STRICTLY POSITIVE

Friday, October 16, 2015

STRICTLY POSITIVE

A few weird, wondrous, and wacky things that kept me afloat this week:

Exhibit A: The video tells the story. Robert Downey, Jr. (i.e., Tony Stark/Iron Man) delivers a bionic arm to a young boy with a birth defect.

Exhibit B: Baron the German Shepherd is a pretty damn good housekeeper. He does laundry, dishes, dusting, mopping, and general clean-up. I watched this and learned what a spoiled slacker I have let Bird become. A new regime is on the way!

Baron the GSD does all the housework!
Baron The German Shepherd is the BEST house keeper ever - he can do the laundry, the dishes, the dusting, the mopping... and even cleans up his own cookie crumbs!!This is some seriously amazing training! :)
Posted by K9 Instinct on Friday, May 15, 2015

Exhibit C: I recently discovered a new photographer who has changed my world. I've always loved lions (and am a sucker for black and white photography), and when I saw Laurent Baheux's work, I knew I had to have one of his spectacular pieces. You can see some of Laurent's work here or here. I've posted the image I bought below, along with a few others and a brief interview with Laurent. I also love Laurent because he works to help ban trophy hunting. This work just blows my socks off and warms the cockles of my heart all at the same time.

Exhibit D: Wacky local story. Suspected car thief ends up hanging from a third-story window threatening to kill himself. For three-plus hours, the cops try and talk him down without luck. Then reinforcements arrived — police discovered the man's family had shown up with his cat. Using his pet, hostage negotiators were able to persuade the man to surrender without incident within 45 minutes. “Using the cat was ingenious,” a police spokesman said. “Never underestimate the power of the love between people and their pets. I think it was great to think outside the box like the officers did. It made enough of an impact on this person to bring him down and come to his senses.” Here's a picture of the little life-saver.

Exhibit E: Women from a Los Angeles shelter get together each week to share stories, find community, and create pieces to sell in order to fund shelter programs. Text taken directly from this article: Each Wednesday evening, around 6:30 p.m., an unlikely group of artists congregate in the activity room downstairs at the Anne Douglas Center for Women, located in downtown LA. For an hour and a half, [they] sing along to Mariah Carey, swap tales from the weekend, compliment each other's work, and make things. More specifically, wire sculptures and multimedia masks, collages and self-portraits, worry dolls and letters to [their] future selves. [They] play telephone Pictionary and draw with closed eyes. Some projects come together with ease, others are more of a gamble -- turns out, mixing bubble formula and paint does not look that cool. However, regardless of the finished products, all cherish the roped-off time each week when there are no strict instructions, no right answers, no winners. And this is not to say the finished products aren't surprising, genuine and wildly beautiful -- which they most definitely are.

Exhibit F: Genevieve Piturro is an avid reader and wanted to focus her long-time volunteer work on literacy and kids. To that end, she began to spend her evenings reading to kids in homeless shelters, foster care facilities and organizations for abused, neglected and needy youth. She noticed that once the reading was done and the kids got into bed, they had nothing to change into. No pajamas. From there, Piturro's Pajama Program was born. In the five years since, she has arranged for 85,000 pairs of pajamas to be gifted to kids in need. If you're interested in learning more about the Pajama Program or how you can help, go to pajamaprogram.org.