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Know someone with reading trouble due to Dyslexia?

May 29, 2007 by Tricia

Have I ever told you that my husband suffers from dyslexia? I think I’ve mentioned it in the past, but not in the last several months.

His dyslexia went unnoticed, or undiagnosed, by his teachers in lower school and high school. Yes, he had a lot of trouble with some courses, but when he was beginning to fail the courses the principal of the school offered him extra credits for helping with the schools musical programs and theatre productions simply because he was, and is, a very talented musician.

What his school did was wrong. I’m sure they must have known that he had reading problems. Instead, Chris didn’t discover that he had dyslexia until he was in college when he was having a lot of trouble with the work. That was quite a blow to him because he had no idea that, that was what his problem was, and it actually caused him to be depressed for a while.

Once Chris was diagnosed with Dyslexia he learned new reading and writing techniques that have helped him a lot. I’m sure most people wouldn’t even realize that he’s dyslexic. Heck, he writes two blogs that many of you have visited – can you tell?

The reason why I’m talking about dyslexia today is because I’ve been asked to write an article for DyslexiaDecoded.com. This site offers a reading program that will help you, or someone you love who suffers from this disorder defeat dyslexia with free help. The free reading program and online course can be located on the website.

The DyslexiaDecoded.com website has a lot of information about dyslexia as well as the free reading program. If you are not sure that you, or a loved one has dyslexia because there’s been no formal diagnosis you might be interested in reading some of the signs and symptoms. This is just a small sample of the information that you’ll find on the site:

If a child is intelligent and appears to speak and listen normally but is unable to read, write, and spell, then there is probably some degree of dyslexia. Other signs include confusing letters and numbers, confusing left and right, and confusing directions: North, South, East, and West. A dyslexic student may experience difficulties with concentration, perception, memory, verbal skills, abstract reasoning, hand-eye coordination, as well as social adjustment.

At DyslexiaDecoded.com they believe that the key to defeating dyslexia is by learning to recognize vowel sounds quickly. If you are able to quickly recognize the appropriate sounds that vowel combination make you should be able to read at a decent speed. There are 44 sounds in the English language with about 15 being vowel sounds. Mastering recognition of these sounds enable better reading skills.

The ReadingBySix program provides a systematic approach that will help defeat dyslexia and other related reading problems. The course is not an easy course, and those with a medium to severe case of dyslexia might have to go through the course a few times before they see a lot of improvement in their reading skills. Whereas someone with a mild form of dyslexia might defeat the problem even before they finish the course.

Success, of course, depends upon how well you apply yourself to the course. The more you practice and the harder you try the more likely you will be to have success fairly quickly.

As I’ve said this program is free, but small donations are more than welcome as I’m sure the donations that they do receive are what help keep the program free. So if you take the course for yourself or download a copy of the course for your child or loved one please consider making a small donation.

Hard copies of the course may be printed via PDF files, or purchased online. The hard copies of the course might be helpful to those who want to study at various times throughout the day but don’t always have access to a computer.

If you’ve tried this program for yourself or for your child or loved one, feel free to write about this free course on your blog. It’s a free program that’s helping a lot of people and by writing about it you could have a hand at helping even more people learn about this program.

I do believe that my husbands dyslexia is much better than it was before he was diagnosed, but I do know that he still has problems with some of his reading and writing. I help him with spelling quite often. I might download this course myself and see if I can get Chris interested in trying it out.

If Chris does try this course I’ll update this post and let you know if DyslexiaDecoded.com and ReadingBySix helped him.

Just had to throw out most of the food in the freezer

May 28, 2007 by Tricia

Ok, now my husband’s watching Hockey.

He’s very thankful that we have a DVR and that he could put the game on pause while we fixed a big problem!

A week or so ago my husband went out and did the grocery shopping for us. He even put everything away in the fridge, freezer and cupboards when he returned from the store. Good guy, eh?

Unfortunately, we think he overstuffed the freezer and the door didn’t quite shut when he’d finished putting the items inside, and in the freezer door. If you haven’t figured it out yet we have a standing freezer that’s a bit smaller than a regular fridge.

I think that happened on a Sunday, but we didn’t discover that things were thawing out in the freezer until Tuesday. If we’d discovered it on Monday perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad, but by Tuesday everything at the front of the freezer was pretty much thawed out.

