Working safely

Even considering the fact that I am a businesswoman who doesn’t find it particularly difficult to assure my safety at work, the truth is that I am aware of the fact that in many other jobs it is vital that we always get the most reliable and secure equipment that will make sure that everyone is fully protected against any unexpected event.

As a matter of fact, if you really care about the safety of construction workers or if you are one of them, then you should definitely have a look at these Cut Resistant Kevlar Gloves, which will protect your hands if you ever have some trouble dealing with any of the machinery that you have at work. Moreover, the prices that you will be able to find on the website above are some of the lowest that you will ever find anywhere across the Internet on almost any safety equipment that we may possibly need! What else could we really ask for our safety at work?

Affordable vacations for all the families in Sandusky

Despite the fact that family vacations tend to be more expensive then the regular vacations around the country while we only take our children, the truth is that we can still bring all the family with us to a great destination and avoid paying too much for it! In fact, if you would like to get your family to Ohio then you should read the msnbc.com article just below:

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By Randi Goldberg Berris

Associated Press writer

SANDUSKY, Ohio - For our first family vacation with our 4-year-old daughter, we had several criteria: It had to be within a three-hour drive, be reasonably priced, provide enough to do in case of bad weather, and keep my husband and me occupied too.

Our destination: Sandusky, Ohio. It's best known as the home of Cedar Point Amusement Park, but there are plenty of other attractions in the area too.

We stayed at the Great Wolf Lodge, a log-sided resort with an indoor water park roughly 2 1/2-hours from our suburban Detroit home. With 11 locations in the U.S. and Canada, the chain is well-established and had gotten positive reviews from friends. We went midweek and found a good deal on the Internet: $179/night for a family suite with balcony, including an all-you-can eat hot breakfast.

We also packed some of our daughter's favorite books, blankie and a night light to make the bedtime routine easier in an unfamiliar setting. The suite allowed me and my husband to watch TV or read a book in the sitting area while she went to sleep.

To make the ride more bearable, we brought along the portable DVD player and bribed our daughter with ice cream if she promised to keep the "are we there yet?" questions to a maximum of three times. Surprisingly it worked.

Our first stop after we crossed into Ohio was the African Safari Wildlife Park in Port Clinton. The main attraction of the 100-acre preserve is a drive-through fenced-in area where visitors can feed deer, elk, moose and other animals. The park is home to 50 different species, including zebra, giraffes and bison. Online coupons offer weekday carload discounts for $42.95 per car, but we got an even better and unadvertised deal with our Detroit Zoo membership card — half-off the regular price of admission. The deal is good with any zoo membership.

The park provides each vehicle one free small bucket of animal food, and you can buy additional buckets as well as carrots. We saved some money by bringing our own 5-pound bag of carrots, though we didn't mention that to the park attendants.

Once inside the preserve, our car immediately was surrounded by deer. It was a rainy Monday, so the park was pretty empty. That made our car even more popular with the animals, who aren't shy at all and clearly are conditioned when they see a vehicle to think "food!"

You drive very slowly, so you can safely take small children out of their car seats. With my 4-year-old sitting on my lap and my husband behind the wheel, we opened the front windows. It wasn't long before a moose grabbed the entire cup of food, put it on the roof of our Pontiac, and chowed down. Pellets of animal food rained into the car and the windows soon were covered with moose slobber. It was too close of an encounter for our daughter, but my husband and I couldn't stop laughing.

After the drive-through area, we parked the car and walked around Safari Junction, where we saw lemurs, alpacas, camels and other animals. Children can ride a pony and camel at no extra cost.

From there, it was a quick 20-minute drive to the Great Wolf Lodge. We timed it so we'd get to the resort around 1 p.m., the earliest guests can check in. It's located on a busy street with plenty of strip malls and chain restaurants, not in scenic downtown Sandusky.

The resort lobby is designed to provide visitors with a rustic Up North feel, complete with animal trophies mounted on the walls. It also has a clock tower that entertains young children with an animated show four times a day. There's also story time about 8:15 each night, a Cub Club with its own staff that does arts and crafts projects with the kids, and the Cubs' Cabin, a dry area for children 6 and under, where they can play games on a computer, put on a puppet show or read a book.

