Just Lizabell

This blog is now located at www.justlizabell.com.

At that address you will be able to find all my recent updates, posts, and means of contacting me. Please switch your RSS subscription over to that site using the links that are provided.

Thanks!

Elizabeth Marie

Feed Part II

Ok one more reminder to everyone to update their feed!

You can go here to change to my feedburner feed.

For those of you that have already subscribed please make sure your feed address is set to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/justlizabell (all lowercase)

as there has been some confusion in this area. Clearly I suck at the whole RSS things.

This is what I get for switching domains. *le sigh* It will all be worked out soon!

Thanks guys.

Also can anyone please notify me via the contact page if they are having feed issues? Thanks a million.

The New Feed

I've had a few people tell me they were having some problems with my RSS feed so let me just throw out another quick reminder.

The sites' original feed has changed so all of you who were subscribing to my old feed, which looks like this:

http://justlizabell.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

will not be able to see any of my updates. : (

So. To avoid such chaos/misfortune please remember to subscribe to my new feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/JustLizabell

Which is actually still my old feed just with the new site backing it up. But never mind that. Just make sure you are on the up and up with the new feed.

Thanks much!

The New Just Lizabell

Ok everyone I have an announcement to make! But before I do let me first say sorry for the lack of regular posting for the last little while. I've been doing some pretty hefty design work and unfortunately it left me with very little time to write - let alone sleep. However the results are well worth it.

So without further ado...

May I present: Just Lizabell - New & Improved!

The blog has undergone some serious redesigning (but I managed to keep in all the things I loved about it in the first place) and I'm happy to say that it's new look is here to stay.

As much as I've loved being on blogger and the blogger community itself, Just Lizabell has grown beyond my expectations and because of that I think it deserves to have a more permanent type of home. So anyone that is running of my blogger feed please redirect it to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/JustLizabell

And please note that there is also a new feed for comments!

Later this week I will be changing my blogger url so that it redirects to the new site to avoid any confusion! Also I have a new email address at which you can inquire about the new site if need be. Please do so at: contact[at]justlizabell[dot]com.

Thanks so much for everyones patience while I get the blog switched over.

Plasma TV For The Puppy

Ok I couldn't help but put this picture up. I walked around the corner out of my room this morning and this is what I saw:


Yea that's my puppy. And yes he's watching the fish in our fish tank. Nope it's not enough to watch me run around the house like an idiot trailing his toy rabbit behind me shouting "IT'S PETER COTTONTAIL TIME!" He has to watch the two fish (both roughly the size of a jellybean) swim back and forth from one end to the other of our ridiculously over sized tank.

Love you too Sam.

(Almost) Naked Chicken

Fun fact: My mom is a vegetarian. And I was too - for many years (much to the disdain of the rest of my family). It's a lifestyle I don't mind in many ways as I would much rather have a salad than a burger any day but it can also be rather challenging at times. It makes eating out extremely difficult. It was a practice I gave up when I moved into my fathers home after my sixteenth birthday - mostly because I knew it wouldn't be accommodated - but it's still something my mother holds fast to. She'll cook non-vegetarian dishes for the rest of us and just make separate little things for herself. And even though I'm more than aware of all the health/environmental benefits of it I've never been particularly tempted to take up vegetarianism again - until last night.

My mother was kind enough to pick up a chicken for us to roast yesterday at the store but upon bringing it home and opening it up to clean it we found this:

Yea - those are feathers. Yep. FEATHERS. Ew.

Is there not like a big long process in which all the chicken resembling parts of the chicken are REMOVED for the health/sanity of us chicken consumers?

My precondition with food is that it must not look like whatever animal it formerly called itself. I don't want to know.

I just about died upon seeing this. And just as I was gaining my composure enough to be able to take this picture my mom looks over her shoulder and goes:

"Hey [Little Brother] - will you go get the pliers?"

At which point I ran from the room, covering my mouth, and trying not to gag.

However I am now an expert on what it sounds like when an already dead chicken is plucked. Yeah. There's a sound.

I'll be spending the next week eating nothing but muffins and cornflakes - thank you very much.

Blog Action Day 2008



*Blog Action Day is a specific day of the year on which bloggers from across the world come together in an effort to raise awareness on a specific issue. This years issue is Poverty. This is my contribution.*

Remember in grade school how, when discussing other countries, our teachers would always refer back to that survey that demonstrated the wealth of the average person in America compared to the average wealth of the rest of the world? The one that shows that we Americans were among the richest people in the world merely because we owned a refrigerator, had more than one pair of shoes, or had access to clean drinking water on a daily basis.

