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leam1983 · 4 years

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Cyberpunk 2077 Thoughts

Having perused Dark Horse Books’ The World of Cyberpunk 2077 over the past few days, I’ve gotten a better feel for the various basic hooks that structure V’s inception as a protagonist. The short of it is the Polish wizards are on the right path to nailing Pondsmith’s treatment the same way they nailed Sapkowski’s works.

Consider the following as half a brain dump, half a series of prospective spoilers, and also half projection, so either skip this, find some other entry to read, or come back to this come late November.

I know I mentioned three halves, but it’s late and I don’t give a shit.

I’m serious - DO NOT PRESS ON IF YOU’RE THE TYPE TO BLOW A GASKET IF YOU’RE INADVERTANTLY SPOILED.

The latest Night City Wire as of August exposed three incipient “life paths”, or starting branches of V’s path. I’ll tackle my personal narrative approaches to them in the order of my choosing.

Nomads: CP2077 is set in a world where much of what we understand to define a family has been blown up, tossed around by climate change and nuclear fire and then stitched back together using grit, resourcefulness and the last dying embers of human decency. Nomads are less a group of people defined by blood relations and more a cadre of individuals that share something more significant than mere genes. It might be a common history, a set of shared hardships, a yen for similar automotive and engineering-related projects - whatever it is, that something pulls people together in ways Corpo rats and street kids will never experience.

This seems to define even the average Nomad’s degree of education. Surprisingly, Nomads are the most well-read group in Coronado Bay’s greater area, some caravans reportedly including entire RVs packed with books. Nomads generationally elect teachers and record-keepers and seem to care for those cultural remnants of the old world, before Pondsmith’s paranoid alternate sixties kicked off more than a century’s worth of technological progression and rampant dehumanization. To a Night City native, a Nomad’s speech patterns appear precious and uselessly florid, while they might appear almost normal to us - maybe slightly touched by the fact that Grandpa Joe or whatever really wanted you to have your Greek classics down before you were old enough to repair your first CH00H2 carburetor on your own.

That new, mega-clustered version of family matters immensely to the Nomads. You identify to yours the same way Orcs in Shadow of War might refer to their clan, or the same way a Scottish clan might design specific visual cues identifying its members. In normal circumstances, Nomads live, thrive and die in service to the clan - and the opening segment for V’s Nomad origins suggests that something happened to his clan. They’re gone, or so the narration says, without going into further detail. Is V responsible? We don’t currently know. As it stands, however, he is a lone Nomad in a clan of one, and soon finds himself pushed out of the Californian wastes and into Night City’s neon-drenched streets.

Seeing this, I considered the narration as an admission of guilt on V’s part. He feels responsible, and hopes that grinding his way to success will in some way atone for what he’s done. Consequently, my Nomad V would be as gruff as could be, but as moral and upstanding as the setting allows. He considers himself as having been invested with an example to set, and would intend to set his sights on more than just filthy lucre. Honest filthy lucre is what matters to him, if that concept even is possible: he might deal in unsavory types and illicit activities, but he always does so with a certain moral rectitude - as a tough and gruff, lean and stringy type you can occasionally catch in his battered Thornton pick-up truck with his feet up on the dashboard and a dog-eared copy of Plato’s Republic in hand. Jackie honestly wonders how he can put up with that Greek pendejo’s endless words and the lack of scrolling animations, while V keeps his Kiroshi optics’ News ticker locked onto grassroots Leftist RSS feeds that stoke a bit of an ignored Rockerboy ethos in him. Quoting Marx in Night City might feel like trying to teach lab rats in the finer points of string theory, but it at least feels genuine to him, compared to the predigested sociopolitical pap Militech, Arasaka and their ilk are more than happy to spew on the airwaves.

There’s a lot to be pissed off about in Richard Night’s failed utopia, a lot of fat cats to gut and buildings to burn. Still, he leaves the glowering act and the churning rage to Johnny Silverhand’s imprinted ghost. Being more of a down-low, gun-toting choomba than a classic Street Samurai, Vincent “V” Carson thinks first and strikes second.

Vinnie isn’t much for electric guitars and anarchy in the UK, much less in the Free State of Southern California; but he does love the occasional Leonard Cohen ballad or the occasional shot of Johnny Cash’s melancholy. Having picked up something of a Northern Texas drawl while cruising, he might feel like Harry Dresden’s Good Ol’ Boy cousin, magic tricks here pushed aside in favor of a measure of dermal plating and a good ol’ fashioned twelve-gauge and revolver combo. Not being much of a techno-fetishist, he considers his optics and his skull jack as being begrudging concessions to an era that looks down on fully “ganic” types. Having grown up with TV serials and the occasional visor-based Braindance all depicting cyberpsychosis as something vile that utterly dehumanizes its sufferers, he’s naturally wary around anyone who seems a little too giddy with the prospect of taking a few scalpels to perfectly decent muscles and bones.

His Thornton is where most of his Eddies go, and yes, he’s named his truck Suzie. Suzie’s done right by him, and he’ll do right by her - unless someone else with a pretty smile and a working moral compass makes him swoon.

Street Kids: if you weren’t taught on the highways or in corporate arcologies, odds are you became a positive blip in an otherwise grim statistic, one of the myriad fucked-up kids raised by other fucked-up kids with more seniority than you. With no roads and paid-for nannies, you survived off of grifts, grit, violence, deceit, smarts and gumption - and that, in its own screwball way, creates its own blood ties. You’re wise by Heywood’s standards - streetwise, that is - and you speak the back-alleys’ lingua franca of threats, insinuation and casual intimidation like no other.

If only Jackie hadn’t fingered that Rayfield, huh? This beaut could’ve been paydirt! Well, at least for a week or so, judging by the fact that hundreds of car thefts are reported across Night City on a daily basis. At least, Dean - who also goes as “V” - got to make a new friend while out in the pokey, and managed to shake a few proverbial trees... They’ve got a short-lease in with Trauma Team’s frequency and could maybe hook themselves up with a sweet finder’s fee for anyone who’s on the verge of death at the hands of the city’s Scavengers...

Little does V know, that’s selling Trauma Team as well as their clients painfully short. Shows of gratitude don’t mean anything if you’re not packing the right social status. He barely remembers his birth parents as it is, and grew up the fifth grubby prospect of one of the Valentinos’ “school clubs” (hence the nickname) - where the points of study refer to the proper observances to be held in Jesus Malaverde’s presence, intensive Chicano and Spanish immersion, as well as the handling of common types of weaponry.

Vincent and Dean would be likely to shoot one another, if placed in the same room. One clings onto nearly-lost value systems, while the other commodifies what can be discarded like so much flesh - only inasmuch as his efforts to pacify his unofficial five or six abuelas force him to forego extensive modifications. His knives and wrist-mounted data port are his main tools of the trade, although Dean keeps his hacking creds along the bare minimum. Why bother, when melting an ATM’s ICE wall and whacking the cops with a baseball bat is all you need? There’s a type of gun for nearly anything else, if someone knows where to look...

