A look at drug abuse treatment centers

As a long term or short term care program for drug abuse, treatments centers are used to encourage the stoppage of drug abuse through their various programs. Drug abuse treatment centers offer a wide variety of ways to help attain a clean life style for many addicts that are struggling with their addictions. Many drug abuse treatment centers are staffed by recovered addicts or alcoholics. Since drug abuse is common, treatment centers use rules and stipulations to keep things alive and well in their institutions.

Drug abuse treatment centers are fully able to try to help but not cure addicts from their drug abuse. Treatment centers are able to run groups focused on self preservation and the use also of other programs such as Narcotics Anonymous. Drug abuse treatment centers also have transportation at most times to get the addict to and from local meetings and also to in-house events such as bowling, softball or things of leisure such as the movies.

Drug abuse treatment centers may also introduce medications as a way to help people detoxify off of most drugs. This includes alcohol and heroin abuse. These medications are taken to help deal with things such as tremors and also many other side effects of the addict’s drug abuse. Treatment centers also monitor things such as the medical needs sometimes and also mental health needs. This is due to the fact that, in some cases of drug abuse, treatment centers need to cope and help with other issues involved in the addicts recovery process which also may include HIV/AIDS and hepatitis.

Addicts use drug abuse treatment centers at the usual time when people cannot tolerate their usage anymore and is sometimes a healthy alternative to being an out-patient and going to NA (Narcotics Anonymous) meetings. Drug abuse centers also provide liasons between parents and their children and also for teenagers with their parents. More than half of drug abuse treatment centers are for adults where the others are designed for the addicted teen.

Teenagers that have been put into drug abuse treatment centers must at times provide parental permission to do so. Teens involved in drug abuse treatment centers usually wind up with a case manager or a therapist to help them cope with their troubles or their thoughts that it it is cool to continue the drug abuse. Treatment centers know this and will do all that is needed to keep the teen from exterminating themselves with the lives filled with drug abuse.

Drug abuse treatment centers may have an age limit as to who and how young the teen must be to be able to enroll in it. This is because they don't want the usual adult stuck with a teenager with a giant age gap between themselves and their recovery. Recovery at a drug abuse treatment center to staff and to most people who enter them can be a satisfactory experience because of the level of experience and the quality of care that most entail.

Only seconds

You've spent money and time creating a logo, letterhead, and brochures for your business. You care about your company message, and you want customers to know you care about quality. You've hired professional graphic artists, designers, and printers to do the job.

But what have you done about your small business Web site design? Does it match the quality and look of your other marketing materials? Since the Web has more reach than the rest of your marketing materials, it should demonstrate the highest quality. And yet so many business owners have hired amateurs, relatives, teenagers, or created McWeb (fast setup, cookie-cutter) sites themselves.

An important distinction about the Web is the amount of time you have to create interest for your visitor. You have only seconds to make a great impression. How are you using yours? Now is the perfect time to see if your small business Web site design needs some tweaking to make that great impression. Visit your own Web site and check out our three-step approach below to see if it's time for you to consider a change.

1. Before you click to review your Web site home page, ask yourself what your current business goals are. Do you want to sell product? Do you want to sell services? Do you want to provide information for prospective buyers? What do you want to accomplish? Your goals and your business may have changed since you first put up your small business Web site. Deciding on your current business goals will help you to decide on the main focus for your small business Web site.

2. Discover what your firm's largest strengths are. This can be done through customer focus groups, surveys, interviews, or informal processes. The result should be something similar to your unique selling proposition or how customers benefit from doing business with you.

3. Now, visit the home page of your Web site. What is the first item that you see? Put one and two together, and shouldn't your small business Web site home page immediately feature your biggest strengths or a means to your goal (or preferably both?)

The Web is filled with what not to do. Yesterday, I saw a consulting Web site that I couldn't tell was an accounting site until I clicked through three pages. A speaker's Web site had a huge picture of the speaker that took forever to download and was not by any means Mr. America. And a photographer's site had a long, irrelevant Flash movie about the creator's dog. I don't know of any customer who is going to sit there and try to guess what business you're in. They'll just go to other sites and do business with the small business Web site that has a clear message for them.

