As my Instagram feed can testify, I love me a good cup of coffee. I think that there is a great culture around coffee, such as the Swedish fika or the tendency for college students to get together in coffee shops. I have made friends with not just the staff at Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue’s TWIGS café, but… Read More Coffee: From Crutch to Companion
I am a bit of a nerd, just in case you haven’t noticed yet. I love reading studies and reflecting on the implications of the results found. However, I also can be quite harsh when it comes to studies that demonstrate a combination of laxity in their data analysis and over-confidence in their interpretation. I… Read More Parenting and Marital Happiness: Not Mutually Exclusive
My blogging journey—an incredible, fulfilling one that has given me so much—started almost nine and a half years ago right here in Sahar’s Blog. I never intended to stop blogging—that is, until I had a baby. I had always intended to take a short hiatus when each of my children was born. When my first… Read More Why I Decided To Take Precious Time Away From My Baby To Start Blogging Again
I spent a large chunk of last weekend working on a list of blogging related tasks as part of Bloggiesta. Every couple of months, the website hosts an event during which a group of book bloggers take on certain tasks and complete them during a set number of days. Lists are posted on the website,… Read More Mutual Support and Assistance in the Book Blogging World: My First Bloggiesta Experience
NaNoWriMo 2014 came to a close on 30 November, but I was lucky enough to reach the goal a couple of days before. Although I don’t know if all of them will make the final cut, I managed to write over 50,000 words of the sequel to the Spirit Within Club. I had discussed at… Read More Did I Win? Some Thoughts on NaNoWriMo 2014
By Larry Shnyder Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about just how much my life has changed with regard to personal entertainment. I’ve never been too much of a “gamer,” per se, but when I did play video games I usually did so alone. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. I always saw it… Read More Modern Gaming Thrives On Communities & Friendships
Just a couple of weeks ago, Bahá’í communities around the world elected their national administrative bodies in a unique electoral process. One of its aspects is, as I personally understand it, that each elector has to make the effort to get to know all the members of one’s community. I also understand that to build… Read More How to Make the Time to Nurture Deep Friendships while Having the Time to get to Know All Community Members: Some Thoughts
When it comes to both personal development and community building, understand certain theories that psychologists have developed has come in quite handy. I mentioned this to a friend recently who confessed that he had tried wading into reading about such studies a few times but he stepped right back out because it was just all… Read More Featured Post: ‘Why We Do Dumb or Irrational Things: 10 Brilliant Social Psychology Experiments’
The question of gender equality is a fascinating one, to say the least. I recently had a great chat on Facebook with one of my friends on the implications of the advice given in this post about men encouraging women’s quest to be modest in their dress to help decrease the level of objectification of… Read More It’s Quicker to Get to my Service Project with a Car that Works: Some Thoughts on Material and Spiritual Progress
One of the things about having so many friends who have been pregnant before me is that I have had the pleasure of hearing about their pregnancy, labor, and delivery experiences and what they have learned from it. If there is one important, vital, underlying lesson I got from all of these experiences, it’s that… Read More Live From the Delivery Room! Community-Building and the Birth of a New Member