Dear Mr. Spencer, I will have lived in this apartment for ten years as of this coming April. I have enjoyed living here and hope to continue doing so. When I first moved into the Greenfield Apartments, I was told that the apartment had been recently painted. Since that time, I have never touched the walls or the ceiling. Looking around over the past month has made me realize how old and dull the paint has become. I would like to update the apartment with a new coat of paint. I understand that this would be at my own expense, and that I must get permission to do so as per the lease agreement. Please advise at your earliest convenience. Sincerely, Howard James

Something inside told me that by now someone had discovered my escape. It chilled me greatly to think that they would capture me and take me back to that awful place. So, I decided to walk only at night until I was far from the town. After three nights' walking, I felt sure that they had stopped chasing me. I found a deserted cottage and walked into it. Tired, I lay down on the floor and fell asleep. I awoke to the sound of a far away church clock, softly ringing seven times and noticed that the sun was slowly rising. As I stepped outside, my heart began to pound with anticipation and longing. The thought that I could meet Evelyn soon lightened my walk.

I am sure you have heard something like, You can do anything you want, if you just persist long and hard enough. Perhaps you have even made a similar assertion to motivate someone to try harder. Of course, words like these sound good, but surely they cannot be true. Few of us can become the professional athlete, entertainer, or movie star we would like to be. Environmental, physical, and psychological factors limit our potential and narrow the range of things we can do with our lives. Trying harder cannot substitute for talent, equipment, and method, but this should not lead to despair. Rather, we should attempt to become the best we can be within our limitations. We try to find our niche. By the time we reach employment age, there is a finite range of jobs we can perform effectively.

Think of a buffet table at a party, or perhaps at a hotel you've visited. You see platter after platter of different foods. You don't eat many of these foods at home, and you want to try them all. But trying them all might mean eating more than your usual meal size. The availability of different types of food is one factor in gaining weight. Scientists have seen this behavior in studies with rats: Rats that normally maintain a steady body weight when eating one type of food eat huge amounts and become obese when they are presented with a variety of high-calorie foods, such as chocolate bars, crackers, and potato chips. The same is true of humans. We eat much more when a variety of good-tasting foods are available than when only one or two types of food are available.

The practice of medicine has meant the average age to which people in all nations may expect to live is higher than it has been in recorded history, and there is a better opportunity than ever for an individual to survive serious disorders such as cancers, brain tumors and heart diseases. However, longer life spans mean more people, worsening food and housing supply difficulties. In addition, medical services are still not well distributed, and accessibility remains a problem in many parts of the world. Improvements in medical technology shift the balance of population (to the young at first, and then to the old). They also tie up money and resources in facilities and trained people, costing more money, and affecting what can be spent on other things.

In the 1930s the work of Sigmund Freud, the 'father of psychoanalysis', began to be widely known and appreciated. Less well known at the time was the fact that Freud had found out, almost by accident, how helpful his pet dog Jofi was to his patients. He had only become a dog-lover in later life when Jofi was given to him by his daughter Anna. The dog sat in on the doctor's therapy sessions and Freud discovered that his patients felt much more comfortable talking about their problems if the dog was there. Some of them even preferred to talk to Jofi, rather than the doctor! Freud noted that if the dog sat near the patient, the patient found it easier to relax, but if Jofi sat on the other side of the room, the patient seemed more tense and distressed. He was surprised to realize that Jofi seemed to sense this too. The dog's presence was an especially calming influence on child and teenage patients.

The two pie charts above show the number of natural disasters and the amount of damage by region in 2014. The number of natural disasters in Asia was the largest of all five regions and accounted for 36 percent, which was more than twice the percentage of Europe. Americas had the second largest number of natural disasters, taking up 23 percent. The number of natural disasters in Oceania was the smallest and less than a third of that in Africa. The amount of damage in Asia was the largest and less than the combined amount of Americas and Europe. Africa had the least amount of damage even though it ranked third in the number of natural disasters.