If you want to make money on the Web, use your seconds wisely.

The perfect chocolate gift basket

Searching a present can be easy for one person, while for another the task of shopping for presents can be very hard, you have to think on so many factors when you buy a present and sometimes you don't know were to start. Don't panic, there is a gift that can make it very simple. It is not important how you buy it, or what is the circumstances, it is a present that saves time and lets you avoid the unnecessary stress of buying a gift, I am talking about the Gift Basket.

You can buy a gift basket from the local store or you can make one yourself, in this case you can extend or reduce the size of the basket. There are some who buy or do fruit gift baskets. Others prefer creating a basket with all the stuff that a person likes, for example, a casino enthusiast gift basket. But if you want something really yummy to give, try buying or coming up with a chocolate gift basket. This kind of gift basket is grate, you don't have any limited for the chocolate kind that you can use, and the basket can be from any material, Country basket, fancy box, bowl of glass, or anything that you can put something inside and wrap it nicely.

Why should i choose chocolate? - Here are some facts about chocolate that may help you consider chocolate gift basket later on:

Chocolate is considered as a power booster or a wonderful source of energy. In fact, the big general Napoleon was known to carry it in his military conquests around the world.

Chocolates may be high in fat, but will not raise blood cholesterol.

Contrary to popular belief, chocolates do not cause acne, neither migraine.

Allergies to chocolates are so uncommon so don't have to worry about it.

Chocolate consumption boosts the economy. Actually, consumers all over the world spend an average of $20 billion annually on it.

See, what I mean? Now, after you read all this amazing fact about chocolates, would not you consider chocolates for your gift basket?

You may include the regular chocolate favorite in your gift basket or better yet, try the gourmet ones that are really sweet, creamy, and delicious, though more expensive, but the upgrade that you can made by yourself for the gift is unbelievable. The person that will receive the gift, can use the fancy basket for decoration, and enjoy the wonderful chocolate that he received.

Mbt sneakers

Did you ever see that episode of Seinfeld where George is playing basketball with Jimmy, the guy selling the freaky-looking training shoes? Ladies and gentlemen, MBT sneakers may not turn you into someone who refers to yourself in the third person and can dunk a basketball better than Dr. J., but they do promise significant improvement in performance.

Advertised as “the world’s smallest gym,” MBT sneakers take the philosophy that typical shoes don’t reflect the actual world we walk in. While the world is dishearteningly uneven, most shoes are flatter than Calista Flockhart. What the MBT sneakers attempt to do is improve one’s coordination and strength so that in turn the stress on the joints and spine can be lessened.

The MBT in MBT sneakers stands for Masai Barefoot Technology. The Masai, in case you weren’t aware, are a tribe in Africa who walk everywhere on either completely bare feet or the barest of sandals. If you’ve ever seen members of this tribe walk, you’ll also quickly notice they are the very model of the term “spring in his step.” Great posture and a graceful, loping stride are what the Masai have naturally and what the makers of the MBT sneakers hope to instill in its customers.

The core idea behind the design is to create an environment in which walking seems to be more of a smoothly continuous motion rather than one made up of repeated shocks to the system. Although being sold as a weight-loss or fitness product, the makers insist that the shoes aren’t just for the athletic. Indeed, everyone can benefit from these shoes. Everyone except those who already have perfect posture, anyway.

It the whole idea seems a little hazy, really the best way to understand it is simply to see them. Much like those oddly designed shoes from Seinfeld, the MBT sneaker is first and foremost a fashion statement; they don’t look like anything else on the market. They feature almost no heel contact with ground, instead placing the entire load upon the front of the shoe, which is what gives wearers that certain Masai spring.

If you check out any of the web sites that sell MBT sneakers, chances are you’ll be treated to little videos that show people walking and exercising in them. These videos are much more descriptive than all the words in the world and you’ll leave these sites either desperately wanting to try them on or laughing at them the way Jerry laughed at Kramer when he was wearing the training shoes on Seinfeld. Chances are it will be the former. They just look so darn comfortable.

