What you think does matter

Anastasia State Park - camping in St. Augustine, Fl. vacation St. Augustine, Florida vacation – having as much fun as you possibly can with as small a budget is possible. Well, no – that is not going to happen. It’s been a long time coming and my wife finally gets her 'St. Augustine' vacation. Sure I live about four hours away and I somehow had an extra body (the daughter of a friend of the family) who unbeknownst to me, was invited to come along with us, of which I had not factored into my already ballooned budget, but all is good. I have to say I was very excited as well; it’s been awhile since I have been camping with my family and I wanted to see how the kids reacted, especially Wanda our friend’s daughter (she has never been camping before). St. Augustine – Anastasia State Park, the campground site my wife finally decided on is a wonderful camp site indeed. Not like my favorite place "Kelly Park in Apopka Florida", but it is nice, clean and has a beac...

St. Augustine, Florida Vacation fun activities. St. Augustine, Florida vacation – having as much fun as you possibly can! St. Augustine, Florida must be the ghost capital of the world; there were more ghostly haunted sites than you could shake a stick at, again something my wife loves. With so many ghoulish haunts to choose from my wife settled on ‘Ripley’s Haunted Castle Adventure’. It took some coaxing but my scared little boy said that he would do it – for me and only if I held his hand as I walked with him. The tour was at night, which made it fun for me. Who doesn’t want to go into places like these at night – that alone was worth the price of admission but that is just me? The tour takes you through the whole building; you watch a 3D movie about a ghost hunting company’s documentary: I will let you be the judge, if you ever see it. The story is about the troubled history of Ripley’s castle and finding Mr. X. Mr. X murdered two women in the castle when it was run as a...

My reluctant Super Star baby So its spring break and I happen to have some free time on my hands – great! But with free time comes great responsibility – I mean, I’m bored and I currently had nothing better to do. So what did I decide to do? Well, I decided to make my little girl the main character, the face, the ‘Super Star’ of my promotional efforts. I am always looking for ways to promote my blog, my book and my Facebook page and so – I created a marketing plan for my FB book page using some interesting pictures of my daughter. Of course, I did not ask for her permission (why should I – am I not Dad?) Besides, the pictures are in public places making it copy right free - Just joking. Please remember friends: I need FB likes. I need G+, I need your comments below and I desperately need you to share this blog with your friends and family. After all, that is what friends do for each other, right? But like I was saying, I had a bit of free time and I decided to set up a mar...

Follow the money – you must be joking, teen makes how much! Sometimes it never ceases to amaze me. What is that old saying: get good grades, go to college and get a great job – you’ve got a wonderful future ahead of you. Sometimes I think the universe has a sick sense of humor. It just has to be joke, what else can it be? I guess this is why I work hard at trying to teach my children how to think out of the box. Not that learning, school and all the traditional methods don’t work. But you have to admit – children today have more opportunities than ever before. All they have to do is open their eyes, focus their thoughts and shoot for the moon.

Have Grit: if you want to have success? Intelligence and creativity are great but you can’t quit when the going gets tough if you really want to accomplish anything big. Published on May 9, 2013 Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn't the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of "grit" as a predictor of success. That’s grit . Perseverance. And it’s one of the best predictors of success there is. Via Dan Pink’s excellent book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us . The best predictor of success, the researchers found, was the prospective cadets’ ratings on a noncognitive, nonphysical trait known as “grit”—defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference...

Review: DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel (Orlando Florida) Every Hotel has its pluses and it’s negative – here is my review of the Doubletree Orlando, Florida hotel by Hilton. I have a lot to say! If you didn’t know my story starts with Walt Disney trying to cheat me with what look like to me like a sort of "bait and switch" kind of scam. After searching for the closest hotel to Sea World to take my mini-weekend valentine vacation with the wife, who decided to take the kids with us (Ohm – Don’t ask me, I still don’t know why she did that?) I settled on the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel. It was too cold for Coco Keys, it’s a great Hotel but it’s mostly a water park – not the kind of thing I wanted to do when it’s chilly. Besides, I wanted to try something new, something deferent and most of all – something elegant; something that was as close as possible to sea world as I could get. After all, that was where we were headed before my wife converted a “you and me” setting to a w...

Is it wrong to motivate my child to succeed? I wrote a bit about my book and my thoughts on motivating children to learn and I received an interesting comment from an anonymous commentator. Comment: 02/5/2014 at 02:48 PM I know of no child that wants to become rich and successful. They want to be happy. If they want to be rich, that's the way you taught them to be, and I find that shallow. I may have addressed this before at another forum but I am going to share my thoughts here as well, since it’s my personal blog about my personal thoughts, opinions and beliefs. As to the assertion of my anonymous commentator made that children “do not want” to be rich and successful – is troubling to me. My experience has been that anyone that is anyone wants to be successful in one thing or another. By this I mean that no one, especially a child goes around saying – I want to fail. In fact children just like adults hate to fail. No one likes to feel like a failure or to be consid...