Dean has no last name, and is consequently registered as “Dean Smith” in the city’s Census records. That doesn’t suggest, however, that he wouldn’t want to make one for himself. As he’s less focused on the city’s legends than on its kingmakers and pawn-movers, Dexter DeShawn strikes him as someone to emulate, watch and learn from - all with a decent degree of caution.

Being on top matters a little less to him than eventually pulling Heywood’s stings. With a little fear and a lot of persistence, Dean “V.” Smith knows that one day, he won’t go hungry on a weeknight. To that end, he’s certainly a hearty eater, here paired with extensive free-weight training regimens and the use of anabolic stimulants. Oh, sure, he’ll speak of family and blood like the best soldier festooned in Santa Muerte visual codices, but his friend Jackie’s got a mind like a slow and steady steel trap.

Either Dean blows his new fellow Street Samurai out of the pond, or he does. Unlike Jackie, however, Dean isn’t realistic about it. Friendships are a rare gift in Heywood, if not the rest of Night City, and Dean’s convinced that Jackie could conceivably look past his final betrayal.

Corpo: nowadays, we’re mostly familiar with the idea of one-percenters creating a bubble of affluence for themselves. Boarding schools, private villas, prebooked vacations across the globe’s priciest spots, access to the hottest trends on the minute of their inception - what this tends to forego is the level of social disconnect that’s required in order to stay relevant. We’re only just waking up to the consequences of letting an aging, crusty first-generation Yuppie be crowned the ruler of the free world, and even someone who’s behind on their Bret Easton Ellis could tell you that Donald J. Trump is a sociopath and a narcissist.

Take that mindset, and cultivate it into an ethos that’s taught to children from a very early age - children who live, eat, shit and breathe in accordance with their parent corporation’s tenets. The more placid, mid-tier lifers in the genre are called sararimen, in reference to William Gibson’s use of the term to designate low-level company workers in Chiba City. A bit like Shenzhen’s factory workers and execs, everything in a corpo’s life is in service to the corporation.

In Night City, as of 2077, two major players have installed this culture of total obedience in their roster. Their names are Militech and Arasaka. One is a juggernaut in the field of military-grade personal defence, the other has a wider grasp and reach, but is more fragile. Arasaka owes that fragility to the last fifty years having involved its re-establishment and reconstruction. Fifty years ago, Night City’s Corpo Plaza was blasted open by a thermonuclear discharge that sent the Japanese giant packing. The charges had been set by three Edgerunners: Rogue, Morgan Blackhand and Johnny Silverhand - accessorily a well-respected Rockerboy and front-line member of the band SAMURAI. Only Rogue survived that fateful night, or so the street lingo goes, having gone on to start a legitimate consultation business as well as a fruitful career in the hospitality business. Her bar, the Afterlife, is Night City’s hotspot for every techie, script kiddie and accomplished cyber-spelunker.

Our gal Vivian knows this. She knows this, because Vivian “V.” Banks lives two lives.

In one of them, she’s a lean and hungry Junior Executive in Arasaka’s Counter-Intel division. In that line of work, you either fuck someone’s prospects or protect your own, or ensure that no up-and-comer just out of the company’s Law School program manages to push you off the board. She knows full well that in centuries past, corpo-speak was made up of mild euphemisms that at best referred to destroying a rival’s prospects or lifelihood. Taking a life was something that required careful deliberation, especially when tossing a fat severance bonus into an aging CFO’s three-piece pockets and letting your erstwhile rival snort cocaine off of the rolling hips of Tahitian dancers was so much cheaper...

Nowadays, zeroing someone is commonplace.

You’re born for Arasaka, and chances are you’ll die for Arasaka just the same. Viv’s killed, lied, cheated and even stole her way to her position, remorse being this vaguely churning sense of coldness in her gut that keeps one-night stands coming in and out of her bedroom. She only remembers her parents as being credit-chip enablers and personal enhancement drug addicts, cutting ties with them so completely on the day of her official hiring that it felt more like a tacit understanding.

On most days, sex and booze keep the cold at bay. On most days, Vivian Banks is a class-act of a sociopath. The stronger she gets, however, and the more paranoid her targets become - which reinforces her own paranoia. Before long, playing the part of one of Arasaka’s several poisonous flowers won’t work anymore.

Unfortunately, she trusts no-one. No Fixer could put her in contact with any hacker she’d trust, no rando fresh off the street with a retro-tinted National Arms plinker would satisfy her. To climb up the ranks and maybe share tea with Old Man Saburo himself, she needs a spotless performance record. She needs skills.

More importantly, she needs a reputation. That means leaving Arasaka Tower and mingling with the experts in their own field - and it means filling out her back book of successful hits. The drinks at the Afterlife are decent enough, but what she’s after is an official in.

If she can get to Rogue, or maybe even hook up with a ripperdoc not bought and paid for by the company, she might be able to score both new skills and increased performance...

If it were as simple as slitting Janet’s throat in HR and diving her way to an orgiastic performance review quite innocently left on the department’s server, she would’ve done that already. Viv is my obvious Pure Stealth build candidate, my main-line hacker and would-be engineer with a thing for black power skirts and designer offensive augments.

With that said, we’re months ahead of schedule, all the good shit’s already come out, so we’re stuck playing the waiting game...

What are your own character or build ideas for Cyberpunk 2077?

#cyberpunk 2077 #spoilers #build ideas #characters #roleplaying

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growlighteco · 4 years

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How To Grow Weed: Beginner's Guide To Growing in 2020

Growing marijuana is a rewarding hobby and can offer a great business opportunity as well. By the time you're done with this guide, you'll know how to grow cannabis in a indoor grow tent like a professional, allowing you to get better and bigger yields than you've ever imagined at surprisingly low cost.

In order to thrive and grow, every cannabis plant needs:

Light – whether you’re using sunlight or grow lights, you must understand the light needs of a cannabis plant to get the best bud quality & yields.

Growing Medium – the stuff your plants grow in; soil isn’t your only choice!

Air – a well-ventilated space with good air exchange and a slight breeze is best.

Temperature – A good rule of thumb for cannabis plants is if it feels too hot for you, it’s probably too hot for your plants. Just like humans, cannabis plants can die if exposed to extreme temps.

Nutrients – you can buy pre-formulated nutrients that you just add to your water, or you can compost your own super soil so that it already includes all the nutrients you need.

Water – like all plants and living creatures, cannabis needs water to survive and grow. Is my tap water “good enough” for growing cannabis?

When growing cannabis indoors or outdoors, you will need to ensure that it gets the proper amount of these 6 resources.