Of course, the whole reason to go to Great Wolf Lodge is the water park. The one in Sandusky has nine slides, five pools, a giant four-story water fort, a lazy river and hot tubs. One of the pools is a zero-depth entry toddler play area, with fountains, small slides and enough room for young ones to swim around. The resort recommends all young children and weak swimmers wear life jackets. It has them onsite for free, though it's first-come, first-served and at peak times, they can run out. Certified lifeguards are everywhere, giving parents peace of mind.

Our daughter was fascinated by the giant bucket atop the water fort that dumps 700 gallons of water on daring souls about every five minutes. A bell clangs for about 30 seconds before the water comes crashing down, so people who don't want to get such a soaking can easily move out of the way.

The resort offers one sit-down restaurant, which we ate at the first night. It's reasonably priced and of course has a kids' menu but enough adult food — and drinks — to satisfy most. The second night we ventured out to one of the kid-friendly chain restaurants along the strip.

Our second day at the lodge — our only full day there — the toddler pool was closed for cleaning, but luckily the weather was beautiful and we spent most of our time at the underutilized outdoor pool, which also has fountains for the kids to play in and a zero-depth entry. On the other end, the pool has basketball nets and we watched one rowdy game of pool basketball.

When it's time to get out of the water, the lodge also has an arcade where parents can easily spend too much money. It also offers various other activities, including a junior lifeguard program for older children and a "wolf walk," where younger kids can learn about different animals and touch pelts from a fox, deer and possum, as well as hold a turtle shell, deer antlers and bison horns.

If you can lure your children out of the resort, Sandusky has a historic downtown along the Lake Erie waterfront, and offers easy ferry service to Put-in-Bay island in Lake Erie. There's also a vineyard and winery open to the public. Those attractions are on our to-do list for our next visit to Sandusky, but this time, we felt our daughter was a bit too young — and too enamored with the water park — to fully enjoy the other sites.

On our last day at the resort, the toddler pool was still closed and the rain had moved in again, so after a final swim in one of the inside pools, we were ready to get on the road. Our itinerary was supposed to include a trip to Goofy Golf, just down the street from Great Wolf Lodge, for a round of miniature golf and some go-cart racing. We didn't get there this time because of the weather, but it, too is on our to-do list for next time.

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Taking some time to relax in Los Angeles...

When considering the fact that I am an experienced businesswoman who tends to spend too much time at work dealing with important matters, the truth is that I often find it difficult for me to discover a nice place to enjoy some relaxing moments in my city…

Keeping this in mind, my friend Tom has recently told me about a new Fine Art Gallery in Los Angeles where I could see the work produced by many famous artists such as Pino, one of my personal favorites. As a matter of fact, I love to spend some time looking at interesting pieces of art that often tend to make us feel as if we were brought to a new dimension when we look at them deeply!

So, do you also love to see the work of the masters in the most glamorous and amazing art galleries? If that’s the case and if you are going to visit Los Angeles in the near future, then you definitely need to check out the website to which I have linked above and see with your own eyes how incredibly easy it is to take some time to relax while being impressed by some amazing pieces of art.

Grandparents taking the kids to the cities during the summer

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you simply didn't know what to do with your children? Do you think that it is about time that you find a solution for that? If you can still count on your parents, then you should definitely consider the possibility of allowing your children to enjoy a great time with their grandparents in the big cities as you may discover by reading the msnbc.com article just below:

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By Eileen Ogintz

Tribune Media Services

Robert Williams, 12, wasn't worried about flying for the first time or visiting a big city. He was only concerned that his manners wouldn't be up to his grandmother's standards.

After all, she was treating him not only to his first flight and first trip to New York City, but the theater-loving middle-schooler would get to participate in special workshops, meet the stars from "Mary Poppins," see at least one Broadway production and check out the Statue of Liberty and some of New York's other famous sites.

"It's the best of the best!" said Robert, who is from Biloxi, Miss. "I'm having so much fun."

So was his grandmother, Kathryn Skinner, who is from Memphis, Tenn. "Of course, the economy gave me pause," she said. "But this is something Robert will remember for the rest of his life. He'll only be 12 once."

