Provides a comprehensive guide to growing one's own food organically, as well as how to cook home-grown produce, raise one's own selected livestock, and develop a more sustainable lifestyle.

'Slices of Life' is a collection of short stories or vignettes that provide an immersive and entertaining experience of diverse scenarios of life in motion. They are slivers of existence with the ingredients of plot and characters, sprinkled with human emotion, pervaded by the aroma of human dilemmas and served in the platter of lucid language. Sometimes searing with agony and often pervaded with beauty and yearning in the midst of travails in a contemporary or futuristic reality, they explore relationships and the human struggle to find meaning amidst chaos. They describe the consequences of our choices and characters who are at the threshold of a discovery or have reached the zenith of tolerance. The universal themes and enduring images of commonplace individuals in the swirl of life are embedded in a mixed bag of genres ranging from bathos and futuristic Sci-Fi to grim Realistic fiction and a suspenseful Whodunit.

Charlie Sweetwater returns to his hometown to visit his brother but arrives to find he is a no-show: The Coast Guard has discovered Johnny’s shrimp boat drifting abandoned in the Gulf. Is it “death by misadventure” as the authorities presume, or something more sinister? Meanwhile, Fulton Harbor, where Charlie’s family have docked their shrimp boats for generations, has changed—and not for the better. Hard-working Vietnamese fishermen are under the thumb of Col. Nguyen Ngoc Bao, a ruthless exiled gangster who aims to recreate his criminal enterprise in a New World setting. Confronting Bao and his thugs are Charlie and a mismatched group of good guys (and gals): a fast-and-loose Cajun hustler, a salty cast of “Third Coast” barroom regulars, a handful of courageous Vietnamese émigrés, a menacing ex-convict, and a misplaced Texas Ranger who discovers a slice of the Lone Star State that the cowboy movies of his boyhood never prepared him for. Along the way Charlie finds himself falling for his brother’s girlfriend, whose zealous desire to see justice served tests his own limits for loyalty and commitment. Unlikely heroes arise from improbable circumstances, and the denizens of the small seaside community find their fortunes and fates ebbing and flowing like the tidal flux of the ocean itself.

Ready Player One meets Stranger Things in this new novel by the bestselling author who George RR Martin describes as "an excellent writer." In January 1986, fifteen-year-old boy-genius Nick Hayes discovers he's dying. And it isn't even the strangest thing to happen to him that week. Nick and his Dungeons & Dragons-playing friends are used to living in their imaginations. But when a new girl, Mia, joins the group and reality becomes weirder than the fantasy world they visit in their weekly games, none of them are prepared for what comes next. A strange--yet curiously familiar--man is following Nick, with abilities that just shouldn't exist. And this man bears a cryptic message: Mia's in grave danger, though she doesn't know it yet. She needs Nick's help--now. He finds himself in a race against time to unravel an impossible mystery and save the girl. And all that stands in his way is a probably terminal disease, a knife-wielding maniac and the laws of physics. Challenge accepted.

You think your life is nuts? Since I was sixteen, I've spent time on Death Row, tried to sell my baby sister on the black market, been stranded at the altar (repeatedly), lied about my son's paternity, and fought viciously with just about everybody in town. Well, okay, it wasn't really me--it was my character, Sami Brady on Days of Our Lives. But like Sami, I've had my share of struggles. I've been told I was fat, watched fellow actresses starve themselves, been cruelly rejected, and wondered if I would ever date. (Hey, the first time I kissed a boy was in front of a TV camera!) There was even a time when I hated myself. Sound familiar? This is my story. It's an account of my years on daytime's most popular soap, and of my life off-screen--the major ups and downs, the craziness of Hollywood, balancing work and play, looking for love, concerns about weight, peer pressure, and finally learning to accept myself for who I am. I'll tell you fun stories about myself and my co-stars. . .recollections of my most memorable scenes. . .and everything you've always wanted to know about Sami. I think you'll find a lot in these pages that will remind you of all the days of your life. . .and perhaps inspire you to follow your own dreams in the days to come. Alison Sweeney was born in Los Angeles, one of three children of a concert violinist mother and a business investor father. Her acting career began when she was four years old. Throughout her childhood, Alison appeared in numerous television commercials, as well television series including Friends, Simon & Simon, Webster, St. Elsewhere, and Tales from the Darkside. She had starring roles in the films The Price of Life and The End of Innocence. Alison joined the cast of Days of Our Lives as Sami Brady in 1993. In her years on the series, her character has evolved from a troubled teenager to a scheming villainess. In 2002, Alison won a fan-voted Emmy as America's Favorite Villain. She has also won the fan-voted Soap Opera Digest Award four times, and in 2001 was elected by the same publication as one of the Most Beautiful Women in Daytime Television. Soap Opera Weekly named Alison 1999's Breakout Performer of the year, and in Australia, she was voted "Best Bad Girl" in 2000 and 2001 by readers of Inside Soaps magazine. Alison lives in a suburb of Los Angeles with her husband, Dave.

To chronicle why young people especially students want to come to United States, what they go through to come here, what their dreams are before they land here, what they experience in the United States and do they really succeed and fulfill their dreams or do they end up somewhere else?