Grow Lights for Maximum Growth

For inside cultivation, it’s crucial to make sure everything is done right to maximize the potential yield from each plant. One of the most important parts is the lighting for the plants. Since the plants are grown indoors, they don’t get the natural light they would receive outdoors. To grow properly, marijuana plants require at least eight hours of direct sunlight. More light can lead to bigger flowers at the end of the growth cycle.

Most beginners are going to opt for CFLs as they are the least expensive to get started. They’re easy to use and do work well for marijuana plants. LED lights are another option, though they are more expensive to purchase. Once they have been purchased, however, they do require less electricity compared to other types of lighting. The best lighting options for marijuana plants, however, are MPH or HPS grow lights. These are far more expensive, but they do provide the best lighting for cannabis plants.

As a beginner, however, it’s likely you’ll want to make everything as easy as possible and start with a less expensive setup. There’s always room to grow in the future. If you only have a few plants and are trying to keep costs to a minimum, CFL bulbs are likely the best LED grow light choice. They provide the right light for the plants, can are the least expensive option, and are easily available, so you don’t need to special order them.

Pruning For Higher Yield

When pruning, start early and often. Cut or pinch branches just above the node where two new shoots will emerge. If you stay on top of this process, you’ll have plants that look like bonsai bushes, with plenty of bud sites but not a lot of stretching out and big gaps between nodes. This is the efficient way to get bigger yields out of small spaces but your vegetating time will increase so factor that into your schedule.

Don’t prune or pinch plants at all once they’ve begun flowering – you’ll only be decreasing your harvest at that point. If the branches are threatening to reach the light, bend them or tie them down to keep them from burning. A trellis system constructed from chicken wire at canopy level (aka the ScrOG or Screen of Green system), will further spread out bud sites and increase your yields considerably. Simply train growing shoots to grow horizontally along the bottom of the screen to fill empty spots.

Flower Power

Indoors, The decision of when to induce flowering in your plants is entirely up to you. If you want to learn how to grow weed, it’s important to determine how much space you have and to factor in the fact that your plants will stretch for at least a few weeks after flowering is induced. I usually recommend one week per gallon of container, so a plant in a five-gallon bucket should get approximately five weeks of vegetative time.

When you’re ready to begin the flowering stage, switch your timer to a 12 hour on/12 hour off light cycle. Be sure never to interrupt the 12-hour dark period with any light. This confuses your plant and can cause serious problems.

Change your feeding regimen to one suited for flowering. Plant nutrients generally come in vegetative or flowering formulations so switch over to a “blooming” solution. Depending on the flowering time of your strain, determine when you have two weeks or so left and begin the flushing process. If you’re growing a 60-day flowering strain, start to flush your grow medium with only plain water around day 46.

Watering

Water your plant regularly with clean, safe and water. Certainly, using chlorine-free or filtered water leads to better results. Always avoid overwatering and watch for good drainage. How to know when to water a Cannabis plant? A good test might be to stick a finger down a few cms or an inch into the soil and if it’s dry, then you’ll know it is time to water.

Ventilation

Ventilation and airflow are key for Cannabis plants to thrive and grow healthy. In this stage, they need air not only to breathe and grow their bodies but also good ventilation to avoid the formation of mold, fungi, and rot. A good fan moving the air inside your growing environment helps a lot, but beware not to point it directly to the buds. An exhaust fan is great for increased ventilation and air movement, this also helps lowering humidity. If the exhaust fan is not enough, a dehumidifier is definitely the best and easiest solution for keeping humidity at range. Also a carbon filter for grow tent is essential.

pH levels

pH levels must remain between 6 and 7 when growing in soil. Most nutrients are available for the plant in the growing medium only between this range of pH. pH levels out of this range may cause your plant to experience nutrients deficiencies and toxicities because the nutrients may be in the soil but the plant cannot absorb them.

Harvesting, Drying and Curing

Knowing when and how to harvest your buds is as important as knowing how to grow weed.

Use a loupe or a strong magnifying scope to take a very close look at the trichomes; the tiny glandular stalk and head sometimes referred to as “crystals”. Up close, they resemble little glass mushrooms with a stem that forms a bulbous round clear top. Inside that gland head resides the psychoactive compounds (THC, CBD etc). Harvest when the majority of the gland heads begin to go cloudy white and before they’ve gone completely amber. Harvest when they’re mostly amber if you desire a more lethargic stone.

Post-harvest, you will trim and hang up your buds to dry. This process should take about a week or two depending on the humidity and heat in your area. It’s always best to keep this process slower than 3-4 days in order to ensure you aren’t locking in that “green” chlorophyll taste. Add a humidifier to your drying room if you think your nuggets are drying out too quickly. Never leave a fan blowing directly onto your drying colas but make sure air is circulating to avoid mold and bud-rot.

After you’ve determined that your buds are sufficiently dried you’re ready to jar them up for the cure. The stems should snap instead of bending and the outside of the flowers should feel bone dry to the touch. The truth is there is still plenty of water stuck in the bud and the curing process will slowly “sweat” out the remaining liquid.

Always use opaque jars (ones you can’t see inside) and place them in a cool dark place. Open up the jars to determine the level of moisture and leave them open if there’s any condensation forming on the inside of the glass. Slowly but surely, if you open and close the jars once or twice a day, the moist air will be replenished by dry air and the water that’s stuck in the middle of your bud will work its way to the outside and then out into the air altogether. After three weeks to a month or so curing, your buds should burn and taste perfectly.

Methods for curing

Sure, there are fast ways to cure your buds like using a microwave, but save the microwave for your popcorn as this method using irradiated heat can reduce the quality and potency of the smoke.

The decarboxylation process that turns THCA into THC is what will be taking place as you dry and cure your crop.

My preferred method of drying crops is air drying. I like to hang my buds upside down with a fan in the room circulating the air until they are ready to be cured. Make sure you don’t let them get too dry; you want them to be moist enough to be flexible but still dry so they don’t get moldy.

The next step requires some patience, but you will be rewarded with flavorful tastes and gratifying aromas. The slow cure takes a few weeks. Get out your mason jars and fill it to the top without stuffing it. Put the jars in a dark place that doesn’t get too hot. Every week shake the jars to get the buds moving around and open the jars for half an hour or so. Try your buds at different stages to find out what you like.

Curing your crop is worth the time and effort as your bud will reward you by its taste and potency.

Storage of seeds

Storing marijuana seeds shouldn’t be a difficult subject matter, yet every toking Tom will tell you their method is the best only to come out with half your seeds ending up unusable. Often times storage methods are not considered serious enough. Yet, when you spend enough dough on your favorite strains, you don’t want any of them ending up barren due to a silly mistake that you’ve made.

Now, I know many of you have never explored using your green thumb to plant anything until you’ve considered growing your own diggity dank nugs, but let’s take it back to 3rd-grade science. We all know that in order for a seed to germinate it needs a few vital things. Like the saying goes “April showers bring May flowers.” It needs moisture, light, and warm temperatures. So, if you want to keep your seeds from germinating avoid all those things. Sounds simple enough, right?

