Tag Archives: challenge

The A-Z April Blogging Challenge

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Along with around 1,500 other writers I have been publishing articles in April as part of a challenge to write 26 articles, each with a theme of a different letter of the alphabet, beginning at A and working through to Z with each successive day.

A-Z Blogging Challenge

There are no prizes, just the feeling that you have accomplished something when you complete the mission, plus having 26 more articles on your blog, and hopefully some more regular followers.

So What Did I Write About

Beginning with the letter A on April 1st, here are the articles that I have written for the challenge so far:

A Is For April – which means April Fools Day, practical jokes, and a quick summary of the A-Z Blogging Challenge.

B Is For Brain Tumor – which my wife was diagnosed with in January, and has now almost fully recovered from thankfully.

C Is For Come Find Me – where can you find me on the internet.  If you would like to follow me on other sites like Facebook, Twitter or Stumbleupon, here is where I am.

D Is For Dine With Me – which discusses various articles that I have written about food and dining.

E Is For Evony – one of the most addictive multi-player games online.  Here I dealt with the addiction that my wife and I both had, and how games like Evony can destroy your lives.

F Is For Fish & Chips – the Great British Takeaway meal, and with my wife having spent some time in her grandparents Fish & Chip shop when she was growing up, a subject that she knows a lot about.

G Is For Gloomy Mornings – don’t you just hate waking up when it’s still dark and you look up to see just a grey sky full of threatening rain clouds.

H Is For History – one of my favourite subjects at school and ever since.  I especially love ancient history, and here my followers get to find out what it was that first interested me in history.

I Is For International Calls – which used to cost a small fortune, but which if you know what to look out for when buying an international calling card can now cost less than an inter-state phone call.

J Is For Jamaica – which is about my first trip to Jamaica in 1989 to install a computer system for one of the petroleum companies, but it’s not about work, it’s about my experiences there and my travels around the island.

K Is For Kingston Jamaica: That Is – ja mon!  This article goes on to describe more of my travels around the island of Jamaica and what it was like to be working in Kingston.

L Is For Lime Cay In Jamaica – the final part of my trip to Jamaica describes the pirate town of Port Royal, a visit to paradise at Lime Cay, and getting stranded adrift in the middle of the sea in a small boat.

M Is For Money Can It Make You Happy – which asks the question that if money is the root of all evil, why sometimes you need money to be happy.

N Is For Nuts! – which means anything from peanuts and cashews to an expression that was made famous during the Battle Of The Bulge.

Oh Dear My Muse Has Left Me – and how to overcome that dreaded phenomenon otherwise known as Writers Block.

P Is For Payne – not PAIN, PAINE or any other spelling forms…

Q Is For Queue – it’s just something that British folk do…

R Is For Reverse – meaning a change of direction, and this article changes direction after inspiration from an unexpected source…

S Is For Spam Comments – just something that has become a fact of life these days, but we can deal with it if we choose.

T Is For Today – I didn’t want to write my “T” post about the same thing as everyone else, and I wasn’t sure what to write about, so I thought “why not Today”.

U Is For Upside The Head – one of those phrases that really winds me up and makes me see red.

V Is For Vampire Woman – let the freak show begin as strange people try to change themselves to look demonic.

W Is For Wedding – and in 2 days time it’s the Royal Wedding, a huge celebration in the UK.

X Is For Xylophone – that often forgotten musical instrument, related to the Marimba that originated in Africa, and that is very entertaining to see someone play.

Y Is For Yawning – what is it that causes us to yawn? Is there a scientific reason?

Z Is For Zecharia Sitchin – a man who probably came closer than anyone to unraveling the mysteries of man’s most ancient times.

Whether you are a new visitor to Off The Record or whether you have been reading my articles for a while, I hope to see you back here reading my future articles, and if you do like them, please leave a comment, and help by sharing them.  You can find a Share button at the end of each article.

W Is For Wedding

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Spring time is the perfect time to get married, and in two days time the world (or at least the women of the world) will no doubt be glued to the television to see the spectacle that is the Royal Wedding take place in London.

Celebrity weddings are always popular, but so often are kept as secret or private affairs, but the Royal Wedding will be in keeping with tradition and be one where the whole of the United Kingdom can celebrate.

Not since the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, the parents of Prince William, got married almost 30 years ago, has London seen such pomp and circumstance.