Like everything else that promises to improve your lifestyle and health, of course, there’s a price tag attached. Be prepared. MBT sneakers are not cheap, and by not cheap I mean they are jaw-droppingly expensive. At least for most folks. But, hey, if you’ve got slightly less than $250 burning a hole in your pocket and you want to walk like a Masai warrior, then MBT sneakers are a no-brainer. For the rest of us, it’s a decision.

Initiation taking your life to the next level

This past Sunday I had the privilege of welcoming back a group of women at the completion of their initiation process. After 10-months of weekly meetings – discovering their wounds and their gifts, exploring their scary edges and their hidden joys – these women left Wednesday evening for the culminating weekend of ritual and celebration.

And on Sunday afternoon, their community welcomed them back. As they walked under the archway and into the circle of friends, I could see, shining through the exhaustion from four days and nights of ritual, the new light that each of these women had tapped into. I could feel the way in which each of them had opened to a deeper understanding of who they truly are.

The highlight of the day was hearing their initiated names, chosen by the leaders, with the help of Spirit, as a lifelong reminder of their purpose and gifts. While I cannot share their actual, initiated names I can give you a taste. They were names like:

Drinks from the Well of Worthiness

Flaming Stone

Speaks Compassionate Truth

Healing Phoenix

Bringer of Sacred Irreverence

These are names that, once given, can never be taken away, and will never be forgotten.

You might wonder what initiation has to do with coaching? It has everything to do with coaching in the way that I approach the work.

Initiation is about stepping into a more mature level of commitment to your life and the manner in which you engage with the world around you. Wherever you stand on your path, the initiatory process propels you into a more active and intimate relationship with the life experience you are creating. Formal initiation marks your transition from one life stage or level of awareness to the next.

While coaching cannot replicate or replace a true initiatory experience, it certainly can help a person discover their unique gifts and find meaningful ways of offering them to the world. In our culture, where formal initiatory experiences are hard to come by, that can be a powerful offering.

In our culture we do have events that offer glimpses of an initiatory past, but very few of them retain their previous power. Weddings, potentially a profoundly initiatory experience, have become an excuse to have a great party. The birth of a child has become so sterilized and anesthetized that the majority of new parents miss out on the opportunity to consciously step through the threshold into parenthood. Most religious initiations have become watered down and no longer serve the purpose for which they were created: namely the conscious and intentional maturation of a person.

According to Jewish tradition, I was initiated into adulthood when I was thirteen. I went through the preparations, learned how to read my Torah portion and chant the other stuff. But when it came right down to it, in my middle-class, reform community, the underlying initiatory element of a Bar Mitzvah had been lost long ago. When I completed the process, my bank balance was larger, but I was no more a man than I had been before the ceremony.

And don’t you dare ask me to remember what Torah portion I read, or anything the rabbi said to me, or the words of wisdom my male elders passed on to me. That is all long gone. What I do remember is the party! We cleared out our garage and turned it into a barn to have a big square dance. Where I came up with that theme, I have no idea. It probably was not even my idea.

In contrast to that, my wife and I created our wedding with the intention of acknowledging and exploring the underlying initiatory experience. We chose to consciously step through the threshold of that initiation into our new life-stage. I will always remember the connections I felt as I walked around the circle of friends and family gathered to support and witness us. I will always remember being asked, at the end of the ceremony, if I was ready to step into the world in a new way, in the role of husband. And I will always remember, after having said “yes,” the surge of power and joy that filled me as my wife and I walked through the gateway into our new experience.

Will the women who participated in this recent initiation remember their experience?

You bet! They’ll carry their initiated name with them for the rest of their lives. They’ll carry the memories of the edges they confronted and crossed over, as well as the edges they confronted and were unable to cross. They’ll remember the dark places they discovered within themselves and the hidden gifts that they found waiting there.

And most important, these women will never again live in quite the same way. They have forged an intimate connection with their gifts. They cannot turn their backs on their gifts anymore than we would turn our backs on our ability to walk or speak or breathe. Can you imagine waking up one day and deciding that you no longer had a use for your ability to walk? Our deeper, soul’s gifts are just as powerful, perhaps more so, and yet, it is far too easy to deny these gifts. The women who went through this initiation no longer have that option. Their experience, their initiated sisters, and their community, will now hold them accountable for offering their gifts to the world in a more expansive way.

