With all of the wonderful things life brings us, it also brings us stress. It is for this reason that I am an active supporter of mental health days.

    Although it's never good to ignore(忽视) responsibilities, sometimes it is good to unplug(拔除) from the world for a day. We eat healthy and stay active to keep us from getting sick, but sometimes we forget to care for our minds. Our minds and bodies are connected, and when only one is being cared for, the other may be suffering. It is important to try to combine self care with our lives and spend time on activities we enjoy. This helps relieve stress on a daily day.

    So, what do you do on a mental health day? The answer is anything you want. Growing up, my brother and I were allowed a few mental health days a year. We would stay home from school and relax. For him, it was playing games on the computer, while my days were spent reading or watching TV. My mental health days now include picking things up around my apartment, cooking a tasty meal, and then reading for a few hours. I completely shut myself off from work or school. To me, this is relaxing. Organize the clutter(凌乱的东西) that piles up during the week, cook the meals I don't have time to cook, and read the books that I've bought but don't have time to read.

    A mental health day is great, but only if it's supplemented(增补) with self care through the week. From my experience, if self care is not regularly provided in your week, taking a mental health day is just going to stress you out even more. But when it's needed, try hard to recognize that and take care of yourself. It will help keep you happy and healthy. A mental health day is not a day to avoid life, it is a day to recoup(恢复).

    When other nine-year-old kids were playing games, she was working at a petrol station. When other teens were studying or going out, she struggled to find a place to sleep on the street. But she overcame these terrible setbacks to win a highly competitive scholarship and gain entry to Harvard University. And her amazing story has inspired a movie,“ Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story”, shown in late April.

    Liz Murray, a 22-year-old American girl, has been writing a real-life story of willpower and determination. Liz grew up in the shadow of two drug-addicted parents. There was never enough food or warm clothes in the house. Liz was the only member of the family who had a job. Her mother had AIDS and died when Liz was just 15 years old. The effect of that became a turning point in her life. Connecting the environment in which she had grown up with how her mother had died, she decided to do something about it.

    Liz went back to school. She threw herself into her studies, never telling her teachers that she was homeless. At night, she lived on the streets. “What drove me to live on had something to do with understanding, by understanding that there was a whole other way o f being. I had only experienced a small part of the society,” she wrote in her book Breaking Night.

    She admitted that she used envy to drive herself on. She used the benefits that come easily to others, such as a safe living environment, to encourage herself that “next to nothing could hold me down”. She finished high school in just two years and won a full scholarship to study at Harvard University. But Liz decided to leave her top university a couple of months earlier this year in order to take care of her father, who has also developed AIDS.“I love my parents so much. They are drug addicts. But I never forget that they love me all the time.”

    Liz wants moviegoers (who often see films) to come away with the idea that changing your life is “as simple as making a decision”.

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Weekend Photography Workshop(研讨班): Seattle Aims

Learn new techniques from a great photographer

Take photos of Pike Place Market, Bainbridge Island, and more

Activity Details

    Seattle is a fantastic place to photograph. Spend the weekend taking photos of the historic Pike Place Market, get a new angle on the Space Needle, and photograph harbor views on Bainbridge Island.

    This workshop is led by a great photographer and a professional instructor and is designed for people who are interested in improving their digital photography. All participants must bring a digital SLR camera(单反相机), a laptop, and the software for organizing and presenting images. The workshop is limited to 25 participants.

Plan – 3 Days

Day 1—Thursday: Seattle

    Settle into our hotel or stay in accommodations of your choice. Gather tonight at a restaurant in town for a welcome dinner.

Day 2—Friday: Pike Place Market & Pioneer Square

    Start the day in the classroom with an instructive talk by our photographer. Our first task this afternoon takes us to the oldest running farmers' market in the country, Pike Place Market. Work on portraits, street scenes, and food photographing. Then photograph the stately 19^th century brick buildings of Pioneer Square, Seattle's historic center. End the day with an edit-and-critic meeting.

Day 3—Saturday: Olympic Sculpture Park & Space Needle

    Head out to the Olympic Sculpture Park. Then go to the streets of the downtown area to get a unique view of the Space Needle, and photograph city life against a background of diverse architectural styles. Tonight, we'll present our best images to the group, enjoy dinner at a local restaurant and end our journey.

Cost

    Meals noted in the plan are included in both options(with and without hotel)

Dates

Jul 11 – 14, 2013     Aug 08—11, 2013       Sep 26 – 29, 2013

Contact Information

    For questions about this workshop, please call 1-886-797-4686. Or you can visit the website: http://www. nationalgeographicexpeditions.com.