We had a lot of meat in the freezer. Well, to tell the truth we had a lot of everything in there. It was much too full to begin with and probably wasn’t working all that efficiently because it was so full.

I think it was about 11pm on the Tuesday when we discovered that things were thawing. You really shouldn’t refreeze items once they’ve already been frozen once, and some things had been in the freezer for a long time. We decided to throw out most of it, but our garbage is only picked up every two weeks. So we closed up the freezer and let it freeze again.

This evening we remembered that it’s garbage day tomorrow and we pretty much had to clear out the freezer.

We literally had to get a chisel out to chip ice off many of the items in the freezer. You see when it defrosted, because the door wasn’t quite closed, a lot of frost built up in the freezer. I think doing the whole job properly and defrosting the freezer as well would have taken a whole day. We managed to chip out a lot of the frost and pretty much empty the freezer in a little over an hour!

We kept a few things because they were way at the back of the freezer and coated in frost so we didn’t think they ever thawed out. Hopefully we didn’t make a big mistake keeping those items.

Perhaps on the weekend we’ll take the few freezer items over to our neighbors, put them in her freezer, and defrost our own freezer properly.

Practical solutions for small living spaces

May 28, 2007 by Tricia

Our house is kind of small. It’s an old 1927 home built with beautiful hardwood and solidly built, but it’s small. The three bedrooms are small, the basements unfinished and there’s only TWO closets in the whole house. I guess back in 1927 people weren’t clothes hogs and didn’t need more than two closets in a home?

Given that our home is on the small side, or rather than some of the rooms in the home are on the small side I’m always trying to figure out ways to save space, not make the home look cluttered, and of course to give the illusion that the rooms are a little larger than they really are.

I’ve done that by carefully selection our home furniture, using various design techniques, including wall and ceiling color and of course all kinds of space saving organizers.

Right now it’s our “middle” bedroom that I’m thinking about. Our master bedroom is the largest bedroom, but by todays standards it’s probably smaller than most kids rooms! I think it’s 13 feet by 10 feet. Yeah, kind of small. Our middle bedroom is the second largest, and the one on at the south end of the house is, well, the size of a decent washroom. Really!

Anyway, we have our old double bed that we used in our apartment in the middle bedroom. What a comfortable bed that is. Unfortunately it literally takes up about 2/3’s of the room. Some day I’d like to use that room as a nursery, but until that time comes I was thinking that it could be used as a nice den.

If we got a murphy bed we could get rid of the double bed that’s in there. Murphy beds stand up against a wall and sometimes come with really nice cabinets that make them look like really nice standing cupboards. Certainly if we got one like that we’d get a bit of extra storage space on the sides of the unit.

The bed could remain hidden most of the time and the room could have a desk on the opposite side to be used for a computer or something. It might work.

I’ll have to think on this some more and investigate the cost of Murphy beds. It is a practical solution for small living spaces though.

If you need a gift for Fathers day visit Designer Gifts

May 27, 2007 by Tricia

Fathers day is coming up and if you haven’t already purchased a gift for your dad or husband you might want to visit Designer Gifts, an online gift store, and check out the Gift ideas for men section.

I’ve actually been asked to do do a full article of the online store Designer Gifts. I’ll begin with the look and feel of the site.

I quite like the colors that they’ve chosen for their website.

Do you see the colors in the site logo at the beginning of this post? The whole layout is white, yellow and purple. They’ve used rounded corners on the borders of the navigation menu and listing headers and I really do like that look, although, on the main page, the sections highlighting some of the feature sections of the site seem a little crowded. Perhaps if those sections had a bit of white space between them it might be a little easier on the eye. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with the design or layout of this site, I’m just stating my own opinion and preferences.

I’m sure that the menu has been designed so that the items that they sell most frequently, or the sections that they find visitors go to most often, are listed near the top, however the sales section is listed at the bottom and my preference would be that it be placed closer to the top of the menu as I think many people going to a site to look for gifts would be interested in checking out what’s on sale first.

The menu itself is quite nice. Use your mouse to hover over a section and an additional menu pops outward to show you sub-sections in that category. The only problem I found with the menu system is that while using FireFox and Internet Explorer I can’t see the very first item listed in the sub-menu for the Gift Baskets category, nor the Picture Frame and On Sale!!! section. The on sale section has the largest submenu, perhaps the website owner/designer is aware of this problem and that is why they placed this category at the bottom of the menu section.