How to store your seeds?

So to break it down, you’re going to need an airtight container like a film canister for example.

Then, put a few silica gel beads or rice grains in your container to soak up any accidental moisture. The humidity should be no more than 10%. Put your seeds in a tiny envelope, bag, or ideally vacuum packed and then put it in your airtight container. Make sure to label what’s inside each container with a date on it as well. You don’t want to take your seeds out unless you have to; temperature changes and exposure to light isn’t good for viability in the long run. Now you’re ready to put your babies away for planting next year. Avoid putting them in the fridge door where the temperature tends to vary, better in a back corner somewhere.

I understand that sometimes you live with other people and you don’t want them to get their grubby little fingers on your seeds. If you don’t want to have a mysterious canister in the back of your fridge labeled “Nothing in this cannister is worth dying for” then you can take a riskier option and store your seeds in a closet, under your bed, someplace dark and protected. However, these places may be more susceptible to temperature change and the #1 enemy of seed storage: humidity. In this case, you must be adamant when it comes to moisture control.

Store your cannabis seeds properly and you can sleep well at night knowing that next year and maybe a few years after the next you can still enjoy growing your most beloved strain of seeds.

Final thoughts

This guide is meant for any cannabis enthusiast who would love to grow cannabis indoors and experience the thrill. While there are chances of mistakes, but that’s normal as you gain experience, you’ll be more than happy for growing, harvesting, and finally using self-grown cannabis. What's more, if you are a beginner, ECO Farm marijuana grow kit is best recommended for you.

We hope this beginner’s guide on how to grow marijuana indoors was able to help you, and we expect this will lead you to the productive and fun cannabis growing journey.

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gabriellakirtonblog · 4 years

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How Five Coaches Grew Their Online Business in Difficult Times

The coronavirus hit the fitness industry especially hard.

Gyms closed with little to no warning, leaving trainers scrambling.

But not every coach was devastated. Some earned more money and expanded their businesses.

The following five case studies show you how they did it.

Read them to learn how you too can build a resilient online fitness business that not only survives tough times, but actually thrives.

How to Make Money as an Online Trainer

Case study #1: How a scientist and single mom escaped a toxic work environment to become a successful hybrid coach

Case study #2: How a part-time nutrition coach went from charging $95 a month to $1,500 for three months, and adds a new client every week

Case study #3: How an engineer found meaning in his work as a part-time coach and trained 300-plus clients in 16 countries

Case study #4: How Nelao helps trauma survivors with their fitness through online coaching

Case study #5: How a gym owner increased his income after the pandemic forced him to close his facility

Case study #1: Leanne Salisbury

How a scientist and single mom escaped a toxic work environment to become a successful hybrid coach

It was a slow day at the lab, and Leanne Salisbury asked her boss if she could use an hour of paid time off to take her teenage son to a meeting to help plan his college education.

She thought it was a reasonable request, and was surprised when he said no.

He told her to use the time to defrost the biomedical lab’s freezer, where they kept the ice used to cut the human tissues they tested for cancer and other diseases.

That afternoon she got a call from her son’s school, demanding that she pick him up because he’d been suspended for acting out.

“I broke,” she recalled in an Instagram post. “I told the boss he could kiss my ass, in front of the entire room. I left and had a complete breakdown in my car.”

Because she worked for the National Health Service in Liverpool, England, she wasn’t immediately fired, as she would have been in just about any private-sector job. (“At the NHS, you have to kill about 10 people to get fired,” she jokes.) They let her transfer to another department.

But she knew her life had to change. As she wrote on Instagram, “This was the moment I knew I had to create my own job, live my own life, and stop being everyone else’s puppet.”

From scientist to personal trainer

Fitness was an unlikely career choice for Salisbury. She didn’t even own a pair of sneakers until she was 27.

But then she got a wake-up call.

“One of my friends in the laboratory died of cervical cancer,” she says. “It really made me assess a lot about my life.”

She started running, figuring that “it shouldn’t be too hard to run for 30 minutes without stopping.”

It was. She nearly threw up at the end of a charity 5k run. But the experience made an impression. “That’s one of the first times I saw you can push through,” she says.

In 2013, the year she told her boss to kiss her ass, she got a personal training certification and began coaching clients part-time—first in their homes, then in a studio where she rented space by the hour, and then in a commercial gym, an environment she says she “absolutely hated.”

She left her day job in 2015 with only three months of severance. It was make it or break it time.

Building her client base was “a huge rollercoaster,” she remembers. She’d spend months growing her clientele, then switch venues and have to build it back up again.

Finally, she hit on a solution. Two of them actually:

She opened a fitness studio about 20 minutes from her home.

She turned her son’s bedroom (he had recently moved out) into a workout space for coaching online clients.

The online coaching breakthrough

Salisbury enrolled in the Online Trainer Academy Level 1 Certification course in 2018. She’d been a member of the Online Trainers Unite Facebook group for a while, but resisted making the leap to OTA.

OTA reminds her not to get distracted by shiny objects, she says. “I go back to it all the time. When I feel myself going off on a tangent, I’ll book a call with the coaches.”

Salisbury’s Instagram feed is a masterful example of connecting with clients and prospects by mixing deeply personal admissions of her past struggles with upbeat stories about her current life and work.

One consistent message: Your life doesn’t have to suck. You can choose to make it better.

“I’m not perfect,” she wrote in one post, “but I’m healthier, happier, have more friends, have more fun. … I get to help people all over the world with their food, training and mindset. And I’m really good at it, because I’m sharing the tools that helped me, not just what I listened to in a podcast. I’ve been in that place where it’s all just far too much, you know?”

Case study #2: Jim Gazzale

How a part-time nutrition coach went from charging $95 a month to $1,500 for three months, and adds a new client every week

From the outside, Jim Gazzale appeared to be a successful online trainer.

His Facebook description of his business—“I help moms over 40 lose up to 20 pounds in 12 weeks by drinking wine and eating whatever they want”—seems irresistible. His website shows a suite of services encompassing strength, endurance, nutrition, and lifestyle coaching.

What you couldn’t see was a struggling part-time nutrition coach who made so little profit from coaching that he wasn’t sure if he could afford to continue.

His day job was safe and steady. But it wasn’t enough to support his young and growing family.

If he couldn’t generate more income from coaching, he’d have to find another part-time job.

But instead of giving up, he doubled down, stretching his finances to the limit to learn a more profitable system to train clients.

The evolution of an unlikely nutrition coach

Gazzale and his wife, Karen, are broadcast journalists.

As an on-air talent, Karen had plenty of incentive to stay in shape. But Jim had never found a fitness or diet regimen he could stick with. “I knew I was overweight,” he says. “I would follow her to a workout here or there. But I hated it.”

