Daliyah Marie Arana, who is only 4 years old, has read over 1,000 books, mastered college-level speeches, and, as of Wednesday, been “librarian for a day” at the Library of Congress.

Carla Hayden, the 14th librarian of Congress, posted photos on Twitter of Daliyah’s visit to the world’s largest library:

It was fun to have 4-year-old Daliyah Marie Arana of Gainesville, GA as “Librarian For The Day.” She’s already read more than a 1,000 books. pic.twitter.com/MQfwlUrakO

— Carla Hayden (@LibnOfCongress) January 11, 2017

Hayden became the first woman, African-American or professional librarian to serve as Librarian of Congress in 2016.

Hayden and Daliyah roamed the halls of the library and they attended executive roundtable meetings.

“[Daliyah] just kept saying how the Library of Congress is her most favorite, favorite, favorite library in the whole wide world,”  said Daliyah’s mother, Haleema Arana.

Arana reached out to the Library of Congress to see if they might be able to increase Daliyah’s  exposure to literature and libraries. The library invited the family to spend the day with Hayden.

Daliyah even made a suggestion for the library: to install whiteboards in the hallways so that children could practice their writing skills. As her mother told the Post, library officials said they would try to implement the idea.

And how did Daliyah become such a precocious reader at such young age? From the moment she was born she was surrounded by literature.

Reading was a large part of her and her siblings’s upbringing. Daliyah often heard her brother reading chapters of books aloud. By 18 months, she could recognize words in books, and when she was  2 years, 11 months old, Daliyah read her first book independently.

 The Gainesville Times reports that Daliyah constantly visits her local library in Gainesville, Georgia, where she checks out books every day and wants to teach other children how to read.

Daliyah was even able to parse out pieces of scholar William L. Phelps’s speech “The Pleasure of Books,” an apropos text her mother gave her to read as a challenge:

Daliyah has a passion for learning about dinosaurs. Her mother told the Post that Daliyah can rattle off dinosaur facts and when she grows up she would like to become a paleontologist.

What’s Daliyah’s next challenge? To learn how to read in Spanish. Her father, Miguel Arana, is Mexican and speaks Spanish to Daliyah on a daily basis. She isn’t fluent though, but so far she can understand many words.

“She’s able to just absorb so much and retain so much so fast,” her mother told the Post.

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On average, an American spends over five times more time in the kitchen than in the living room. A notable amount of this time is spent washing dishes, hands, filling pots with water, and cleaning up foods like vegetables using the kitchen faucet. Therefore, a kitchen faucet has to meet a lot of usage demands, many of which are specific to each individual. That is why you should ensure that you choose the perfect faucet for your kitchen. Here is how you should go about it.

1. The faucet should have adequate height

Your kitchen faucet should have adequate height in order to help you fill things like jugs and other large containers with water. Essentially, a good kitchen faucet should be at least 8 to 10 inches above the sink plane so that you can fill large pots with water without restrictions. 

2. Decide on a One-handled, Two-handled, or Hands-free Faucet

Some people don’t mind having to turn the faucet on and off whenever they need a flowing stream of clean water. If you are among them, then a one-handled or a two-handled faucet might be suitable for you. 

The one-handled version has a cleaner look, while the two-handled alternative makes it easier to control cold and hot water flows. On the other hand, the hands-free version is perfect if you prefer a faucet that offers the best usage convenience. 

3. The Desired Reach

A kitchen faucet should come with adequate reach. Sometimes this reach needs to extend beyond the kitchen sink, for when you need to fill something like a bucket on the floor with water. Therefore, the faucet should come with the right sprayer to make sure that the water can get to all places where it is needed within the vicinity of the kitchen sink. In this regard, you have the option of a pulldown, pullout, and side sprayer. 

4. Understand the Kind of Sink You Have

The sink you have in your kitchen can affect the experience your kitchen faucet gives you. For instance, if the sink cannot handle the water volume your faucet generates, then you will always find yourself having to turn it down to give your sink a chance to catch up. 

Even when you have the best kitchen faucet on the market, this usage experience can make you regret your purchase. So, make sure that your sink is built to handle your faucet’s water volume. Otherwise, be wiling to renovate it so that it works well with your faucet. 

5. Choose a Faucet that Matches Your Kitchen’s Decor

As much as you want every installation in the kitchen to stand out, it is best when this happens in a positive way. Therefore, when you use a modern faucet in a traditional kitchen, it will stand out like a sore thumb. 

