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It’s a small world, and it’s an Amazing Raise

BY SANDE SNEAD

It’s a small, small world. I’ve said that so many times. I know you have, too.
I think Disney coined it, as in “It’s a small world after all.” I am a born and raised in Richmond, Virginia girl so I see people I know here ALL the time. I run into my own mother, sisters, cousins, aunts, etc. in unexpected places. But what about when I am out of town or headed out of town. What are the chances I will see someone I know, not just well, but VERY well?

Chance encounter with Sean McGrath on the Embarcadero in San Francisco.

Chance encounter with Sean McGrath on the Embarcadero in San Francisco.

A few years ago, I was visiting my daughter at Berkeley and crossing the street to the Embarcadero in San Francisco, I saw Sean McGrath, the brother of Kelly, our “fourth” sister, my sister’s former roommate and best friend of all time. There were 16.5 million visitors in San Francisco in 2012, and I ran into a very good friend while crossing the street. Another recent encounter happened when I got on a 707 plane at RIC, and out of 700- some people, I am seated next to my very best friend’s husband. I insisted that we call her to tell her that there really wasn’t anything going on between Mitch and me just in case the plane went down.

Fast forward to the present. A dear friend and Virginia Press Women member loses her husband to a brain tumor. He was a wonderful and active man who loved tennis, traveling and his family most of all. The obituary asks that “in lieu of flowers” donations be made to the Cullather Brain Tumor Quality of Life Center. I make a small donation and think to myself that I have never heard of this place, nor will I probably ever hear about it again.

The next day, Rhudy & Co., a company that I have recently begun doing freelance work for, asks me to work on communications and marketing for for their client Bon Secours Richmond Health Care Foundation’s Cullather Center, which is in the running for Richmond’s Amazing Raise.

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In 1992, Jack Cullather and his wife, Jean, lost their son, Chris, to a brain tumor. About a decade later, Jack lost Jean to a brain tumor as well.

I met Jack a few years back at a James Madison University homecoming where he was tailgating with his daughter, Maribeth, and her husband, Tommy Carr, who I went to JMU with in the 1980s. My boyfriend, Martin, knew Jack through golf and other social circles. Following that initial introduction, Martin and I ran into Jack many times at Azzurro, one of Jack’s favorite restaurants and more and more lately, one of ours as well.

I knew that Jack had tragically lost his son, and then later, his wife to brain tumors, but I didn’t know that he had started the Cullather Brain Tumor Quality of Life Center to honor their memory in 2007.

Now that I am helping Rhudy & Co. develop communications and marketing to help the Cullather Center compete during the Community Foundation’s Amazing Raise, it has become personal. This is not just a job; it’s a mission.

Sometimes people come in and out of our lives and they may seem like random encounters, but the older I get, the more I believe Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s quote that hung in my parents’ kitchen growing up, “I am a part of all that I have met.” Now, I am a part of the Cullather Center and this amazing place dedicated to helping patients and their families dealing with the devastating diagnoses of a brain tumor.

Please join me in supporting this most worthy cause and the patients who receive this unthinkable diagnosis during the Amazing Raise Sept. 18-19. We have set our sights on winning an extra $2,500 by being one of 15 non-profits to get 50 unique donations of $50 or more at 6 a.m. sharp on Sept. 18. Set your alarm and go to http://www.bsvaf.org/amazingraise and Click for Cullather.

Guaranteed Sale & More Fun Ways to Buy and Sell Houses

Blog as posted on http://www.realestatewebmasters.com

BY SANDE SNEAD

If you are a Baby BoomLongmeadower like me, chances are that you’ve had numerous “interesting experiences” in buying and selling homes.

Take the time my husband and I bought a charming little salt box in Columbia, SC, when he was a Captain in the U.S. Army at Fort Jackson, SC. New orders came and we could not unload that house, so my next door neighbor and best friend at the time gladly took the listing. We eventually rented it using her as our property manager. Pain and sorrow ensued. Among other issues, she soon became “unavailable” to numerous phone calls, emails and pleas for information. When we finally got back to see our property after having moved 3,000 miles away, the weeds were an embarrassment and the wine stains all over the master bedroom walls were scary.