He found his motivation in 2015, when they joined a gym with the goal of getting in shape for their wedding. And he stayed with the program after the wedding, even though the results were disappointing.

That all changed in early 2016, when they hired the owner of the gym to be their nutrition coach.

“I followed it to the letter and got absolutely shredded,” he says. “That opened my mind to what’s possible. I was strong, I was confident, I was fearless. It was really a life-changing thing.”

It was so life-changing that he and Karen decided to help other people change their own lives. They get certified through Precision Nutrition, set up a website, and waited for clients to find them.

They quickly realized it takes a lot more than the desire to help people. It only works when you combine your knowledge and good intentions with marketing and business development.

Finding an online training model that works

Thinking “how hard could this online coaching thing be?” (sound familiar?), they spent that year “trying to build the business flying by the seat of our pants,” Gazzale recalls. “We took our lumps early on trying to figure the whole thing out.”

They had what looked like a breakthrough in 2018, when they helped a woman with a big Instagram following lose weight. Her story brought in 30 clients virtually overnight.

“But I didn’t have a way to service them,” Gazzale says. “After a few weeks, they all kind of dropped off.”

That’s when he started looking at the Online Trainer Academy.

“We were living paycheck to paycheck, sometimes even operating in the red,” he says.

“I knew I had to get a part-time job. Why would I want to spend my time doing something I didn’t enjoy? That’s where the impetus to make this a profitable business took shape.”

Gazzale saved his pennies, and enrolled in OTA, and never looked back.

Balancing a family, a full-time job, and part-time nutrition coaching gig required structure that Gazzale couldn’t build on his own. He leaned into OTA for help and hasn’t looked back.

“Having a structure in place was the biggest thing I got from OTA,” he says. “Some months were better than others, but I was confident it could grow over time, rather than fizzling out like that influx we saw in 2018.”

It was working, but not as well as it could have.

The problem, he says, is that the business “was structured to always be a side hustle.” Each of his clients paid about $95 a month for a la carte services, which meant each of them required more or less the same amount of attention.

He needed a way to scale it up so he could coach more clients in the same amount of time. To do that, he decided to once again stretch his finances to the breaking point.

How a high-ticket coaching program pays off

Gazzale was one of the first coaches to be accepted into the Online Trainer Academy Level 2. He had to spread the enrollment fee over three different credit cards and bank accounts.

Level 2 teaches coaches how to create, market, and operate a premium coaching service. It’s for online coaches who already have a strong foundation, either from OTA Level 1 or somewhere else. His clients now pay $1,500 for the 12-week program, and he’s been adding four to five new ones a month.

He’s also learned to follow the same advice he gives his clients. Be patient. Be consistent.

“I have to remind myself to replay the conversations I have with clients and apply them to myself,” he says. “It’s why I’ve had a good run of success lately.”

Case study #3: Gil Mesina

How an engineer found meaning in his work as a part-time coach and trained 340-plus clients in 19 countries

Gil Mesina is an electrical engineer, a job he’s been doing for 20 years and counting.

It’s the kind of steady, high-paying gig a lot of people fantasize about, especially if they happen to be math nerds with boatloads of student debt.

“It’s a great job, with great people,” he says.

But …?

“Fitness is my true passion.”

It just took him a while to figure out how to act on it.

From dancer to online trainer

Mesina met his future wife through bachata, a Dominican dance style, where they competed internationally. His passion for fitness emerged when he got in peak shape for their final contest.

By then he was on the cusp of 40 years old, and the grind of training for competition had taken the fun out of dancing. But he’d found a new calling.

“Dancers started coming up to me and asking me to help them,” he says.

In early 2016, he trained four male friends from the dance world—all online, all for free. (To this day he’s never trained anyone in person.)

“One of the guys said, you should try it with females,” he remembers. The four women he recruited helped him launch a thriving online training business.

Mesina’s first four clients. (His wife is in the middle.) After showcasing their results, Mesina says, “a lot of people started reaching out.”

He began running groups for 10 to 15 clients, and their results led to even more referrals.

Now that it was a business, he looked for ways to run it more efficiently. John Berardi, cofounder of Precision Nutrition, told him about Jonathan Goodman and the Online Trainer Academy.

“What I saw from Jon and his tribe is no-nonsense,” he says. “There’s a trust factor because I never felt Jon was there to sell to me. He never said ‘buy, buy, buy.’”

Mesina launches four 12-week group challenges each year, using the same basic program each time. After averaging 20 clients per group, recent challenges have brought in about 30.

His marketing is mainly word of mouth, much of it generated when he shares his clients’ before-and-after photos and testimonials on Facebook. “Just do a damned good job, and make sure everybody knows about it,” he says, quoting one of Goodman’s favorite exhortations.

Until recently, he’d never considered training clients who want to continue beyond the 12-week challenge, even though the demand was there. “My philosophy was, after 12 weeks, you’re done with me. You’re good to go.”

Soon after COVID-19 hit, the OTA coaches convinced him to add a “legacy” group.

Training those clients along with his challenge groups would seem to be a full-time job, but Mesina still manages to run it in his spare time.

“A lot of it is already automated, so it doesn’t take as much time as people think,” he explains. As for the legacy clients, “They don’t need as much hand-holding because they know how it works in terms of accountability.”

That said, he is considering his exit strategy from his original career. “It’s something I’m working toward,” he says.

“The engineering job is still really good. But fitness is my passion.”

Case study #4: Nelao Nengola

How Nelao helps trauma survivors with their fitness through online coaching

“I didn’t ask to be in this stupid-ass survivors club,” Nelao Nengola once said in a powerful video. “I didn’t sign up for lifelong depression.”

What she survived is a sexual assault when she was a high school student in Namibia.

Until recently, she wasn’t sure how to address the attack that so profoundly changed her life. She first shared her story a few years ago, but stopped when she realized she wasn’t ready.

“I used to think you heal by telling,” she says. “But I realized not everyone deserves to hear your story.”

Nengola decided to start sharing it again when she discovered an audience who deserved to hear it: assault survivors interested in fitness.

It made perfect sense.

Like many survivors, she rapidly gained weight following the assault, part of a downward spiral both caused by and feeding depression.

Running, Pilates, and eventually strength training helped her regain some control over her body and emotions. She got certified as a personal trainer shortly after.

Building a career beyond borders

Namibia is a big country with a small population.

The challenges, though, go far beyond population. Sub-Saharan Africa has the world’s most extreme income inequality. That means every fitness pro competes for the small handful of people who can afford to pay for personal training.

Nengola started out in a franchise gym in Windhoek, the capital, but left that job after three months to open her own training studio.

“It was awful,” she says. “I was training from 5 in the morning until almost 10 in the evening sometimes. I loved what I did, but I had no energy for anything else at all.”

