GEMSTONE

GEMSTONE - Citrine – Success stone


The citrine is a member of the quartz family its name is derived from the colour – yellow citrine. Citrines have mellow, warm tone which to captures the last glow of autumn, perfect for the November stone.

Associated with the third chakra, the Citrine promotes appropriate use of personal power and abundance. Its helps one to accomplish tasks, develop self worth and master ego. Additionally it helps develop courage and self discipline and dispels negative energy.

Physically, the stone balances digestion, food disorders, allergies, diabetes and helps to Cleanse spleen, liver, kidneys constipation, poor circulation, anemia. Good for asthma, and emotional trauma.

• Business. Citrine is the best stone to use when trying to "Take care of Business" whether it be accomplish business matters, education, or settle family matters. This includes legal issues and lawsuits when materials or money is involved.
• Light: Citrine is sun energy - Used during the Middle Ages to treat people whose energy and moods become depressed during the long winter months, or during a long spell of rainy, overcast weather.
• Materialism: Although this stone is particularly good for material wealth, prosperity and career success.
• Entrepreneurs: Especially good for people starting a new business!! Supports your material and business success in addition to supporting your business plans and successful associations with vendors, partners, and suppliers.
• Relationships: Excellent stone for smoothing family or group problems, cutting to the quick of the situation and speeding up the process.
• Communication: Often carried in the pocket of public speakers, to give courage and strengthen communication skills.

The citrine stone is contained in the pearl enzyme exfoliating mask.


http://sobrietystones.com/
http://www.gemstone.org/gem-by-gem/english/citrine.html

DESTINATION

DESTINATION – BUTHAN AMANKORA RESORT

The resort

The richness of life is found in the still simplicity surrounding the remarkably unscathed geophysical and biological existence in Bhutan today. Due to a sincere Buddhist belief, adhered to since the 7th century, the co-existence of nature and nurture has resulted in a unique eco-system and a thriving mosaic of different peoples all linked by a common belief system that regards all life forms as sacred. This prevailing ethos washes the staggeringly beautiful undulating valleys, plains, deep gorges, and mountainous landscape with a force of supreme greatness; that of genuine harmony and environmental compatibility.

Amankora has created a series of lodges, all creatively unique and sympathetically balanced to their environment, in order to discover and comprehend the extraordinary wonders above and beneath this treasured land. The lodges are created to provide a circular pilgrimage in Bhutan’s breathtakingly spectacular central and western valleys.

Most journeys start at Amankora Paro or Amankora Thimphu. The lodge in Paro is nestled among glistening conifers in a 24-suite pine forest retreat. Amankora Thimphu, raised up in a blue-pine forest of the Motithang area, sits close to the capital’s intriguing sights and traditional shops.

Amankora Gangtey, set in the remote wilderness of the Phobjikha valley, proffers magical views across the bird-strewn gorge and to the empowering Gangtey Goemba, a 16th century monastery.

Amankora Bumthang rests adjacent to First and Second King’s palace, Wangdichholing, within the town of Jakar in the Choekhor valley, a valley sprinkled with an exotic mix of sloping pine forests, apple orchards, and restful fields of farm produce.


http://amanresorts.com/amankora/resort.aspx

INSIGHT

INSIGHT – SEA OF CHANGE

A tribute to our watery planet -- and real-life adventure story by Sylvia Earle, a World Wildlife Fund national council member and diving pioneer. In this book she introduces us to marine biology and recounts her many exploits underwater. Former chief scientist of NOAA (the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration), Earle has become our ambassador-at-large for the world's oceans. Using many examples of contemporary threats to the health of the world's oceans in this lively book, she takes us to the over- fished markets of Tokyo, sight of the Valdez disaster in Prince William Sound, and Persian Gulf oil spills.

Sea change is at once the gripping adventure story of Earle’s three decades of undersea exploration, an insider’s introduction to the dynamic field of marine biology, and an urgent plea for the preservation of the world’s fragile and rapidly deteriorating ocean ecosystems.

Earle takes us along on journeys to places of unimaginable beauty and unutterable destruction. She conjures up the exhilaration of swimming with humpback whales off the coast of Maui; she makes us comprehend the true environmental tragedy of the massive oil spills; and she leads us out into Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the epitome of ocean wilderness but also the final resting place for tons of waste that drift in from thousand of miles away. This brilliant, thought-provoking, superbly readable book will inspire a new reverence for the majesty of the world’s oceans even as it opens our eyes to the intricate interdependence of all life forms. The book concludes with a detailed, constructive plan of what we must do to preserve our ocean resources.


http://longitudebooks.com/find/p/699/mcms.html

ART/DESIGN

ART – THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION
MAN RAY, AFRICAN ART AND THE MODERNIST LENS
OCTOBER 10, 2009 – JANUARY 10, 2010

While the influence of African art on modern painting and sculpture has been explored, Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens examines a parallel history, the role of photography in shaping international understanding of African objects as art, in the 1920s and 1930s. The exhibition reveals photography’s complex engagement with African art by exploring African art in the context of American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, surrealism, and the worlds of high fashion and popular culture, at the same time as it investigates issues of race, gender, and colonialism during the modernist era.