Because it is so rare to find an opportunity to participate in a formal initiatory experience, we must become the stewards of our own conscious maturation. We must, on a daily basis, affirm and re - affirm our choice to move into a mature adulthood.

Without formal initiation, our maturation process is evolutionary. It happens each day, in small, incremental moments and movements. By bringing our attention, and intention to the micro-initiations of our daily life, we can achieve the same result as going through a formal initiation. We can step through the threshold to our next level of maturation or awareness.

If you would choose the path of initiation, then begin to pay attention to the opportunities for transformation that happens every day. When something happens in the outer world that propels you to an inner edge, stop and explore it. Don’t be in such a rush to turn around and get away from that edge. When someone says or does something that irritates or even angers you, stop and ask yourself what wound inside you has been activated. When you find yourself resisting an opportunity to offer your gifts to the world, stop and uncover the old beliefs that hold you back.

By committing to your own initiatory process, and using the seemingly insignificant events of your everyday life to catalyze your awakening, you will discover your gifts and the ways in which you are meant to share them with the world.

For more information on initiation, I recommend the following books as a great starting point: Soulcraft: by Bill Plotkin and Of Water and the Spirit: by Malidoma Somй

Two dads one computer-maniac the other computer-phobic

I have two Dads. That sounds strange doesn’t it? One is my genetic father, and the other is my geneticist father. The genetic Dad I’ve only ever lived with for one year when I was an infant, while the geneticist Dad is what you would call a step-father, but I’ve lived in close proximity with him for more than 20 years. I feel close to them both. I connect differently with each of them but on a pretty much equal level. The reason I’m sharing my personal information with you is because I’ve just had a realisation about my fathers in relation to the area that I work in: computers and the Internet. It’s really quite interesting.

One father is a computer maniac. Whenever a new technology, software, gadget, or website emerges he is one of the first to grab it up and evaluate it. My other father has an old piece-of-crap box that looks something like a computer, with a tediously slow dial-up connection to the World Wide Web. Compared to the wireless, broadband Mac personal computer and mobile-connected Mac laptop of the enthusiast, they couldn’t be from further parts of the galaxy.

Then there’s me. I could be construed as being a walking paradox, an enigma, or just plainly twisted when it comes to my relationship with the computer and Internet sphere of life. Nature/nurture, genetic/environmental…For whatever strange reason, I have turned out to be a combination of the two papas. I work as a creative writer for an Internet web-hosting company. I love the ideas and valuable functions and tools that the Internet has brought to humanity (or was it humanity that brought it to the Internet?). However, I have issues and challenges when it comes to using these awe-inspiring machines.

Currently I am away from home in a different city visiting my girlfriend. At home (I am currently living with my parents-Mother and geneticist, as I’m going to live overseas soon) all I have to do to get on the Internet is open up my laptop and I’m on-line. If I’m at work, I go to my PC and all of my settings are stored and ready for me to use. While in a new place, things haven’t been running as smoothly as I would’ve liked. The answers are probably simple and easy to do, but this is one of the kinds of challenges that cause me to stumble. Although I am deeply interested and have a true faith in this new technology, I am a real novice when it comes to getting things done on someone else’s computer.

I brought my laptop with me. My girlfriend only has a dial-up connection which she uses with her laptop. I could use hers’ but she’s Chinese so a lot of what comes up on the screen is illegible to me. I don’t know how to change her language configuration. I’m used to doing it quite easily on my Mac, but her computer is a PC and I’m not as practiced in this other format. That’s one of my problems. I only have so much patience when it comes to working these technological issues out; it could be a trait passed on by my ice-age father (No judgement is being laid here. He just doesn’t feel that he can work new technologies out. He’s had a digital telephone answering machine for two years which he still hasn’t set up. He feels bad about it but his manual one does the job, so he sticks with it.). I’m also a little afraid to hook my laptop up to her dial-up line as I know from experience that I’ll have to change some settings of which I am not confident about doing.