Alexander Young Jackson (everyone called him A. Y.) was born to a poor family in Montreal in 1882. His father abandoned them when he was young, and A. Y. had to go to work at age twelve to help support his brothers and sisters. Working in a print shop, he became interested in art, and he began to paint landscapes in a fresh new style. Traveling by train across northern Ontario, A. Y. and several other artists painted everything they saw. The Group of Seven, as they called themselves, put the results of the tour together to create an art show in Toronto in 1920. That was the show where their paintings were severely criticized as art gone mad. But he kept painting, traveling, and exhibiting, and by the time he died in 1974 at the age of eighty-two, A. Y. Jackson was acknowledged as a painting genius and a pioneer of modern landscape art.

《Safety Poster Contest》 Each year there is a topic chosen by the Safety First Chair. This year the topic is Classroom Safety. Contest Rules: The contest is divided into two age groups: 8 to 9 year olds and 10 to 11 year olds. Poster size is 11 inches by 14 inches only. On the back of the poster, please write the name and age of the artist. Entries are limited to one per person. The deadline for submitting your poster is March 31, 2019. Each first place winner will receive a $50 gift certificate. For more information, please visit www.safetyfirstchair.com.

《Adult Bike Repair Class》 This course is a great way to begin learning how to repair and maintain your bike yourself. Who: Open to everyone - We do need at least five participants to hold classes! Class Time: Mondays 6:30 PM – 9:00 PM - This is a 4 week hands- on class. Cost: $80 (preregistration required) Class Schedule: Week 1: Bike Parts & Tools Week 2: Bike Safety Check Week 3: Cable & Brakes Week 4: The Drive System We do not provide bikes for class. Bring your own bike. For more information, contact us at 4566-8302.

If there's one thing koalas are good at, it's sleeping. For a long time many scientists suspected that koalas were so lethargic because the compounds in eucalyptus leaves kept the cute little animals in a drugged-out state. But more recent research has shown that the leaves are simply so low in nutrients that koalas have almost no energy. Therefore they tend to move as little as possible — and when they move, they often look as though they're in slow motion. They rest sixteen to eighteen hours a day and spend most of that unconscious. In fact, koalas spend little time thinking; their brains actually appear to have shrunk over the last few centuries. The koala is the only known animal whose brain only fills half of its skull.

Painters have in principle an infinite range of colours at their disposal, especially in modern times with the chromatic explosion of synthetic chemistry. And yet painters don't use all the colours at once, and indeed many have used a remarkably restrictive selection. Mondrian limited himself mostly to the three primaries red, yellow and blue to fill his black-ruled grids, and Kasimir Malevich worked with similar self-imposed restrictions. For Yves Klein, one colour was enough; Franz Kline's art was typically black on white. There was nothing new in this: the Greeks and Romans tended to use just red, yellow, black and white. Why? It's impossible to generalize, but both in antiquity and modernity it seems likely that the limited palette aided clarity and comprehensibility, and helped to focus attention on the components that mattered: shape and form.

The body tends to accumulate problems, often beginning with one small, seemingly minor imbalance. This problem causes another subtle imbalance, which triggers another, then several more. In the end, you get a symptom. It's like lining up a series of dominoes. All you need to do is knock down the first one and many others will fall too. What caused the last one to fall? Obviously it wasn't the one before it, or the one before that, but the first one. The body works the same way. The initial problem is often unnoticed. It's not until some of the later dominoes fall that more obvious clues and symptoms appear. In the end, you get a headache, fatigue or depression — or even disease. When you try to treat the last domino — treat just the end-result symptom — the cause of the problem isn't addressed. The first domino is the cause, or primary problem.

Would you expect the physical expression of pride to be biologically based or culturally specific? The psychologist Jessica Tracy has found that young children can recognize when a person feels pride. Moreover, she found that isolated populations with minimal Western contact also accurately identify the physical signs. These signs include a smiling face, raised arms, an expanded chest, and a pushed-out torso. Tracy and David Matsumoto examined pride responses among people competing in judo matches in the 2004 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Sighted and blind athletes from 37 nations competed. After victory, the behaviors displayed by sighted and blind athletes were very similar. These findings suggest that pride responses are innate.