Consequently, you should make sure that your choice kitchen faucet goes well with the style of your kitchen. For instance, some kitchens work best with a faucets that have a shiny chrome finish, while others would go better with versions that feature an understated matte finish. 

6. Have a Preferred Mounting Style

A faucet can be mounted on the deck or on the wall. The wall mounting option is better if you want a faucet that does not mess with the counter, or when you lack adequate space to mount the faucet on the deck. 

On the other hand, a deck mounted faucet is mounted on the counter , and it is a good option when you don’t want to mess with the wall. Otherwise, where both options are viable, you can choose the style you prefer best.

7. Price and Quality

You would be shocked at how expensive some kitchen faucets can be. But price does not always equal quality, fortunately. For instance, brass faucets, however affordable they might be, will have less maintenance demands and a longer life of service in comparison to most other materials, however expensive. On the other hand, plastic faucets don’t last as long, and their value for money proposition may leave something to be desired.

Conclusion 

Choosing the right kitchen faucet is very important, considering how much these installations are used around the home. Basically, things to consider during this process include the functionality of the faucet, your kitchen’s design, the features you need the most in a faucet, and your preferences with regards to installation styles. Ultimately, the best kitchen faucet is that which meets all your expectations as far as your usage needs and design choices are concerned. 

Just when you think that the world is out of surprises, a quick glance around the corner will prove you wrong. A couple of nuns have taken the meaning of ‘high’ to a whole new level. These sisters grow cannabis and create a whole array of hemp products for the good of the people.

Sister Kate and sister Darcy are not the ordinary nuns you may think of. They have created their own order and they call themselves highly spiritual, but despite their white robes, they are not Catholic, abstinent or subordinate to any priest. They simply answer to a higher power.

These nuns are vegan, feminist supporters and they believe in every human’s god-given right to cannabis. In fact, they are licensed Medical Marujuana growers who operate in their abbey in Merced, California.
In their abbey, they grow cannabis and create different salves, tonics and tinctures which contain high amounts of CBD, with little or no THC (the psychoactive ingredient). Their products serve to aid people with problems varying from cancer and arthritis, to diaper rash and hangovers.

Their products are organic, pesticide free and lab-tested. That means that it’s perfectly safe to obtain cannabis treatment products from these sweet-looking nuns without the fear of miscalculated efforts or lack of knowledge. On the contrary, these sisters know their job very well!

From their calendar of activities, you can see that they treat their cannabis plants with great care and with all-natural harmless products that can nurture them and protect them from insects and other harmful effects from external influences.
They currently have an ETSY Store called Sisters of the Valley, where you can choose from their products. And these products are not only ones made of cannabis – you can also buy crocheted gloves, smudge sticks, holy soap, sacred wood and more.

Their store homepage states: “The Sisters prepare all of their products during moon cycles, according to ancient wisdom. They are activists on a mission to empower people to heal themselves.”

Story and photo sources:

Dailymail.co.uk
Huffingtonpost.com
Sisters of the Valley

The notion that the longer you toil at your workplace, the more you get done may not be true after all. Or so says the latest research of K. Anders Ericsson, one of the foremost experts on the psychology of work.

For decades, the 40-hour workweek has been considered the most productive and balanced approach to extracting the best of workers while giving them enough “own time” to show up ready and willing to their workplace come Monday.

Mr. Ericsson’s work, however, disputes this conventional setup, suggesting that a smarter, more streamlined approach might actually yield better results for both employers and employees.

His research, conducted over the course of several months in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, found that people can put in a maximum of 4 to 5 hours of effective work before their performance levels begin to decline.

“If you’re pushing people well beyond that time they can really concentrate maximally, you’re very likely to get them to acquire some bad habits,” Mr. Ericsson told the Tech Insider.

“What’s worse, those bad habits could end up spilling into the time people are normally productive, and suddenly even the shorter weeks are wasteful.”

His findings have been substantiated by a number of companies who decided to shorten the work hours or switch to a four-day workweek, as was the case with Treehouse, an online technology school that offers beginner to advanced courses in web design, web development, mobile development and game development.

CEO Ryan Carson, who made the switch to a 32-hour work week in 2006, told the Atlantic last year that the move not only made employees happier, but increased productivity as well.