By the time she closed the studio, after two and a half years, she was deep in debt and looking for a way to survive as a personal trainer. For a while she ran group fitness classes in a gym owned by a prominent local businessman. But the early morning hours “reminded me of all the things I hated about training.”

Online training was the obvious answer. She signed up for the Online Trainer Academy within a week of finding it. “It seemed to be exactly what I was looking for,” she says.

Nengola in her home, where she now runs her online business—filming workouts, coaching clients, and creating content.

That’s when she realized there was a natural audience for her message, if she was willing to start sharing again.

“When I asked myself who I’m best suited to serve, and what would be in line with my purpose, it was trauma survivors,” she says. “Fitness is what pulled me out of my dark place. Why shouldn’t I teach other women that they can do this as well?”

She currently has online clients on three different continents—North America, Europe, and Africa—and no longer trains anyone in person.

“The way I see trainers here grinding, I could never go back to that,” she says.

Case study #5: Jesus Acuna

How a gym owner increased his income after the pandemic forced him to close his facility

Timing is a mysterious thing.

If you try to do the perfect thing at the perfect time, odds are you’ll fail. The only way to ensure success is to put things in place before cataclysmic events happen so when they do, you’re prepared.

Perhaps this is why Jesus Acuna, owner of Resilient Fitness in Tucson, Arizona, has the most appropriate gym name in history.

On March 13, he got the call to shut down his gym because of the pandemic.

“That was a punch in the gut,” he says. “They gave us maybe eight hours’ notice. I didn’t sleep that night.”

But when he got up the next morning, he realized it might actually be a blessing in disguise.

An injury, weight gain, and busting his butt in the gym

Acuna started lifting as a high school football player in Tucson. “The technique was crap,” he acknowledges. “But the idea was, if you bust your ass in the gym, you’ll beat the other guys.”

A shoulder injury and corresponding recovery caused him to gain 40 pounds. And he continued packing it on after he returned to the weight room.

By his senior year of college, he estimates he weighed 300 pounds—more than 100 pounds above his pre-surgery weight.

That led to his lowest moment. While training a group of young athletes, one of them said, “Hey, I bet your fat ass can’t do this. Why are you making us do it?”

He lost 20 pounds the next month, on his way to losing all the weight he’d gained.

The next 10 years were the typical grind—five years as an independent trainer, followed by five at a powerlifting gym, which he eventually managed.

In July 2019 he opened his own studio gym with two clear goals:

“I had to be able to make the money I wanted to make.”

“I had to do it on my own time.”

And for the first seven months, it worked exactly as he planned. He got to the gym at 9 a.m., went home at 7 p.m., and made $7,500 a month “working as much as I allowed myself to.”

The only problem was, his business was already maxed out, and didn’t know how to ramp up.

When preparation meets opportunity

At a fitness event in 2011, someone recommended Ignite the Fire, Jonathan Goodman’s first book. Acuna read it, started following the PTDC, enrolled in 1K Extra (the precursor to the Online Trainer Academy), and eventually became a Certified Online Trainer.

But online training was still a small part of his business in January 2020. His gym was going well and, like so many of us, he had no idea what was about to happen.

When he got the pandemic shutdown announcement and suffered through that sleepless night, he saw the solution right there on his computer screen. Why couldn’t he offer his group workouts on Zoom?

He contacted his gym members and told them the new plan. “Maybe four or five clients said, ‘Hey, we’re going to stop,’” Acuna says. But the rest of them thanked him for setting up the online system and not leaving them to figure it out for themselves.

In March, 2020, when the first shutdown happened, he made $10,000 online. (The most he had ever made with his studio before the pandemic was $8,000 a month.)

His income rose to $11,000 in April and to $12,000 in August. Through all the twists and turns, with his gym reopening and then closing again, his revenue has remained higher than it was before the pandemic upended his business.

More important, he found a workable model that allowed him to grow his business without canceling his life.

It worked because he was prepared (even if he didn’t quite realize it at the time), and the result is more profit without sacrificing any time with his family.

The Acuna family repping the Resilient Fitness brand.

But there’s one more twist to the story.

On June 27—Father’s Day—Acuna noticed he was struggling to breathe.

He assumed it was because of a wildfire in the local mountains.

When he woke up the next morning, the breathing difficulty was accompanied by a migraine and aching joints. “I felt like I was hit by a truck,” he says. A test confirmed that he had COVID-19.

He was flat on his back for the first three days, and mostly out of commission that first week.

He started taking walks the second week, and thought he was healthy enough to train the third week. The headaches convinced him to wait another week. “I started lifting heavy again, and felt fine,” he says.

His three weeks of illness and recovery are a wakeup call to all the fitness pros who believe young, fit, healthy people are somehow immune.

“People reached out and said, ‘You’re the healthiest guy we know!’” Acuna recalls. If he could get this illness, anyone can.

But he knows it could’ve been worse.

“When I was 300 pounds, I used an inhaler daily,” he says. “I had asthma. Getting COVID in that condition would’ve ruined me. I have no doubt about it.”

Acuna didn’t know that he’d contract a potentially deadly disease when he lost all that weight. But the fact he prepared his body may have saved his life, just as his OTA certification prepared his business for a potentially catastrophic closure.

It’s a double endorsement for the value of preparation meeting opportunity. And it illustrates how smart it was to call his gym Resilient Fitness.

If You’re an Online Trainer, or Want to Be …

You can’t move forward in your career until you learn how to coach fitness and nutrition online responsibly, effectively, efficiently, and confidently.

If you’d like to get ahead, and stay ahead, consider enrolling in the Online Trainer Academy Level 1 Certification.

If you’re already training clients online, making more than $1,000 a month, and looking for a more scalable business model, you may be a better fit for the Online Trainer Academy Level 2.

The post How Five Coaches Grew Their Online Business in Difficult Times appeared first on The PTDC.

How Five Coaches Grew Their Online Business in Difficult Times published first on https://onezeroonesarms.tumblr.com/

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chuicide · 7 years

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Gentle Alpacas Want Companionship To Thrive

It’s a candy sound, but it displays many feelings, equivalent to being content material, cautious or fearful. Sophia, who usually provides tours of her family’s farm, is often asked whether alpacas spit. Only when they're burdened, after which usually they spit at one another,” she said. She advises guests to “stand quietly and let the animals come to you,” cautioning that “they don’t like having their heads touched. You can’t have just one alpaca,” mentioned Brandon Tenney, 16, who helps his family raise alpacas in Catlett, Virginia. There’s a leader in each pasture,” Brandon said. Alpacas are very curious, so when one thing new comes close to, the whole bunch will comply with the leader, typically operating together to get a better view, whether or not it’s of an individual or one other animal. Brandon, a highschool junior, and his sister Danielle, 20, have been serving to elevate their family’s alpacas for 11 years. The day begins at 5:30 a.m., with chores together with feeding the fifty one alpacas and cleaning their stalls. Danielle jokes that she schedules faculty courses around alpaca feeding times. She is finding out to be a large-animal veterinarian - one who cares for horses, cows, llamas, alpacas, sheep, and so on. She particularly loves newborn alpacas. Brandon is tuned in to every alpaca’s character. They’re all totally different,” he said, noting that alpacas show emotions much like people do. Around dusk, his household loves watching the alpacas have interaction in pronking - a playful, bouncing run signifying a contented feeling.