This isn’t a huge problem because if you go to the main page for the categories that I listed as not being able to see the full submenu you can still see all of the sub-menu listings in the form of well designed thumbnails for each sub section of a category.

When you are looking for a gift for someone, but you are on a budget, it’s always nice when you visit a site that lists gift ideas either in a shop by price manner like Designer Gifts does, or that has a Cheap gifts section, which Designer Gifts also does.

The Cheap Gifts section has banners or image headings similar to this one, on the right, throughout the section. I quite like the way the “signs” are written as I like the font and the color of the lettering but I’m not sure I like the masked bright idea man quite as much. If he were only here and there throughout the section, I might like him better, but he’s all over the place in that section. Again this is my personal opinion. I think the bright idea man is kind of cute and I’m sure others would love the guy. I just think he might be overused to some extent.

Now, the real meat of any store, online or otherwise is the products that they sell. I found a few very small problems with the sites design, but I have absolutely no problem with the items that Designer Gifts sell.

All of the items appear to be quality items, well designed and seem to have been picked out for the store with care and attention to detail. I took a peek at the gifts under $15 section and I was quite surprised to see some very nice items that I’m sure would cost at least twice their price in a retail store.

One of the gift ideas that I really like, that can be found in the Picture Frames section, are the Digital picture frames. I think that this would make a really cool gift idea.

This particular digital picture frame is on sale for $99.00 and it’s made by Mustek. I used to have a scanner made by that company and I can vouch that that they make good products.

This picture frame can display hundreds of JPEG photos. The photos are stored on SD, MMC, Memory Stick or other popular memory card formats. Use the frame to display a selection of photos or an MPEG movie. You can even add music to your display for a full multimedia experience.

I’d never really taken the time to look into these Digital Frames before, but now that I have finally taken a look at whats available I’m quite pleased with the technology. Don’t you agree that a digital picture frame would make a wonderful gift?

Take a look at the Designer Gifts store yourself and see if you don’t also think that they have a wonderful selection of gifts. There must be 1000’s of items to choose from – go check it out and let me know if you bought anything.

Need a flag? Check out The United States Flag store

May 27, 2007 by Tricia

It’s Memorial Day weekend in the USA and I’ll bet that many of my US readers either have flags, or would like to have American Flags to display on such a special holiday.

If you need to purchase US Flags you should visit the United States Flag Store, the largest online retailer of flags and flagpoles.

The United States Flag store carries everything that someone wanting to purchase and display a flag might need. On the easy to navigate site you’ll find everything from small flags, car flags, pins, patches and decals, patriotic decorations, as well as patriotic wear and gifts. Along with the selection that I just listed, they also sell custom flags, state flags, World flags, flag display cases, flag accessories and Outdoor Flagpoles. There’s even a section on the site that contains information about flag etiquette and flag care.

I’ve actually been asked to write an article about the United States Flag Store website, and to tell you the truth there’s little that I can find that needs improving on the site.

The site is well laid out and it’s very easy to find whatever you are looking for by using the menu list on the left hand side of the page. There are also buttons at the top of each page that lead to the largest and most important sections of the online store.

I think the selection of flags, flag related accessories and flag poles is just amazing. I don’t believe that I’ve ever been on a site with such a wide selection. Perhaps that could be the sites only downfall in that a person might like too many products and delay their purchase.

At the very bottom of the menu on the left side of the page there is a menu selection called “Specials” and another one called “Election Campaign Discounts”. I think that the Specials menu section should perhaps be moved up closer to the top of the menu area. It’s nice when you visit a site to know if they are having a sale on certain items. Often the most popular items are listed as being for sale so it’s possible that this online store might make even more sales if it displayed it’s specials a little more prominently.

If you need to purchase a Flag – US, state or a flag from another country I would strongly suggest having a look at the huge selection at the United States Flag store first. The prices are reasonable and the selection is probably the most complete selection of flags and flag related items that I’ve ever seen.

Know someone with reading trouble due to Dyslexia?

Just had to throw out most of the food in the freezer

Practical solutions for small living spaces

If you need a gift for Fathers day visit Designer Gifts

Need a flag? Check out The United States Flag store

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