I remember how our teacher would hand out different slips of colored paper and tell us all to stand on top of our chairs. Most of the class had yellow, pink, or green slips. A few had blue. Only one other kid had a red slip like mine. She explained that the yellow, pink and green slips demonstrated the different levels of poverty in which most people were living and told us that if our class was a small scale representation of the world everyone with one of these slips was living in an impoverished country. She asked those people to sit down. Over two thirds of my classmates quietly took their seats.

"Those people," my teacher told us "are the people that do not have clean water, safe food, or a house to live in. They don't have access to doctors and medicine when they're sick. They don't get to come to school like you do. They probably wont live as long as you will." She turned to the students holding blue strips. "Those of you that have blue papers are living in developed countries. You have safe houses, decent schools, some medical care, and a government that provides some benefits for you." With a nod from our teacher those children took their seats too.

Finally, she turned to look at me and the other girl that was still standing. "You two are from countries like America where you can have the best schooling available, be taken care of by the best doctors, and maintain a lifestyle that many people in the world could never dream of. You can own a car, new clothes, a big house, toys, and books. You have heating, indoor plumbing, and many other things that are considered luxuries to most of the world. The people like you amount to less than five percent of the world yet they own more than ninety percent of the worlds wealth." And that was when she looked me right in the eye and said "Don't you think we should share?"

Poverty is, and always will be, an issue of extreme importance but its devastating effects have been brought into the limelight recently by economical failures spanning our globe. It's common knowledge that both the American and the Canadian economy have not been doing well lately. People everywhere are in constant fear of losing their jobs, their homes, and their savings. It's terrifying to think about but the worst part of it is that it could all have been prevented. I truly believe that if it wasn't for the strong few who prey on the many that are weak we could have avoided a financial crisis like the one we're in now. If it wasn't for large corporations and billionaire CEO's that just can't have enough and choose to find ways to cut costs that deplete our markets, raise inflation, and leave so many jobless - without even a pension to get them by - maybe we might have been able to stop this from happening. If it wasn't for all the greed upon which our nation runs then maybe our unemployment rates wouldn't be so high and our citizens would be happier. If health care wasn't just another opportunity to make money, to cheat a patient out of something he needs in an effort to keep more money in the investors pockets, perhaps our country could enjoy the riches of being safe and healthy.

Just last night Crayon and I had a discussion over what we would both be doing to support ourselves financially and how that would affect where we live and when we get married. We talked about what kind of options we had with our careers and what choices we could make that would allow us to live comfortably - without the cloud of financial stress hanging over our heads. And it was then that I remembered standing up on that chair in school with all my classmates looking up at me and how I wondered if I was going to be one of the lucky few that didn't spend life worrying about whether or not I would be able to make rent or buy groceries that month. I didn't want to have to choose between three meals a day or college textbooks. I don't want to have to suffer through a career I despise for the sake of being able to fill up my gas tank every week. And most importantly I don't want Crayon to spend forty hours a week doing something he doesn't love just for money.

The amount of poverty that resides in our nation spreads far beyond our bank accounts and affects every aspect of our lives, from where our children attend school, to what kind of car we drive, to whether or not we can even afford to see the doctor once a year and unfortunately it's something that can't be fixed over night - but it can be fixed. So tonight, if you choose to watch the presidential debate, I urge you to do so not only with an open mind but with the welfare of those less fortunate than ourselves as your prime concern. Let us not elect a president who will, driven by greed, bring our country farther into debt and farther from accomplishing the goals that are important to the American people, but instead put in power a man who will start from the bottom helping those in the most dire of circumstances first and leave the corporate bailouts in the past where they belong. Let this election be a turning point for our society and a chance to eliminate poverty in every form.

*Blog Action Day 2008*
*Vote Obama 2008*




Christmas In October!

This is the picture I took before I went down to Salt Lake last weekend:


Prettyness right? Everything is green enough that you can tell Fall is just starting to show her colors. While taking this picture I was all excited for leaf fights and caramel covered apples. I was hoping Fall would stick around for a few months this year. Clearly, The Weather had other plans.

This is what I came home to:


Not cool. Not cool at all.

*Please excuse this brief intermission of actual writing while I download every Christmas song I can think of and decorate my room with red/green crepe paper THREE MONTHS in advance*