Plus, you'll be able to earn so much from the produce that you may get from them. Especially the fresh eggs must you consider to promote them. Here are a few of the issues you may want to think about. Publisher: John Most women and men think that raising chickens is all concerning getting serious. Even supposing raising chickens might want a sprint of labor in addition to commitment, its advantages are absolutely something which is price trying ahead to. Publisher: Stan Simmons Once you increase older chickens, they don't need you to take care of them as a lot as you do with youthful chickens. That's when you actually need to be involved. Read this text on some tips on how you can take care of younger chickens. Raising Chickens? Chicken Coop Plans Made Simple! Publisher: Steven B Your flock will get pleasure from all of the desk scraps you may give them, that is of course much less the bones and citrus peels. Chickens will not be very fussy and will devour absolutely anything out of your kitchen desk. One thing that may come as a bit of a surprise is they like fish and meat. But if you should complement their eating regimen as nicely you may consider growing their meals or purchasing other goodies for them. Writer: Stan Simmons Whereas chickens can endure the seasons, you want to make it possible for they don't endure for a very long time. This article discusses what you can do during these occasions. Publisher: John A number of people assume that elevating chickens doesn't involve that a lot power and energy. What they do not notice is the fact that chickens additionally need a few quantity of care for them to survive and reside skillfully. Grass Fed vs. Grain Fed: What’s the Distinction? Lease Paperwork in your Cafe: Look Them Over Rigorously! Cooking Suggestions for Grass-Fed Beef three. Why Sesame Seeds Are Thought-about World’s Healthiest Food?

To totally experience the happiness of this Halloween season, these videos are prepared for you. Have you concentrate on your menus this coming week? To achieve some ideas in cooking your favourite foods, watch the full videos now! Breadsticks preparation: Heat oven to 375? F. Spray cookie sheet with cooking spray. Unroll dough; separate at perforations and reduce into 12 to sixteen smaller breadsticks. Roll every until 8 to 12 inches long. Cut the tip of each bread stick( a couple of two inch incision) and roll every separate ends of the breadstick; place on cookie sheet (don't twist). Brush breadsticks with egg white. Sprinkle with cheese and basil. Bake 12 to 14 minutes or till golden brown. Fondue preparation: Combine milk, garlic clove, and cream cheese in a saucepan over low heat. Stir till the cheese is melted. Add the parmesan cheese and stir till heated through. Remove the garlic clove. We actually hadn't supposed on taking a look at alpacas let alone shopping for one! However, we stayed for a couple of days with Bob and Diane Hey in Tasmania and fell in love with a younger brown male that that they had, Van Diemen Qjori. A deal was struck and the strategy of getting him here started. After a month or so in quarantine at EPC, Qjori was flown to New Zealand to a quarantine station at Valley of Peace Alpaca Stud just outside Christchurch where he started an extra 6 months quarantine. There he has been appeared after by Greg and Rachael Graham. On arrival he was shorn of every ounce of fibre, high knot, legs, the whole lot gone. I acquired an e-mail this morning from Greg letting us know that each one was going properly and that Qjori can be leaving for the UK on the 23rd of August. Slightly bit later than we had hoped but what can you do?

The rapid reproductive fee of emus also made it tough to keep up with bills and wanted tools. In distinction, alpacas give birth to just one child a year. So alpaca herds develop slowly, yet the demand for alpaca fiber in the style industry stays high and is even rising. New U.S alpaca ranches are rising by about 30% per year, with the common begin-up ranch purchasing a start-up herd of 2 to 5 animals. Demand for alpacas significantly exceeds supply. Based mostly on the gradual, but regular development price of the general U.S. In addition to the run-away emu progress rate, emus and emu eggs were still being imported into the U.S., which flooded the market. This was a horrible scenario for emu farmers, who had no technique to promote the meat, and no new emu farms to promote reside birds and eggs. Many emu farmers quit the enterprise and turned their birds free into the woods. Then you will know what your chicks have been fed. As long as they're raised from healthy inventory and are fed accurately, there isn't any must feed your chicks antibiotics. Before you run out and get roosters, you have to test your local laws to see if they really allow you to maintain roosters as a part of your backyard hen flock. This is because some states don't enable this maybe as a consequence of the truth that roosters can often make plenty of noise as in comparison with the hens. Roosters don't just crow within the morning! They tend to crow at common intervals throughout the day which I find charming but your neighbors may not. If you try to boost your own chicks, you might be in all probability going to search out that almost all meat birds are not very broody. Which means you'll have to tug the eggs you wish to hatch and put them in a brooder to hatch them.

Something new every day should be a very good factor. I have to consider this and embrace my new discovered information every day. Or a brand new learning expertise which is what I now call these 'episodes'. So at ten o'clock I braved the rain again to test on the girls. Penny politely pooped in front of me then hurled herself to the floor and rolled, and it wasn't in a 'have a look at me I am having enjoyable' sort of means. No it was in a 'Hold on a minute me old china one thing isn't fairly right here and it's inflicting me some discomfort' type of approach. Penny has been baking a Qjori cria for 340 days. I observed, I've achieved a lot of that lately. She rolled once more. I returned home and conferred with Mrs S. We then both observed. Time to research we both agreed. If we had to select one feminine alpaca who we didn't need to should study internally it can be Patou Penelope. Penny was born into the 'Hair-set off spit monster family' and after learning her household's behaviour she decided that she should and will take it up a level.

