Flowers Reduce The Blahs

Nancy Etcoff, a researcher at Harvard has studied the effects of flowers on our happiness. Here is a PR release: article

Looks like we don't have to feel guilty about having flowers around us all the time. In fact, they're therapeutic!

This explains my love of flowers and their therapeutic effects of just being around them. As a child, I kept my own garden of daffodils and bearded iris. I helped maintain the tulips, garlic, roses and crocosmia in our yard. When anything smelled (including the bathroom), I would get my mother's 'Tea Rose' from the Perfumer's Workshop and spray it everywhere so that our house smelled like flowers. :)

Even now, I look at my favorite bi-color yellow/red roses or freesia in photo form to give myself a mood lift. Wouldn't it be lovely if you had a house or room filled with these?

More Pics of Puppy Lab

Isn't he so adorable? My dad's started to call him Johnnie, like Johnnie Walker. -__-

How To Get More Positive Stories In the Media

I went a a talk today about Faith and the Media, part of the speaker series held by the Young Adult Circle in Silicon Valley: http://www.youngadultcircle.org/

It was a really interesting talk given by a mature Catholic reporter about how to influence the media, especially mediums such as newspapers, radio stations and tv stations. The easiest thing that we can do to demand more positive stories are the following:

1) Write or email the tv reporters, newspaper reporters, and radio hosts, thanking them for positive stories that ran in the media.
2) Feed them news stories if you know of any happy things happening in your local area or just know some really fantastic people

These 2 small things any of us can do to help direct media on stories that inspire and gladden the heart.