Fast forward, many years later when I was trying desperately to sell my house and move from Chester to Richmond, when I discovered a fool-proof plan to get me there. Who knew that there was such a thing as a “guaranteed sale” Realtor? This particular Realtor offers a 90-days guaranteed home sale or he buys the house for cash.

My house was located in Longmeadow subdivision where I was competing with significant new construction from the developer and incentives to buy like free washer/dryers and/or big flat screen TVs. Further, I bought my house in a divorce desperation measure and it was not situated on the most desirable lot.

So I made a deal with the devil to get the house sold. The Realtor got a 6 percent commission, plus another 1 percent for signing up for his guarantee.
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Forty-eight hours after signing your listing with him, he gives you his assessment, based on what WGracecomparable houses in the area are selling for and that is his guarantee. It is lower that the asking price for the house, but it should be no more than $5,000 to $10,000 less than what the house is listed for. Also, you don’t have to sell your house to him at the end of the 90 days, but he does have to buy it.

In my case, he did eventually buy my house, but there were so many caveats and clauses that I felt dirty afterwards. Still, I was out.

Then, there was my last experience with selling my cute little bungalow on West Grace Street. I worked with a friend and a good Realtor who advised me correctly. I priced my house right and sold it to the very first family who saw it – less than two weeks after it was listed. Of course well meaning family and friends said that if it sold that quickly I must have priced it too low. No, my friends, it was priced correctly.

As Team Hensley Real Estate Team Leader Annemarie Hensley says about the one piece of advice she would give to someone trying to buy or sell their home: “Position it appropriately. I see so many people who overprice their home and don’t understand the danger of doing it until it’s already done.”

To find out how to position your house correctly, contact Annemarie or any of her team members by phone at 804-601-0710. You can also reach her on her cell at 804-221-4365.

 

Sort of Single

Girls and me-Big Pink Chair
BY SANDE SNEAD

I fancy myself a bit of a Carrie Bradshaw figure as I write this essay about life as a single on my laptop – except that I don’t live in the greatest city in the world, I don’t have a cool apartment, nor do I own a single pair of Jimmy Choos. Okay, my life is nothing like the characters on Sex and the City. I live in a house in the suburbs, I never have time for brunch with friends, and I have had one boyfriend for the past three years – oh, and I have teenage daughters.

My girls aren’t dating yet, but if they were, I’m sure I’d be telling them to get off the phone – it’s the one role reversal we are experiencing. They just can’t figure out what my boyfriend and I have to talk about all the time. He has pushed me to try new things and to revisit activities I once enjoyed. I’ve gone scuba diving, snowmobiling and motorcycling. I’ve taken up skiing and water skiing. I’ve also had more opportunities to travel.

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Deciding when to introduce your significant other to your children is one of the biggest questions in the life of a divorceé. We waited nearly a year to do all the introductions – way longer than most people thought we should. We listened to our instincts and instead of foisting ourselves onto the children, we waited for our kids to tell us they were ready.

Now that everyone knows each other and gets along well, we combine the families every now and then – dinner out, dinner in, a game of football, board games, a movie, boating, weekend getaways, but we limit these outings and try to take our cues from the children. None of us is ready to be the Brady Bunch.

This appeared in Richmond Magazine on Nov. 9, 2008. Many things have changed since this was written…

Soul Searching

"How does that make you feeee-eeel?"

“How does that make you feeee-eeel?”

BY SANDE SNEAD

I admit it. I’m addicted to counseling. I enjoy analyzing my childhood to help figure out why I am who I am today. I like finding out things about myself that were right in front of me all along. I feel enlightened when I gain insight into the behavior of my significant other.

My former husband and I had three counselors over the course of our 15-year marriage. The absolute best was our last, but despite all we learned about ourselves and our relationship, our marriage could not be saved.

I look at therapy the way some people look at prayer and God. I know it’s there if I need it, but if everything is going OK I don’t think about it too much. So it had been a while since I had stretched out on that leather couch.

Then, I lost my car and my boyfriend all in the same weekend. Replacing the car was just a big headache. Replacing the man I’ve loved for nearly four years, however, has been a whole lot of heartache.