So the next answer was to go to her university where she said people use their laptops wirelessly in the library. That sounded cool so I went in and tried it out. I even tried changing the settings to get it to work (It took courage.) but I couldn’t get it to work. I was weary about asking for help because I wasn’t really a student at that particular learning establishment. Instead, I’ve been using the library’s computers. This is OK, but since I can’t walk away with the files I create (I borrowed my girlfriend’s thumb-drive but an experience from the past of not being able to transfer information from PC to Mac deters me from using it-again, an irrational fear. I know it, and I will give it a try this week. I’ve resorted to saving my files in my email account as attachments. It’s not conventional, but it works.

Another issue I’ve had is getting onto my messenger service. The university computers don’t have it on their desktop, and when I tried to download an on-line version I was told that I didn’t have the authority to do so. I went to an Internet cafй, and I could do work there (I’m working on the road) but I feel kind of silly paying to get paid. It was cool there though as they had messenger with voice and video and I was able to have a conversation with my brother who is travelling around India. He could see my sister and me, but we couldn’t see him as he said the Indian computer devices (webcams, headsets) in that town were looking a little bit crappy in design and also looked worse for wear. It was heaps of fun making funny faces knowing that he would be seeing us. I think he’s getting lonely as he’s only 19 years old and has been away from home for over 7 months.

As you can see I’ve inherited beliefs about computer from both of my Dads. I find things more difficult than most, I believe, but I’m not going to give up doing my best to get the things done that I feel are necessary. Over time I hope to get over these little obstacles and hurdles and become proficient in all of the cool aspects of this new realm of human endeavour. I also have faith that the technicians and engineers are probably working hard to make things simple for the rest of us.

Whatever happens, I’m going to stick with it, and when I go to see my genetic father next I’m going to do my best to inspire him to buy a new computer with a Broadband connection. Then all I have to do is show him a few of the amazing things that this human created Internet tool can do. One of the aspects of the Web that affects me most profoundly is the simple fact that if you think of anything at all in the known Universe, you can then look it up on your search engine like Google and in the time it takes to blink your eye, immediately start to learn. It sure beats catching the train to the library, looking up a book in the card catalogue, searching for it, then finding out that someone else has borrowed it and is late bringing it back.

Trout grenobloise

Trout Grenobloise

Kosher Salt

White Pepper

10 ounce filets off whole rainbow or brook trout; skin on, scaled.

1 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp butter

Ѕ lemon, segmented, diced 1/8” (brunoise)

1 tbsp fresh lemon juice

Ѕ tbsp capers

1 ј tbsp minced parsley

Grenobloise is a classic French sauce, composed of capers, brown butter or “beurre noisette” and lemon. This recipe is for a classic dish – La Truite Grenobloise, or trout with sauce Grenobloise. I prefer to cook fish filets, generally, with the skin on. The skin, if properly cooked, will remain crispy while the flesh of the fish is soft and delicate. To get crispy skin, two things are important. One is to remove all excess water, and the other is to leave your fish filet cooking on the skin side until the skin is set and well caramelized.

First, with the back or dull side of your knife, gently scrape the skin in one direction to remove excess water – dry on a towel with each stroke.

Next, season each fillet on both sides with Salt and pepper, and allow to rest for 15 minutes.

Heat the olive oil in a large saute pan over medium high heat until just below smoking. Place each fillet skin side down in the oil and cook until golden brown. Do not move or lift the filet until the skin is crisped, or you risk losing the skin off the filet. Turn the fillets over and reduce heat to medium and continue cooking for just a minute or two, until cooked (I prefer medium rare fish). Remove fillets to a plate.

Turn flame to low. Remove pan and allow pan cool for a few seconds. Add butter to pan and return to low heat to cook until butter is browned – not black. You can tell if the butter is at the brown butter or “noisette” stage when it gives off a pleasant, nutty aroma. If it smells of raw flour, it is not yet at the noisette stage; if it smells burnt, toss it – you’ve got Beurre noire. Remove pan from heat and add lemon segment brunoise and juice. Return to low heat, stir in capers and parsley. Plate fish on mound of potatoes and spoon sauce on and around fish.