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I visited New Creations of Richmond, Indiana way back in mid winter of 2007 and I was impressed with the people I met, the facilities New Creations offered, the students and the school’s programs. New Creations Chapel is a church based ministry that reaches back to the late 60s when Tim and Bonnie Cummings were led by the Lord to work with young people. They initially began with a traveling youth choir (which exists through today). As the church matured, it branched out into specific ministries including a boarding school, camp facilities, a local day Christian school, a Bible college, and a basketball academy. In recent years, when New Creations asked us at Sozo Creative to improve their web presence with new websites and to assist with their online marketing, it was a privilege we didn’t look upon lightly.

New Creations Boarding School offers personalized help to teens who might be struggling academically or socially in their current school setting. The program is fairly strict and has been likened to a Christian version of military school, but it has offered hundreds of teens the boost they need – both spiritually and personally – to help them get back onto the right track. The boarding school is also a great option for foreign students looking at a couple years of Christian high school education (in English) in preparation for applying to a U.S. college or university. The school is also perfect for overseas missionaries who may be struggling to give their children a proper English education. The boarding school is quite affordable, comparatively speaking, at $2500 per month for room, board & tuition (2009-2010 school year).

Located on 450 acres straddling the Ohio and Indiana border with acres of trees and water, it made perfect sense for New Creations to develop camp & conference facilities. Presently, the ministry doesn’t offer a full fledged children’s camping program but offers the facilities (cabins, recreation hall, lake, sport fields, cafeteria, gym) for rent to Christian ministries and other groups which then operate their camping programs on the site. God has truly blessed New Creations with beautiful facilities. Each year they undertake additional building programs to further develop their facilities.

Along with their boarding school, New Creations also offers a standard Christian school to day students located in the Richmond, Indiana region as well as for faculty/staff children. The curriculum is based on Alpha Omega’s LifePac and Switched on Schoolhouse programs, which permits them to flexibly cater to each child’s learning level.

For those interested in furthering their Christian education, perhaps for preparation for pastoral ministry or for the mission field, New Creations offers a Bible college with two and four year degree options including intercultural studies, Christian education, residential counseling and pastoral theology. Bible college students are then able to apply their learning in a practical environment at the boarding school and other ministries at New Creations.

In recent years, New Creations began a Christian basketball academy called New Creations Basketball Academy. NCBA has already achieved four national championships and is rapidly progressing forward as it equips young men with competitive basketball skills and a sure foundation in the Bible. Anthony (Tony) Cole is the head coach and is eager to see success personally, professionally and spiritually in the lives of the young men he serves.

New Creations is definitely a ministry to check out, especially if you’re looking for a Bible based boarding school to send your daughter or son to. I highly recommend it.

Ever tasted a delicious seasoned roast at a restaurant and wondered just what spices they put in it to make it taste that way? Or wondered just what combination of ingredients those caterers used for that moist pound cake? Chances are you asked or looked around to see if you could find a recipe for the dish that you wanted to eat at home.

Some restaurants sell recipe books explaining how they make their dishes or showing things you can make with special sauces and mixes that they sell. But you might not want to carry a bulky book home with you. And you might not be able to get a copy just of one recipe. But you’d buy something small that lets you take home a whole bunch of your favorite recipes. That is where a flash drive makes a useful tool for holding recipes.

Sell your grill recipes on USB flash drives

A restaurant or novelty store could sell a USB drive that contains a large selection of recipes. CFgear can help them develop a custom layout that helps users navigate to the recipes they want to see. They could see an opening screen with the name of the restaurant and its logo and a picture of a big juicy steak in the background. On the side would be links to various types of recipes that could be divided into categories like meats, salads, desserts, etc.

The custom USB drive would contain detailed recipes listing ingredients, amounts for various serving sizes, and instructions for cooking. It could also show pictures of the finished product (and maybe some steps along the way). With a large enough flash drive size, it could even contain short video clips showing how to mix ingredients or cook or serve or do other steps along the way.

You can pick from a wide variety of bulk flash drives on CFgear’s website. You want oval-shaped? Square? Credit card-size? Wood? Plastic? Metal? They’ve got them all for you to look through and pick the one that suits your restaurant/store the best. Once you’ve picked a drive, they can imprint it in up to four colors with your logo using precise Pantone color matching technology. Or, if you wish, they can laser-engrave your logo on select drives for an especially professional look. Your USB drive, your choice—it’s all about customization.

Using flash drives, people can fulfill their dreams of making that delicious chicken cordon blue at home just the way they had it at that classy restaurant. They can simply plug a drive into a computer, browse to the recipe they want, print it out, and head to the kitchen. Then they can don aprons and find the ingredients to mix together and cook up into a delectable meal.

The drive could contain print-friendly documents with the recipes, and maybe even card-size printouts to store together. CFgear lets you preload file formats like PDFs and Word docs onto the USB drives.

Use custom bulk flash drives to preserve recipes for people that want to take them home. Check out CFgear’s website today to learn more.

Now is not a great time to be selling your house. I know this first hand. We’ve had the house on the market for two months and no one has even viewed it. We’ve had several open houses and the only people who showed were realtors and nosy neighbors. It’s a frustrating time for both buyer and seller. The buyer can’t buy because mortgage loans are becoming extremely more difficult to obtain, if obtainable at all. Those with poor credit might as well forget about obtaining a mortgage much less trying to even get a credit card. As for the seller, since there are so few buyers who have the means to purchase, the selling prospect further dims.

As for my family, we have determined that if we sell, that’s fine and if we don’t, that will be fine also. There is no absolute need for us to move other than we would like the kids to have their own bedroom and we would like more garage space so that my husband can comfortably work from home. However, our wants are just that and certainly not needs. In some ways, I feel content just to stay right where I’m at. There wouldn’t be any moving expenses and hassle. Our current mortgage is approximately 3 years off from being paid off completely. It would in fact make life easier in some aspects.

Trying to sell a house during the poor economy

We have looked at another house that is for sale. It would certainly meet our needs with plenty of space for the kids and the husbands business. The price is right, given the current market, but the interior needs some serious help. The kitchen would need to be gutted, the ceilings need the popcorn texture shoveled off and skipped troweled, the wood paneling would need to come down and be replaced with drywall and the bathrooms updated. Of course, all of this is no small feat. Unfortunately, my husband is not the handy one in this family so most of the tasks would be mine. I could probably handle most of the gutting of the kitchen but the re installation would definitely be someone else’s issue. The ceilings are no problem for me. I can get the popcorn down. Putting up the mud is labor intensive and shoulder killing, but I could probably do if I had to. I have no problem taking paneling down and I could even put the drywall up myself but the seams and joints would need a master’s touch.

After all the big items are taken care of, then there are the little things such as painting, furniture, alarm system installation, window treatments and so on. Most of the little things are do-able over time. I’ve been debating whether to go with a monitored alarm system like ADT (www.adt.com) or just install a system myself that isn’t monitored such as the 54 piece X10 home security system from X10 Package Deals. Both have good points to them. It’s a subject still up for discussion with my husband.

As you can see, if you can move during this recession that we’re in, the updating and remodeling don’t lessen by project or by cost. Perhaps it may be best just to stay exactly where I’m at.