I had to get him out of my head and my heart. Our break-up occurred Thanksgiving week, so I had weeks of solo holiday weekends stretching out before me. When anyone in my family asked what I was doing, I replied, borrowing lines from Jim Carrey’s version of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, “Wallowing in self pity.” If they said, “What are you doing tomorrow night?” I’d say, “Let me check my shed-youl. Let’s see (as if consulting a calendar)…Ah yes, dinner with self. Can’t cancel that again.”

When the broken record of what went wrong in our relationship just wouldn’t stop playing itself over and over in my head, I knew it was time to go see someone who would say those magic words, “Tell me about how you fee-ee-ee-l.”

The thing about the end of a long-term, meaningful relationship is that you go through all of the stages of grief including sadness, anger and denial. I didn’t want to bring my family and friends down with me right through the holidays. And I sure didn’t want them to hear me rant about all the things he did wrong as the anger stage kicked in with the new year.

I wanted someone to talk to who wouldn’t judge me — or him. I also wanted to explore areas where I needed improvement, so I would be better equipped for my next relationship, even if it was with this same guy (obviously, I haven’t reached the acceptance stage yet).

After a few sessions of talking about my shortcomings in a relationship — I tend to suppress my feelings and emotions and not express myself — Dr. Michael Smith recommended the national bestselling book by Dr. Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Intimacy: A Woman’s Guide to Courageous Acts of Change in Key Relationships.
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While I am not one to typically enjoy self-help books, this one resonated with me. One thing I learned is that our reactions to another person’s differences is what leads us to exaggerated and stuck positions in relationships. Lerner writes: “Our positions become so rigid and polarized that we lose our ability to relate to both the competence and the incompetence in the other party and the competence and incompetence in the self. Instead we become overfocused on the incompetence of the other and underfocused on the incompetence of the self.”

What a concept. We get so hung up on the negative in the other person to the point that we can’t even see our own negative habits and traits. The worse he looks through my filter, the better I am through that same filter.

In addition to recommendations of helpful books to read and sometimes even homework, therapy can include personality and other types of tests that also help shed light on who you are. A good counselor will even go through these tests and help you understand why you are who you are.

One of the things I learned is that I tend to have male-dominant traits. My view of the world is less feeling and emotional than that of most women.

According to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, I am an ENTJ  — extroverted and thinking, task-oriented, logical and objective – traits more typically associated with men. So while the men in my life tend to want to solve my problems, I’ve already solved them.

And then there are those Eureka moments, either in counseling or just riding in your car, where you start to figure some things out on your own.

While I am not a Ph.D., I came to the brilliant conclusion that each of us has a set-point of happiness. Just like I believe we all have a set-point for our weight. If you eat right and exercise, your weight will reach a plateau and it really will not budge from that point. I weigh the same at the doctor’s office (almost to the pound) every year of my physical and I don’t even own a bathroom scale. We all have ups and downs in our lives, but our own personal happiness level doesn’t really change much. I am a happy person. I always have been. So even though I don’t have mad, passionate love in my life right now, I am happy. And I’m no longer wallowing in self-pity.

Besides, my boyfriend and I will probably get together again soon.

This appeared in Richmond Magazine in 2009. And I am happy to report that I do have mad, passionate love in my life again.

 

We’ve got spirit, yes we do!

Longwood Lancers get into the spirit of the game.

Longwood Lancers get into the spirit of the game.

BY SANDE SNEAD

When Virginia Tech fell to James Madison University 21 to 16 on Sept. 11, JMU graduate Sarah Marshall was crushed by the defeat.

Even though Marshall graduated from JMU in 1983, she has been a Tech devotee for as long as she can remember.

“I was devastated by the (Hokie’s) loss to JMU, yet extremely happy for them (JMU) too. I felt bad walking out of Lane Stadium all hang dog,” Marshall said. “This was the biggest victory in JMU history, and Madison played with so much heart. They wanted that game so badly.”

Marshall was torn because she grew up in Blacksburg. Her father got his undergraduate and master’s degree at Tech and was a professor there for 42 years.

Marshall is such a Tech fanatic that when she and her fiance set the date for their wedding – Sept. 25, 2010 — the first thing they checked was the Hokie home game schedule.

College football is played by 22 men on a field but the stadium stands are full  of women like Marshall. Thousands of Virginia women are avid sports fans.

A 2009 ESPN study on sports viewership indicates that while more men than women watch sports at certain points in their lives women become very interested in watching sports.