Skinner, who is in her 70s, and Robert had joined a group of other similarly aged grandparents and grandchildren from around the country — 41 in all, including 17 kids between the ages of nine and 12, for a five-day "Broadway Adventure," courtesy of ElderHostel.

Elderhostel, of course, is known for their affordable, educational programs for seniors. But what many don't realize is that there are 200 different grandparent-grandchild programs with almost 400 departures (a handful includes three generations), which start at just $365 for four nights and draw 7,000 people annually — everything from a summer camp at an iconic Adirondacks resort on Lake George, N.Y., to a tour of Oxford, England, from the perspective of "Harry Potter" and "The Chronicles of Narnia," to a rafting excursion out West.

This Broadway experience, first introduced last year, has been a hit from the start, said Molly Goodrich, who oversees the program and many others for Elderhostel in New York. Even better, the trip was a good deal, the grandparents said — less than $1,000 each, including activities, hotels, meals and tickets to a Broadway musical. "All you have to do is show up. Everything is planned," said Peter Dillon, of Pittsford, N.Y., who was spending the week with his wife, Ann, and 10-year-old grandson, Spencer Kelly, who lives in Virginia.

The N.Y. adventure also included a Q&A session with Broadway stars Scarlett Strallen, Mary Poppins, dinner with Kelsey Fowler, who plays one of the Banks children in the production, interactive theater workshops with Broadway veterans and a tour of the historic New Amsterdam Theater, opened in 1903, where Mary Poppins is currently playing. This is not a trip families could replicate on their own.

"What's the difference between a Broadway theater and an Off-Broadway theater? The tour guide Kimberly Tuttle asked the kids. They were stumped. But it turns out it's the number of seats — anything over 499 constitutes a Broadway theater. The kids learned the fabulously renovated theater is even home to a ghost — a former Ziegfeld star who died under murky circumstances in Paris. "Not like any theater I've ever seen," said an awed Robert Williams.

"I really liked the theater," added 10-year-old Samantha Tiller of Richmond, Va. "I want to learn a bunch of stuff here because I want to be an actress."

Many of the kids in our group are aspiring actors, singers and dancers who are veterans of local and school productions. They clearly enjoy the workshop learning the stagecraft behind the popular "A Spoonful of Sugar" number from "Mary Poppins," taught to them by Lee Wilkins and Daniel Egan.

"For most of them, this is their first trip to New York and their first time to Broadway," says Wilkins, a well-known director/choreographer. "This is so designed for the wonder in their eyes." That's why, he adds, the program is meant for kids nine to 12 — before teen angst sets in.

They even learn a couple of life lessons that performers practice every day, Egan adds, such as discipline, respect and focus, among others. The kids pepper Egan and Wilkins with questions about their experience (impressed that Egan performed with Clay Aiken on Broadway) and how they might audition for upcoming professional productions.

Grandparents, of course, are all smiles. And they're not just watching either. They join the workshops and have their own adult-only writing for the musical theater class while the kids are busy practicing elsewhere. "This is educational for us as well as the kids," says Mary Ann Hotchkiss, here with her husband and granddaughter Samantha Tiller.

Many in the group, like the Hotchkisses, are veterans of these intergenerational Elderhostel programs, seeking a way to connect with grandchildren who live far away.

"When we visit, we see her asleep or with her friends," said Carol Marks, a retired NYC teacher, whose 12-year-old granddaughter Olivia lives in Durham, N.C. "This is our time to spend time with her." And to make sure Olivia has fond memories, her grandmother takes lots of pictures and makes her a photo album of their adventure.

Olivia adds that while she loves spending time with her grandparents, these trips are more fun because there are so many kid-centric activities — and other kids her age. "You get a much different view of the city than if you were just traveling by yourself. And you don't get bored," she said. "I always make new friends."

Grandparents find these trips far less stressful than if they were traveling with their entire family. "The dynamic is totally different," said Ann Dillon, noting that she and her husband have made these trips a tradition — taking each grandchild when they turn 10. "As soon as the parents are there, the whining starts."

"It's a lot less painful without my brother," adds Ann Dillon's grandson Spencer Kelly, who chose New York over Disney World or a rafting trip.

But in the end, said Olivia's grandmother, Carol Marks, the location isn't really what matters, as long as the kids are happy. "It's the chance to connect," she said.

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