    The fridge is considered necessary. It has been so since the 1960s when packaged food list appeared with the label: "Store in the refrigerator."

    In my fridge less Fifties childhood, I was fed well and healthy. The milkman came every day, the grocer, the butcher, the baker, and the ice-cream man delivered two or three times each w eek. The Sunday meat would last until Wednesday and the bread and milk left became all kinds of cakes. Nothing was wasted, and w e w ere never troubled by rotten food. Thirty years on, food deliveries have stopped, and fresh vegetables are almost impossible to get in the country.

    The invention of the fridge contributed comparatively little to the art of food preservation. Many well-tried techniques already existed — natural cooling, drying, smoking, salting, sugaring, bottling...

    What refrigeration did promote was marketing — marketing hardware and electricity, marketing soft drinks, marketing dead bodies of animals around the world in search of a good price.

    Consequently, most of the world's fridges are to be found, not in the tropics where they might prove useful, but in the rich countries with mild temperatures where they are climatically almost unnecessary. Every winter, millions of fridges hum (make a low continuous sound) away continuously, and at vast expense, busily maintaining an artificially-cooled space inside an artificially-heated house —while outside, nature provides the desired temperature free of charge.

    The fridge's effect upon the environment has been clear, while its contribution to human happiness has been unimportant. If you don't believe me, try it yourself, invest in a food cupboard and turn off your fridge next winter. You may miss the hamburgers, but at least you'll get rid of that terrible hum.

    Ever walked to the shops only to find, once there, you've completely forgotten what you went for? Or struggled to remember the name of an old friend? For years we've accepted that a forgetful brain is as much a part of aging as wrinkles and gray hair. But now a new book suggests that we've got it all wrong.

    According to The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain, by science writer Barbara Strauch, when it comes to the important things, our brains actually get better with age. In fact, she argues that some studies have found that our brain hits its peak between our 40s and 60s — much later than previously thought.

    Furthermore, rather than losing many brain cells as we age, we keep them, and even produce new ones well into middle age. For years it's been assumed that brain, much like the body, declines with age. But the longest, largest study into what happens to people as they age suggests otherwise.

    This continuing research has followed 6,000 people since 1956, testing them every seven years. It has found that on average, participants performed better on cognitive (认知的) tests in their 40s and 50s than they had done in their 20s. Specifically, older people did better on tests of vocabulary, verbal memory (how many words you can remember) and problem solving. Where they performed less well was number ability and perceptual speed — how fast you can push a button when ordered. However, with more complex tasks such as problem-solving and language, we are at our best at middle age and beyond. In short, researchers are now coming up with scientific proof that we do get wiser with age.

    Neuroscientists are also finding that we are happier with aging. A recent US study found older people were much better at controlling and balancing their emotions. It is thought that when we're younger we need to focus more on the negative aspects of life in order to learn about the possible dangers in the world, but as we get older we've learned our lessons and are aware that we have less time left in life: therefore, it becomes more important for us to be happy.

    Alan Naiman was known for being very careful about how he spent his money. But even those closest to him had no knowledge of the fortune he quietly gathered and the last act he had planned.

    Naiman died of cancer at age 63 last January. The man from the American state of Washington gave most of his money to groups that help the poor, sick, disabled and abandoned children.

    He gave them $11 million. The large amount of his fortune shocked the groups that received his gifts and even his best friends. That is because Naiman had been known to repair his own shoes with duct tape. He had sought deals to buy food from grocery stores at closing time and taken friends out to lunch at low cost restaurants.

    Naiman died unmarried and childless. He loved children but also was intensely private. He saved, invested and worked extra jobs to gather money. He rarely spent the money on himself after seeing how unfair life could be for children who suffer most.

    Naiman was a former banker who worked for the past 20 years at the state Department of Social and Health Services. He earned $67,234 a year and also took on side jobs. Sometimes, he worked as many as three at a time. He saved and invested enough to make several millions of dollars. He also received millions more from his parents after they died.

    He left $2.5 million to the Pediatric Interim Care Center in Washington. The center is a private organization that cares for babies born to mothers who abused drugs and children with drug dependency. The center used the money to pay off its mortgage (按揭) and buy a new vehicle to transport the children.

    Naiman gave $900, 000 to the Treehouse, where children without parents can choose toys and necessities for free. Treehouse is using Naiman's money to expand its college and career support services Statewide.