision EVERY SINGLE DAY.
This post commemorates the first year of my life after-employment. I must say my 7 years of higher education (bachelors and two masters’ degrees) didn’t teach me half of what I have learnt in the past year. And I have been able to not only support myself but also…
- Create a brand
- Design a range of awesome service products
- Deliver a talk to an audience of local entrepreneurs
- Move to an amazing location in Spain on a protected natural dune.
- Get a rescue dog
- Learn how to sing to a ‘cringe-free’ level
- Learn how to play two of the most difficult classical guitar pieces ever written
- Have experienced life-affirming near death experiences while surfing
- Fire a client (and loving the result)
- Get married with the love of my life
- Visit Thailand
- Lose my fear to surfing
- Join a martial arts club
- Work one week in Berlin
- Take two road trips to South of Spain
- Visit Lithuania and work from there
- Learn how to record and edit videos
- Complete a 3-month coaching course that changed my life
- Wake up whenever I want (early anyway)
- Experiment with intermittent fasting regimes
- Fully express myself with my family
I am not a millionaire nor I aspire to be one. I am something more powerful than that. I have seen what is possible when you commit yourself to living on your own terms, and I am fully committed to continuing optimising my lifestyle and thus reminding myself that the sky is the limit.
I am so passionate about growing and consolidating my dream lifestyle that I will never stop. And I promise you, if I run out of money somewhere in the process, I will grab my guitar and busk on the streets rather than work on somebody else’s terms.
Here is how you can get started (this is what worked for me):
- Work with a coach to make you set and stick to your goals
- Create very specific products based on what you know creates value
- Get a website and build your own brand
- Read your email once or less per day
- Put effort on the non-income-generating things you love doing
If you are not exuding joy at your current job but think it somehow is the best thing you can get (as I did when I was in that position), you are wrong. The world has nothing but opportunities ready for you to take them.
Are you ready to commit?
Peru Buesa is the founder and digital strategist at Gozen Media, an agency determined to help innovative ideas and products reach far.
You’ve read How To Quit Your Job (with romantic worst-case scenarios), originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
The Lonely Struggle of Lee Ching-yu
Lee Ming-che in a sense is like other political prisoners in China, a man stripped of rights, facing in solitary fashion the organized power of the Chinese state, but he is also different because he is from Taiwan. He is in fact the only Taiwanese ever to be charged with subversion of state power, and this imparts a special meaning to his case.
In Situ Studio Designed this Wonderful Home in North Carolina, USA
This modern house, designed by the architects Erin Sterling Lewis, Matthew Griffith and Jeremy Leonard from the architectural firm in situ studio, is located in Matthews, North Carolina, USA. It was built in the year 2016 and covers a total ground area of 4,006 square feet. It is hidden by the thick vegetation of the forest and overlooks the pond, a wonderful landscape that we can enjoy both from the..
The post In Situ Studio Designed this Wonderful Home in North Carolina, USA appeared first on HomeDSGN.
There are some moments in nature that leave you breathless. Take…
There are some moments in nature that leave you breathless. Take an early morning walk in Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia. Follow the trails past calm wetlands. Listen to night noises begin to quiet. Look up over a misty field to see the golden sun rise above a stand of trees. Find your perfect nature moment. Photo by Kris Orr (http://ift.tt/18oFfjl).
Sig Nordal 