“It’s not about more family time, or more play time, or less work time — it’s about living a more balanced total life,” he said.

“We basically take ridiculously good care of people because we think it’s the right thing to do.”

Web development company Reusser Design has seen similar improvements since changing to a four-day week in 2013, even though employees are working longer hours to make up for the lost Friday.

“You wouldn’t believe how much we get done,” he told CNN last year, adding that the new regime has substantially improved employees’ work rate.

Another example of a successful transition from the conventional 40-day workweek comes from Utah, where former governor Jon Huntsman switched nearly three quarters of all state employees to working four 10-hour days in the midst of America’s financial crisis in 2008.

Per the Business Insider, the benefits from the switch were twofold. Not only did it increase morale by providing employees with an extra day off to spend with their families, but it also saved public resources that would have otherwise been used to heat, cool, and power the buildings — which can sure come in handy when savings are a top priority.

The case for braking from the “good old” 40-hour workweek has been made. Now it is up to the powers that be whether it will take root on a wider scale, or be dismissed altogether.

One of the most basic forces that drives us as humans is the pursuit of happiness. But what is happiness? What makes us happy? Are we on the right track? Is it having money? Children? A partner in life?

All of these things make a person happy. And here’s a boost from science to clear the air – experiences make us truly happy, not things.

We live in a developed world, which means, we live in a consumerist society.

If you thought that buying a new house or a new car is the key to being happy, think again. Professor Thomas Gilovich from Cornell University claims that money does make us happy, but there is a catch and it’s in the way we spend our money.

In his study, titled “A wonderful life: experiential consumption and the pursuit of happiness,” Professor Gilovich claims that happiness is derived from experiences, not things.

“One of the most striking results to emerge from the literature on happiness and well-being is the remarkable human capacity for habituation. Terrible things happen to people, such as the death of a loved one, the loss of one’s arms or legs, or a precipitous fall in economic standing, and yet, as devastating as these traumas are initially, people tend to find ways to rise above them and go on to live happy, fulfilling lives,” write Gilovich and his coauthor, Amit Kumar.

“But when it comes to positive events, that same capacity for adaption can be a formidable enemy. People are thrilled when they get a raise, buy a new car, or get their first article published in The New Yorker, Outside Magazine, or Psychological Science. But often the thrill quickly fades.

The raise gets absorbed into the budget, the car loses that new-car smell and feel, and soon a thirst develops for getting more articles published.”

He was focused on studying how people spend their money, what people spend their money on and how these purchases affect people and ultimately found that even though physical objects last longer, as opposed to experiences, a concert, or a ten-day vacation, for example, it’s the experiences that make us much happier.

“People often think spending money on an experience is not as wise an investment as spending it on a material possession,” explains Gilovich.

“They think the experience will come and go in a flash, and they’ll be left with little compared to owning an item. But in reality, we remember experiences long afterward, while we soon become used to our possessions. At the same time, we also enjoy the anticipation of having an experience more than the anticipation of owning a possession.”

To further support his claim, professor Gilovich states that experiences last for a lifetime, we remember them and retell them, and by retelling them, we are reliving them. Also, experiences are usually shared with loved ones, close friends and so on. Shared experiences connect us more to other people than shared consumption.

“To be sure, the material goods we buy are sometimes shared with others (we invite friends over to watch the Oscars on our new television and take our friends out for a spin in our new BMW), but not consistently so (people often watch television by themselves and commute alone),” it says in the study.

“Beyond their more inherently social nature, experiences connect us to others in several ways. Imagine that you just bought an experience—you went to the Azores, dined at le Cirque, or saw Flight of the Conchords in concert.

If you learned that someone else had the same experience, would you feel closer to that person? Now imagine that you just bought a material possession—a Stickley couch, a 46-inch Sony TV, or a North Face parka. If you learned that someone else had made the same purchase, would you feel closer to that person?”

“The answer is almost certainly yes to both questions because almost anything we share with another person tends to bring us closer together (lovers being a very notable and potentially explosive exception).”

What can we learn from this? It’s pretty simple, really. Instead of buying the latest gadget on the market, go see a movie with a friend, take your family to a park, pick up a new hobby with your wife.

Go on vacation, go to paintball, a wine tasting… the options are endless. We need to free ourselves from the constraints of this consumerist world.

Making and spending money will always make us happy. We will never stop spending money as long as money exists; it’s how we spend our money that counts.

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