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#alpacas #alpacas eating apples #alpacas fighting #alpacas funny #alpacas humming #alpacas mating #alpacas running #alpacas screaming #alpacas spitting #alpacas spitting on people #alpacas stuffed animal #alpacas t shirt #alpacas with hats #alpacas world #animals #chickens #finland #llamas #videos

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themomsandthecity · 7 years

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How 1 Mom's "Obsession" to Exclusively Breastfeed Almost Killed Her Baby

Breast is best . . . until your baby nearly starves to death. That's the message one mom sent with a candid Reddit post about her struggles with breastfeeding her newborn son, now 15 weeks old. "I have put literal blood, sweat, and tears into breastfeeding with low supply," she wrote. "Only I didn't realize I had low supply. My kid would have died without formula, it was that bad. He was in the [hospital's Special Care Baby Unit] until almost 2 weeks old due to accidental starvation because I had no idea my baby was starving." The first-time parent explains how no one stepped in to intervene, not even nurses who could have easily detected the early warning signs. "The nurses would come in and ask me if he was having wet diapers and I'd rub my finger in it and think 'that kinda feels almost wet?'" she wrote. "It wasn't until he was admitted to the SCBU and we started supplementing formula that I realized what a real wet diaper looked and felt like. And I cried and cried and cried because I realized how hungry my poor baby had been since he was born." Even her supposed friend came down hard on her for questioning breastfeeding. "My baby was nursing almost every second of every hour of every day until he fell asleep too exhausted to nurse anymore. I didn't think this was normal, I was stressed and harassed by my lactivist 'friend' who told me this was normal for a breastfed baby and I needed to tough it out. Well, that shit nearly killed my baby. I heard the usual chime of 'cluster feeding' again and again. . . . I was made by my friend to feel like I just wanted an excuse to use formula and that I just couldn't handle what real breastfeeding mums go through." Related Mom's Message About Her Baby's Death: "If I Had Given Him Just 1 Bottle, He'd Still Be Alive" When she finally introduced formula, doctors encouraged her to maintain a strict regimen of breastfeeding attempts followed by formula and around-the-clock pumping. They'd say the same pseudo-encouraging things like "the baby can remove more milk from the breast than a pump can" and how it's all about "supply and demand!" But she knew it wasn't helping. Despite these red flags, the nurses encouraged me to try to exclusively breastfeed my baby again. And I agreed because I presumed it must be safe because they said to do it. His latch was incredibly painful. He had a slight tongue tie that was deemed non restrictive yet was remedied anyway and made no difference to his feeding. My nipples bled, baby screamed constantly and I was told it was normal. I still pumped around the clock to "encourage my milk supply." Yup. Worst mother ever over here. I still didn't realize then that my baby and I were let down by people who should have realized there was a low-supply issue going on. Eventually I stopped pumping. I was done wasting my hours hooked up to a pump watching other people cuddle and parent my baby while I was tangled up in pumps and tubes and bottles for 5 ounces per day. I had accepted not defeat, but that I was making myself unwell with the stress and lack of sleep and for what? Baby was happy with formula. Baby was healthy with formula! Now he's 15 weeks old and every single one of his feeds is formula, because that's what he needs to survive and my body just can't give him what he needs to thrive. But we still nurse all throughout the day! It's wonderful. We enjoy our booby cuddles and when he cries it soothes him and he drifts off to sleep. He's not getting ANY milk beyond a dribble now. I wish I'd done better by my son by giving him formula feeds sooner instead of letting him suffer and go hungry for MY obsession to have him exclusively breastfeed. This mom is still proud of their breastfeeding relationship, and that they continued to "dry nurse" safely, even when it's not about ounces anymore. And her son, who had been readmitted to the hospital for dropping 11-percent of birth weight in those first weeks, is faring much better these days. "HE IS HUMUNGOUS. He's 94th percentile!" http://bit.ly/2qSZh5A

#Health and Safety #Parenting News #Breastfeeding

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viralleakszone-blog · 7 years

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Air Plant Care 101

http://www.viralleakszone.com/air-plant-care-101/

Air Plant Care 101

air plants, tillandsia

Interest in air plants is sky-high right now. After all, who can resist their velvet-ribbon foliage? Their delicate neon blooms? Or the astounding fact that they don’t need soil to grow — and can be placed in clever little nooks like living sculptures? We at The Horticult certainly can’t resist them.

But air plants (also known as tillies, or tillandsias, after their genus name) can be tricky to keep alive. Well-intentioned lovers of these plants might mistake “no soil” for “no water,” which isn’t the case. “Air plant” does not mean “breatharian of the plant world.” As epiphytes, tillandsias grow innocuously on larger structures like trees, and pull hydration and nutrients from the air, rain and debris. Tillandsias absorb their essentials through their foliage (not through their roots, which are there instead for leverage), so they need to be watered regularly. They also have specific needs when it comes to circulation, light, and maintenance. Read on for these tips on keeping your tillies in tip-top shape… Step 1: Before You Buy, Find Good Light and Circulation for Your Air Plants You know those glass orbs often sold alongside tillandsias? They’re hip, but not necessarily healthy. Tillies need airflow and bright light to thrive. So find a spot — whether indoors or outdoors — that gets circulation, as well as bright but indirect light.

When we grow them inside, we always place them near a window. (When entertaining, sometimes we move them temporarily to a more stylish spot.) We’ve had the best luck when we grow them outdoors, under a tree or eave so that they do not get direct midday sunlight and receive excellent air circulation. Step 2: Get Your Tillandsias Acquire your air plants from a trusted source. That could be a local nursery, home furnishings store (where the plants are stored near a light source), or online. We’ve had great luck with highly rated online sources that sell directly from their greenhouses, at discount/wholesale prices. Get a variety! Try different types, and see what you like and what you can keep alive in your space and your lifestyle. Step 3: Choose Your “Planter” This can be the nook of a tree, a shelf, or a planter designed specifically for tillandsias. You can even make your own air plant stands or frames out of aluminum wire or with a metal grid from your local hardware store. Place your air plant habitat in the kind of spot determined in Step 1.

Step 4: Water Your Air Plants The Technique

Misting is a good, quick way to hydrate your plants between soaking or drenching. Mist your plants as little as once a week in humid climates or as often as every day in dry climates. Use a spray bottle with a wide spray pattern to thoroughly wet the leaves. Drench weekly by running under a stream of water or immersing for a minute or two in a bowl of water. For many species of air plants, this will be enough in humid climates with good air circulation. If plants appear to be drying out even with weekly drenchings, apply a weekly or bi-weekly soaking regimen. If you miss weekly drenching for more than two weeks, soak thirsty plants for up to five hours. Always keep blooms above water level. After soaking, shake off excess water and place them in a location with good circulation so they can dry completely within four hours. Lingering moisture or puddling water can lead to rot. Step 5: Mind Your Pups An air plant flowers once in its lifetime, and during that time will often begin to develop a pup, or offset, at its base. That’s the offspring! As the pup grows, the parent will slowly fade. When the pup has gotten at least one-third the size of its parents, often you can separate the two by gently pulling them apart with a slight twist — but this is completely optional. If they do not separate easily, the pup may not be ready to survive on its own. If you do separate them, take care to keep the pup’s structure in tact. Step 6: Consider Pruning and Feeding You will likely find dried brown leaves at the base of your plant, which is totally normal. Feel free to trim them with a pair of shears, but make sure there are no small pups within the dried foliage. Some pups can be as small as an eraser tip and can hide in the dried leaves.

You don’t necessarily need to fertilize, but for more robust flowers and pups, fertilize once a month (in spring, summer and early fall) with a water-soluble bromeliad or orchid fertilizer added to your mister and diluted to one-quarter strength.

#air plants #tillandsia

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