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsky, 1890–1976) was an artist in many mediums, but he is best known as an avant-garde photographer. His Noire et blanche (1926), showing a white model with a black mask, is an icon of modern photography. Born in Philadelphia, Man Ray lived in ultramodern circles in Paris, from 1921 until the German occupation of the city in 1939. There he produced experimental photographs, fashion photographs, and celebrity portraits. He also produced a large body of photographs featuring African artifacts. In the wake of French colonial exploits, objects of a kind that he had previously encountered in museum or gallery settings in New York were widely accessible to him in Paris, appearing in flea markets, curio shops, as well as in private collections.

The photographs in Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens include well-known photographs by Man Ray, as well as recently discovered documentary images by him, and the work of other photographers. Over 100 photographs, more than half of them by Man Ray, the rest by his contemporaries, including James L. Allen, Cecil Beaton, Walker Evans, and Alfred Stieglitz, are presented alongside many of the objects they depict. Among these are over 20 masks, carved figures, and utilitarian objects, the majority from diverse West African cultures.

The photographs themselves give no indication of the purposes the objects served in their original contexts, and by presenting images and objects together Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens offers a rare opportunity to understand exactly how lighting, camera angle, and cropping manipulated the objects to serve Western ideas of beauty and art. The exhibition also documents the histories of the objects and explains their uses.

The Phillips Collection
1600 21st St., NW, Washington, DC 20009
Near 21st and Q Streets, NW

http://phillipscollection.org/exhibitions/current/index.aspx

ARCHITECTURE

ARCHITECTURE - PORTLAND

Eco Factor: 1949 sleeper car converted into lux home.
Have you ever wondered about what exactly happens to all those rail cars after they’re no longer in use? While most of them go for a complex recycling process, there are a few which have a different fate altogether. The Train Car Home in Portland is a stunning example where an old 1949 sleeper car is converted into a luxurious and green home with all the modern amenities.


The designers removed all sleepers and chairs from the rail car and replaced them with a fully electric kitchen, DSL, incinerator toilet and luxurious bedding. Impressively, the interior is built from the finest materials available on the markets. The railcar home is 85 feet long, 9.5 feet wide and has a 10-foot domed ceiling. The home is listed for sale at Laurie Holland, bearing a price tag of $225,000.

TREAT

TREAT – THE BUDDHA COOKIE CUTTER

A fun alternative to traditional holiday cookies!

Cinnamon Buddha Cookies
adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s book “Baking: From My Home to Yours” (Sweet Tart Dough recipe)

Ingredients
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar
• 1 stick plus 1 tbsp (9 tbsp) unsalted butter, chilled and cubed
• 1 large egg yolk
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon

Method
1. Preheat the oven to 375 F (190C) degrees.
2. Pulse flour, sugar and ground cinnamon in a food processor. Add butter and pulse until it resembles a coarse meal. Stir in the yolk and pulse again until the dough forms clumps and curds. Turn the dough out onto a work surface and very lightly and sparingly, knead just to incorporate dry ingredients. Chill the dough in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours (preferably overnight). If you have a cookie mold like I do, just press small pieces of the dough inside the mold and pound it on the counter to let the cookie come out. If not, then you can roll the dough to any thickness you like and cut out cookies of various shapes.
3. Lay a sheet of parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Place the cookies on top and bake for 20 minutes covered with another layer of parchment paper, remove the paper and bake for another 5 minutes. Let cool.

You can buy it here
http://cafefernando.com/cinnamon-buddha-cookies/

RESTAURANT

RESTAURANT – FLOUR + WATER

Flour + Water is a San Francisco Italian restaurant that focuses on seasonal ingredients sourced from the unparalleled and ever abundant California artisans and growers.
Their menu changes daily and is intentionally small and focused. The cuisine of flour + water has literally been done for hundreds of years in Italy—they are not re-inventing it rather trying to pay tribute to what we believe is the world’s purest style of cooking.

Opened last May in a restored Victorian building on a quiet corner a few blocks from the center of the Mission District, flour + water is the latest in a steady stream of high-caliber Italian restaurants to enter the neighborhood. The owners, David White and David Steele, are longtime Mission residents, with roots in the food trade.

“We make the kind of food that chefs like to eat,” Mr. McNaughton said of the restaurant’s cooking style. Given the restaurant’s name, it should come as no surprise that pizza and pastas are focuses. The kitchen has a wood-fired oven, and Jon Darsky, the pizzaiolo, is a skilled operator; even before you take a bite, the aromas that waft through the restaurant make that abundantly clear. A tangy margherita with fior di latte, a fresh-milk cheese, is delicate yet substantial.