Sure there have been other Royal Weddings, like those of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, but nothing that quite compares to the one that we are all looking forward to in the coming week.

The UK is excited for a number of reasons, not just because of the wedding itself, but because the wedding day, 29th April 2011 has also been declared a National Holiday.

Not wishing to make those in the USA jealous, especially since many of you might not have had a public holiday off work since New Years Day, and are waiting anxiously for Memorial Day at the end of May, but in the UK this time of year is probably the best of all for public holidays.

Only last weekend, the country had four days off work for Easter, and this coming weekend will see not only Friday as a holiday because of the Royal Wedding, but the following Monday as a holiday because it’s the first Monday in May.   With Easter falling so late this year, that makes it two four day weekends in a row, and on top of that the weather has been gorgeous.

The Royal Wedding will be good for the country in a time of unrest and high unemployment, and it is a good thing that the celebration is not going to be an overly lavish affair, which would not sit well with the public.

My only concern is that there are certain groups in the UK who like to protest and cause trouble, as was seen during a large demonstration in London in March, when over 200 people were arrested for damaging public property and assaulting the police.  These criminals, which is what they are, were not part of the protest, but merely used it as a reason to create problems.

Then of course there are the terrorist elements, who could be looking to use this event where many celebrities and high ranking officials are gathered together to try and cause more innocent deaths. You never know when and where these psychopaths are going to try and strike next.

My son and his wife are both police officers in London, and in March they were both on duty in Trafalgar Square, my son having around 15 bottles thrown at him.  I have to hope that every time there is an event like this in London and when I know that they are working, that they will be safe and not come to any harm.

So meantime, both Debbie and I will be watching television, seeing how many celebrities we can spot, looking to see if Victoria Beckham has learned to smile yet (I think it’s a physical imposibility myself), and looking to see if we can spot my son among the many police on duty that day.

It’s only just over a year of course since Debbie and I got married, and as those of you who read my articles know it’s been a difficult year, with Debbie getting sick, but things are now looking up and we hope that 2011 will be a great year for us.  If you missed the wedding photos, you can view them HERE and see what true happiness looks like.

If you are getting married this Spring or in the coming months, we wish you every happiness together.

M Is For Money Can It Make You Happy

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They say that Money Is The Root Of All Evil and that Money Can’t Make You Happy, and while in many ways this is true, I think that anyone who has a shortage of money would strongly disagree.

There are precious few celebrities or sports stars who seem to have an idyllic life.  While they might live in a mansion, have expensive cars, be able to travel anywhere and to do anything that they want, without a loving partner and true friends who want them for themselves and not for their money, they will never be truly happy. 

So often these abundantly wealthy people end up losing everything, throw their lives away with partying and drugs like Charlie Sheen, or get into trouble with the law like Mel Gibson or Lindsay Lohan.

But it’s not those who have more money than sense that I wanted to write about, it’s those who have enough to live on, but not enough to make them happy.

My wife and I can be counted in that group, since while money is tight, we are able to pay our bills every month, but for reasons I will explain, we are struggling emotionally because we don’t have enough money to be able to see our children, and that is difficult for us both.

To cut a long story short, if that is possible, when I was still living in Florida we tried to get a visa so that my fiancee could spend a year with me, the application got rejected, and it made it very difficult for her to visit the USA at all. 

I also lost my job while we were trying to sort the visa problem out, and we therefore decided that it would be better if I moved back to England, since by then her daughter was going to have her first grandchild.

That meant I would have to leave my two daughters in Florida with my ex wife, and to not see them very often, but I hoped to be able to go back twice a year at least.

A year after returning to England and having got married in the meantime, my wife’s daughter was also having visa problems, this time because she was married to a South African.  Despite their having been married for five years and having a baby as well, it didn’t look like the visa situation would be resolved, and so they moved to South Africa.

With my current income being about the same as I was earning 20 years ago, and my wife taking a 20% cut in income due to the recession, between us we can barely afford one trip a year, either to Florida or South Africa, and this is the root of our misery, not being able to see our kids at all.

The cost of flights just seem to keep going up and up, and with my wife working in the school system, she can only take vacations during the school breaks, which is the most expensive time of year.

So while we do have enough money to live on, we will not be happy unless we find a way to be able to see our children at least once a year.  Seeing them on Skype using the webcam is one thing, but it’s a poor substitute for real hugs and kisses isn’t it.