Sometimes a person is acclaimed as the greatest because there is little basis for comparison. For example, violinist Jan Kubelik was acclaimed as the greatest during his first tour of the United States, but when impresario Sol Hurok brought him back to the United States in 1923, several people thought that he had slipped a little. However, Sol Elman, the father of violinist Mischa Elman, thought differently. He said, My dear friends, Kubelik played the Paganini concerto tonight as splendidly as ever he did. Today you have a different standard. You have Elman, Heifetz, and the rest. All of you have developed and grown in artistry, technique, and, above all, in knowledge and appreciation. The point is: you know more; not that Kubelik plays less well.

Theseus was a great hero to the people of Athens. When he returned home after a war, the ship that had carried him and his men was so treasured that the townspeople preserved it for years and years, replacing its old, rotten planks with new pieces of wood. The question Plutarch asks philosophers is this: is the repaired ship still the same ship that Theseus had sailed? Removing one plank and replacing it might not make a difference, but can that still be true once all the planks have been replaced? Some philosophers argue that the ship must be the sum of all its parts. But if this is true, then as the ship got pushed around during its journey and lost small pieces, it would already have stopped being the ship of Theseus.

Credit arrangements of one kind or another have existed in all known human cultures. The problem in previous eras was not that no one had the idea or knew how to use it. It was that people seldom wanted to extend much credit because they didn't trust that the future would be better than the present. They generally believed that times past had been better than their own times and that the future would be worse. To put that in economic terms, they believed that the total amount of wealth was limited. People therefore considered it a bad bet to assume that they would be producing more wealth ten years down the line. Business looked like a zero-sum game. Of course, the profits of one particular bakery might rise, but only at the expense of the bakery next door. The king of England might enrich himself, but only by robbing the king of France. You could cut the pie in many different ways, but it never got any bigger.

When we were infants, we were tuned in to the signals from our body that told us when to eat and when to stop. We had an instinctive awareness of what foods and how much food our body needed. As we grew older this inner wisdom became lost in a bewildering host of outer voices that told us how we should eat. We received conflicting messages from our parents, from our peers, and from scientific research. These messages created a confusion of desires, impulses, and aversions that have made us unable to just eat and to eat just enough. If we are to return to a healthy and balanced relationship with food, it is essential that we learn to turn our awareness inward and to hear again what our body is always telling us.

One of the first things I did in each classroom in South Milwaukee was to draw a diagram of the students' desks, labelled with their names, as an aid to recognizing them. At lunch in the first grade classroom the first day I was present, a group of students came over, saw the diagram, and began finding their names on my picture. One said, Where's your name? and was not satisfied until I included a sketch of the chair by the bookcase where I was sitting, labelled with my name. It had not occurred to me that I needed to be included: after all, I knew where I was sitting, and knew my name. But to her, my presence in the classroom was the newest, most noteworthy thing that had occurred that day, and it was logical to include me. Her point of view was different from mine, and resulted in a different diagram of the classroom.

A little boy sees and hears birds with delight. Then the good father comes along and feels he should share the experience and help his son develop. He says: That's a jay, and this is a sparrow. The moment the little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing. He has to see and hear them the way the father wants him to. Father has good reasons on his side, since few people can go through life listening to the birds sing, and the sooner the boy starts his education the better. Maybe he will be an ornithologist when he grows up. A few people, however, can still see and hear in the old way. But most of the members of the human race have lost the capacity to be painters, poets, or musicians, and are not left the option of seeing and hearing directly even if they can afford to; they must get it secondhand.