The pastas, all housemade, included a maltagliati with a dark and earthy braised giblet ragù ; and a roasted corn and crescenza cappelletti with bitter honey, which gave the dish a pleasantly sharp finish.

For dessert, the restaurant offers an understated chocolate budino with sea salt flakes and espresso-caramel cream ; and a honey-pistachio semifreddo, topped with a little mound of green frost — a granita of herbs and simple syrup.

Flour + Water, 2401 Harrison Street; (415) 826-7000; www.flourandwater.com. Open daily, 5:30 p.m. to midnight.


http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/travel/27bites.html?ref=travel

NUTRITION

NUTRITION - JUICING


Benefits of Green Juice:
Leading medical authorities, nutritionists, dietitians, and other known experts in the medical field recommend that we consume three to five servings of green leafy vegetables a day. No vitamin or medicine is a legitimate substitute. The healing elements that are found in green leafy vegetables are so powerful and synergistic, no combination of synthetic medicines or supplements could ever match their power.

Five main benefits of green foods are:

Chlorophyl power
• Chlorophyll is quite possibly the most powerful element that exists in the universe. Chlorophyll is one of the most intensely researched elements and has been used in the treatment of everything from periodontal disease, diabetes and low iron, to open wounds, ulcers and body odor.

• Its chemical makeup strongly resembles hemoglobin (the portion of the blood that carries oxygen). The center element of chlorophyll is magnesium.
• Some research is now suggesting that chlorophyll can efficiently release magnesium, and replace it with iron. In other words, chlorophyll can actually be converted to hemoglobin, which increases the flow of oxygen to all parts of the body.
• Oxygen reduces stress on the body, creates greater energy and endurance, and creates an aerobic environment. In an aerobic environment, disease cannot get started.
• An aerobic environment also is beneficial to the so-called friendly bacteria which promotes digestive health and detrimental to bad bacteria which contributes too disease, body odor, and bad breath.

Trace Minerals
• The recommended source of virtually all minerals and trace minerals is green leafy vegetables. It is not an accident that while we have begun consuming fewer and fewer green foods, the lack of trace minerals quite possibly has become the number one cause of disease within Western culture today.
•Chlorophyll is the only food that creates an environment that is ideally suited to deliver and to maintain those proper mineral qualities.
• Chlorophyll contains magnesium which is immediately delivered to the muscle tissue. This mineral is absolutely essential for both cardiac and respiratory wellness. Night leg cramps bother you? Take more magnesium.
• While many women need to increase the iron in their diets, but conventional supplements usually result only in constipation and headaches. This is because the body does not know what to do with the iron it is receiving. When you ingest minerals through plants, you can never suffer from toxicity.
• There are many other benefits to the trace minerals. Potassium is important for digestive health, chromium helps blood sugar control, and selenium aids the metabolism. Calcium reverses osteoporosis, and helps build stronger bones and beautiful hair. While calcium is probably the most popular mineral consumed through supplements, the bioavailability of such products is a fraction of what you can receive by consuming green leafy vegetables.

Vegetable Protein
• Lightweight complete vegetable protein contain all eight essential amino acids, which are building blocks for the immune system, enhance reproductive function, and creates lean connective tissue which leads to dense, heavy permanent muscle on the body.
• Without proper body volume and the quality of peptides, we will begin to break down our own bodies. In other words, the body feeds on itself.
• All of the phytochemicals found in green food are interrelated. You cannot isolate them. You cannot mix liquid chlorophyll, digestive enzymes, antioxidant enzymes, mineral supplements, an alkalizing agent, and lightweight protein supplement and expect to come up with an effective food.

Enzymes
• Green foods contain phytonutrients that are capable of initiating chemical reactions. cleansing, detoxifying while enhancing the immune system.
• Plant sources contain both antioxidant and digestive enzymes identical to those manufactured by the body. This becomes vitally important when we realize that our bodies have a limited ability to manufacture enzymes, and when we run out, death will result.
• To make it simple, cooking and processing food eliminates enzymes, while raw, unprocessed foods contain them in great supply.

Alkalizing Agent
• Acid and alkalinity is measured on a pH scale of 0 to 14 with 7 being neutral. Scores above 7 are alkaline, and scores below 7 are acidic.
• Certain ecology of the body must be alkaline in order for humans to be healthy. The most notable example is the human blood which must a pH of 7.4. It will begin to steal potential the mouth, small intestine and the urinary tract.
• The first ecology that it will rob is the mouth. There are a number of common problems: including cavities, plaque, bleeding gums, periodontal disease, and bad breath. Green foods can reverse this dangerous process.
• The small intestine needs to be alkaline in order to regulate the passage of glucose through the intestine. The benefits of regulated blood sugar are many, including potential weight loss, increased energy, and higher metabolism. Both hypoglcemics and diabetics find that they benefit significantly by taking green juice, which alkalizes the small intesine, which in turn, regulates the passage of glucose through the intestinal barrier. This results in energy, stamina, and endurance.


http://allonhealth.com/barleylife/more-than-multivitamins.htm