So just put us in that category of people where having more money would indeed make us happy.  Material things are one thing, but being able to see your loved ones when you want makes you the wealthiest people in the world.

H Is For History

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This is the 8th article in the A-Z Blogging Challenge for April, where each day a post is written that is inspired by a successive letter.

Today it’s the turn of the Letter H, and this stands for one of my favorite subjects, History.

Even now I remember what interested me in history, in particular Ancient History, and it was going with my parents to see an Italian made Epic called The Wooden Horse Of Troy, which I found out was released in 1961.

The story fascinated me, and I also had a Readers Digest book for children which had an article on Heinrich Schliemann who spent years searching for the location of Troy, before finally discovering the site in 1868.

At that time in primary school I was learning about Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, and soon afterwards about the great explorers (Christopher Colombus, Vasco De Gama, Ferdinand Magellan) and the discovery of the New World, and I was hooked.

These were also the years of other great epic movies about King Arthur, with movies like Excalibur, and also the amazing Jason And The Argonauts featuring the animation talents of Ray Harryhausen.   Watching movies like these as a young boy in the 1960′s just took you straight into another world.

While I do enjoy other periods in history, it is Ancient History that still has a hold over me, in particular since reading Chariots Of The Gods which was published when I was at university.  That got me hooked on exploring other works about unsolved mysteries, including the Mayan Civilization and the lost city of Atlantis amongst other things.

Transitions in my life caused me to lose track of this topic for a few years, but then in the 1990′s I had cause to go to the new Barnes And Noble bookstore that opened in town, and on a whim I went off and browsed the New Age shelves in search of something about Atlantis or other unsolved mysteries.

What I did find was a book called The Twelfth Planet by Zecharia Sitchin, and this together with other books that he has written just made everything that I had learned fall into place, and started me off on an even deeper search for knowledge of mankind’s most distant past.

But enough for now of Zecharia Sitchin, since unless I suddenly find a fascination for Zebras in the next few weeks, you could be reading more about him at the end of April when it becomes the turn of the Letter Z for me to find something to write about, so stay tuned.

More recently, research into my family history has let me to research my Grandfather’s voyages in the early 1900′s.  He was an apprentice on sailing ships and one of the last Cape Horner’s, sailing around Cape Horn in the last days of sail.

I have only got as far as writing the Preface to this book, which I published HERE to get an idea as to whether anyone would be interested in reading it or not.

During my research to find information on the actual events that the book is to be based on, I discovered a treasure trove of digitized newspaper articles, and being also interested in how our lives have changed in just the last 100 years, I have written a number of articles that were based on news stories that I found from 100 years ago, and which I also published on Squidoo as One Hundred Years Ago.

Well before I lose your attention completely, however I would like to think that if I had written this as the introduction to a book, in far more detail and allowing my boyish fascination with adventures from beyond my wildest dreams to shine through, that I might have you hooked from beginning to end.

B Is For Brain Tumor

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B Is For Brain Tumor

As many of our online friends have been aware, Debbie has not been well since the middle of 2010, and eventually after months of waiting, in the first week of January she managed to get an MRI.

Three days later the phone rang, and I went with her to the hospital, where we found that not only did she have a Brain Tumor, it was a large one.

She was admitted to hospital the same day, and they were able to remove it successfully.  

We are also fortunate in that it was not malignant, and she is now recovering really well.

Debbie created a lens about this, which you can find on Squidoo, and which tell the story of everything that led up to finding that she had a tumor, and everything that has happened since.

Her lens not only won a much coveted Purple Star award on Squidoo, on 29th March 2011 it was awarded Lens Of The Day, which is not bad considering that there are more than 1 1/2 million lenses on Squidoo.

B Is Also For Best Reviewer

Best Reviewer is a Google Adsense Revenue Sharing site that was created in 2010.

There are a number of  Adsense Revenue Sharing sites, which allow you to create articles and to share in the advertising revenue that is generated from clicks on adverts when pages from teh site are displayed.

What makes Best Reviewer unique is that instead of writing articles or just posting links to articles, it provides a form that allows you to create reviews in the form “Top 5 Movies” or “Top 10 Basketball Players” etc.

Each of the entries in the review can also be a link, which can point to an article, or even to an affiliate link (for example Amazon).

I created a lens about this on Squidoo if you would like further information on Best Reviewer.  I love the fact that I can create reviews in 5 minutes, and that it gives me “Do Follow” links to my articles.

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