It can be helpful to read your own essay aloud to hear how it sounds, and it can sometimes be even more beneficial to hear someone else read it. Either reading will help you to hear things that you otherwise might not notice when editing silently. If you feel uncomfortable having someone read to you, however, or if you simply don't have someone you can ask to do it, you can have your computer read your essay to you. Granted, it's not quite the same thing, and the computer is not going to tell you when something doesn't sound right. The computer also won't stumble over things that are awkward — it will just plow right on through. But hearing the computer read your writing is a very different experience from reading it yourself. If you have never tried it, you might find that you notice areas for revision, editing, and proofreading that you didn't notice before.

Hubert Cecil Booth is often credited with inventing the first powered mobile vacuum cleaner. In fact, he only claimed to be the first to coin the term vacuum cleaner for devices of this nature, which may explain why he is so credited. As we all know, the term vacuum is an inappropriate name, because there exists no vacuum in a vacuum cleaner. Rather, it is the air moving through a small hole into a closed container, as a result of air being blown out of the container by a fan on the inside. But I suppose a rapid air movement in a closed container to create suction cleaner would not sound as scientific or be as handy a name. Anyway, we are stuck with it historically, and it is hard to find any references to vacuum prior to Booth. Interestingly, Booth himself did not use the term vacuum when he filed a provisional specification describing in general terms his intended invention.

When a child experiences painful, disappointing, or scary moments, it can be overwhelming, with intense emotions and bodily sensations flooding the right brain. When this happens, we as parents can help bring the left hemisphere into the picture so that the child can begin to understand what's happening. One of the best ways to promote this type of integration is to help retell the story of the frightening or painful experience. Bella, for instance, was nine years old when the toilet overflowed when she flushed, and the experience of watching the water rise and pour onto the floor left her unwilling to flush the toilet afterward. When Bella's father, Doug, learned about the name it to tame it technique, he sat down with his daughter and retold the story of the time the toilet overflowed. He allowed her to tell as much of the story as she could and helped to fill in the details. After retelling the story several times, Bella's fears lessened and eventually went away.

Unlike coins and dice, humans have memories and do care about wins and losses. Still, the probability of a hit in baseball does not increase just because a player has not had one lately. Four outs in a row may have been bad luck, line drives hit straight into fielders' gloves. This bad luck does not ensure good luck the next time at bat. If it is not bad luck, then a physical problem may be causing the player to do poorly. Either way, a baseball player who had four outs in a row is not due for a hit, nor is a player who made four hits in a row due for an out. If anything, a player with four hits in a row is probably a better batter than the player who made four outs in a row. Likewise, missed field goals need not be balanced by successes. A poor performance may simply suggest that the kicker is not very good. Being rejected for jobs does not make a job offer more likely. If anything, the evidence is mounting that this person is not qualified or interviews poorly. Not having a fire does not increase the chances of a fire — it may just be the mark of a prudent homeowner who does not put paper or cloth near a stove, put metal in the microwave, leave home with the stove on, or fall asleep smoking cigarettes. Every safe airplane trip does not increase the chances that the next trip will be a crash.

Once upon a time there was a king of Armenia, who, being of a curious turn of mind and in need of some change, sent his men throughout the land to make the following proclamation: Hear this! Whatever man among you can prove himself the most outrageous liar in Armenia shall receive an apple made of pure gold from the hands of His Majesty the King! People began to swarm to the palace from every town and village in the country, people of all ranks and conditions, princes, merchants, farmers, priests, rich and poor, tall and short, fat and thin. There was no lack of liars in the land, and each one told his tale to the king. None of those lies, however, convinced the king that he had listened to the best one. The king was beginning to grow tired of his new sport and was thinking of calling the whole contest off without declaring a winner. Then there appeared before him a poor, ragged man, carrying a large sack over his shoulder. What can I do for you? asked His Majesty. Sire! said the poor man, slightly bewildered. Surely you remember? You owe me a pot of gold, and I have come to collect it. You are a perfect liar, sir! exclaimed the king. I owe you no money! A perfect liar am I? said the poor man. Then give me the golden apple! The king, realizing that the man was trying to trick him, said, No, no! You are not a liar! Then give me the pot of gold you owe me, sire, said the man. The king saw the dilemma. He handed over the golden apple.