Sports viewing habits begin to increase for women after they turn 35 as they watch games more often with male friends, spouses and families, according to the study.

“I think that as attitudes about sports evolve, more and more women will become sports fans,” said Katie O’Connell, a junior at JMU who blogged recently about being a huge sports fan.

We’ve become a nation of fans with strong allegiance to the teams we cheer for each week. As women interest in sports grows, they are just as likely as men to live up to being a sports fanatic  in every sense of the word.

“You have the stereotype of a man who jumps up when his team is about to score, and swears when they lose, and gets angry and upset, and I am the same as that,” O’Connell said. “When the opposing team scores on mine, I swear and stomp my feet and feel just as furious as a man would.”

What drives fans to put so much energy and passion into cheering for their chosen sports teams?

“It’s our intrapyschic needs being projected onto a screen,” said Dr. Michael Smith, a Midlothian psychiatrist. “Our basic needs to succeed, have power, feel important and respected are often projected onto our sports teams.”

Smith said being the “fan” in “fanatical” is O.K. as long as it’s kept in perspective with the rest of your life.

“It’s only a bad thing when people take it too far and are overly attached to their team or the outcome. If they feel like when their team loses that their entire life fortune goes up in smoke or when their team wins, a pot of gold has come their way, then, I would suggest that they have some basic needs that may not being met in their own lives.”

If taken too far, fans  could fall victim to an extreme case of basking in reflected glory or BIRGing, a phenomenon identified by social psychologists.

BIRGing was examined in a 1976 study that showed fervent fans’ self-esteem rises and falls with a game’s outcome, with losses affecting their optimism about everything from getting a date to winning at darts.

But what is a game of football, basketball or soccer without cheering fans?

In hopes of creating stronger fan bases while generating school spirit, many colleges hold spirit marches and pep rallies.

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Longwood women’s associate head soccer coach Steve Brdarski said he noticed that students on campus were wearing t-shirts and sweatshirts from the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech instead of sporting their college’s school colors.

He decided to infuse some school spirit into the Farmville institution.

Brdarski, Ben Brittain, Student Government Association president and Stacey Wilkerson, who’s in charge of “New Lancer Days” planned the GAME event.

About 1,300 people gathered at a pep rally before the first home soccer game against University of Richmond. They were given blue and white Longwood Lancer scarves.

Then the crowd hiked the one and ½-miles from the rally to the stadium.

“It was just so cool to see everybody marching and coming together to support the soccer team,” said Samantha Chuchul, a Longwood peer mentor. “It made me feel really good.”

Although Longwood fell to the University of Richmond during that first game, the school spirit was palatable.

“Part of the reason for the event was for new students to get excited about Longwood,” said Chuchul, who is a junior.

Similar to Marshall at the JMU-Tech game, LaTia Harris is regularly torn between two schools.

She received her bachelor’s degree from Virginia Union University in 2008 and will get her graduate degree from Virginia State University in 2011.

When the two archrivals go head to head, she really doesn’t know which one to root for.

“I had great school spirit at VUU and brought that same enthusiasm over to VSU,” she said.

A sports management major, Harris attends games like it’s her job. And oftentimes, it is part of her course requirements.

“I love basketball the most, and being in the crowd yelling and feeling like the team hears you,” she said. “I like being the biggest motivator I can and feeling like I’m on fire and so the team is on fire too.”

Harris said she doesn’t get upset if her team loses.

“I know we’ve got it next time,” she said. “We learn from our mistakes, but we can’t win every game. It’s hard if you have an undefeated season and you lose the last game, but I think you have to take that as a learning lesson. It doesn’t dampen my spirit though.”

Sarah Marshall’s Virginia Tech roots run so deep in fact, that she has written a book, “Learning Football with the Hokie Bird,” published by gamedaypublications.com. The book is geared towards children 4-9 years old and is a primer on football and the fundamentals of the game.

“As a child, I learned about the game by listening and watching, but I’ve heard so many adults say that they didn’t understand the nuances of the game, so I’ve put together this fun book that tells that story.”

Other books are being developed as well including one featuring Marshall’s alma mater, “Learning Football with the Duke Dog.” Go to gamedaypublications.com to order.

This first ran in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.