valentines flowers delivery - Volunteer group ready to help homeless, others in need

With the plight of the homeless and other needy people in their hearts, a group of area volunteers stands ready to help the less fortunate in various ways.
Founded by Bristol Township resident Penny Martin in 2009, the nonprofit Advocates for Homeless and Those in Need has, among other services, established a Code Blue program in Bucks County.

When the temperature dips below a certain level, Advocates volunteers fan out to area homeless encampments and transport the homeless to one of four local churches that take turns providing shelter. The organization also transports the homeless and others to meals held at area churches.
The idea for the Advocates group started when members of the Emilie United Methodist Church in Bristol Township, including Martin, were having a valentines flowers delivery dinner in 2009, according to Martin and a history of the organization on the church’s website.
Though homeless people from a nearby encampment were invited to attend the dinner, only four or five showed up.
“We soon realized that was because they didn’t have a way to get there,” said Martin.
With the help of Bristol Township police and others, Martin and other church members delivered leftover food from the Valentine’s dinner to homeless encampments. The transportation network and other services offered by the Advocates have expanded from there, Martin said.
“I realized that God was leading me to do a mission, to do something to serve our homeless in a better way,” she said. “But this isn’t about me. It’s about God working through so many wonderful people. I couldn’t do anything without the hard work and help of so many others.”
The role of the group has no defined borders, said Martin.
“That’s why the words and those in need were added to advocates for the homeless in our name,” she said. “As examples, we try to help people who can’t pay an oil bill, or can’t pay for a prescription, or elderly people who don’t have transportation to a doctor’s appointment. Our name is definitive of who we are.”
Martin said the group recently tried to help a homeless person who was determined to end his homeless status. One of the first steps was to get him a photo ID card.
“He had a birth certificate and other needed papers,” Martin explained. “We took him to a place in Bensalem, but they wouldn’t give him the ID because he didn’t have an address. I mean, a homeless person should be able to get a photo ID. We’re not giving up. We’re going to get that man his photo ID.”
The Advocates mission statement says the group is “an interfaith ministry whose mission is to help the homeless and those at risk of becoming homeless attain self sufficiency by offering, with dignity and compassion, food, clothing, resources for shelter, housing, employment, medical aid and other services. We also provide opportunities for all God’s children to be a part of this mission by using the gifts they have been given to help others.”
The churches that participate in the Code Blue program and take turns providing shelter during cold weather are: the Emmaus Road Lutheran Church on Hood Boulevard in Falls; the United Christian Church on New Falls Road in Falls; A Church of Living Hope on East Maple Avenue in Middletown; and the Woodside Presbyterian Church on Edgewood Road in Lower Makefield.
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valentines flower delivery - Carlos Rigau's Sections Exhibition Opens at General Practice

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General Practice is an abode located a little bit north of 36th Street that doubles as a gallery. Miami-based artist Carlos Rigau runs the space and will exhibit the five-artist show Sections this Thursday. He's played host to an R. Kelly/Valentine's Day-themed dance party, eardrum crushing metal shows, and this week, GP will house Roofless Records' New Year's Eve fundraiser.

General Practice, Rigau says, "fills a void of work that's a little more difficult to commodify."

The space lends itself to a certain sensibility, one marked by the artist's dark but humorous perspective. All flyers and images emerging from GP look like something Dracula might create when inviting friends over for a birthday party.

When Crossfade spoke with Rigau a few months back about a musical experiment curated by Viking Funeral, where bands played one after the other in each room, he called General Practice, "solutions in spaces." His upcoming show Sections was somewhat inspired by the emptiness of three of the first floor rooms. His goal is to find the right ideas to fit the structure. This exhibition allows you to discover the empty domestic area as occupied by artists Ryan Roa, Jeroen Nelemans, Justin Long, Domingo Castillo, and Rigau.

New York-based Roa uses rubber bungie cords to create shapes that connect the wall to the floor. Rigau says it's formalist, modern, and a little S&M, keeping with the murky and somewhat creepy theme of GP. Nelemans from Chicago is using laser levels and mirrors to create boxy shapes in a dark room. Similar to Roa, Rigau notes, "They're both using these materials that create form, but they're not art materials." He added of the works in Sections, "Formally, all of them make sense together."

Long, Castillo, and Rigau have created an environment where viewers can watch a video filmed at the end/SPRING BREAK's space at the Miami International Art Fair. In the cubicle, Long painted watercolors of things like a crotch in a Speedo, while Rigau tried to auction off Long's simple creations.

While he comically begged people to buy these paintings, he offered a slideshow of Google image searches of Cousin Itt and told personal stories about onlookers. Rigau said cynically of the event, "Selling watercolors at an art fair speaks for itself." The Heat Lightning said, "The coolest thing happened last weekend, and you weren't there." With this installation, you can pretend you were that cool that you were there.

Sections opens on Dec. 29 at General Practice on 7 p.m., 3930 NW 2 Ave.,
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valentines flower delivery - Cake pops are the newest item on the menu at this Richmond bakery

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Amber Wright's newest creations are small, round and covered in chocolate.
A mother of three with a love of and talent for cake decorating, Wright runs a small bakery out of her home in Richmond, called Under the Frosting. Her latest item on the menu are bite-sized pieces of cake on a lollipop stick, a new trend in the baking world called cake pops.
"I've always known that I wanted to work for myself," Wright said. "If you love what you do, you never have to work, and that's really how I feel. I feel like I'm not working, I'm just playing around in my kitchen, decorating something pretty."
Wright makes cakes, cupcakes and other treats for birthday parties, baby showers, graduation parties and other get-togethers. She even makes the occasional wedding cake, although weddings are not what drives the majority of her business.
"The first thing that pops into your mind when you think cake, is wedding," Wright said. "But there are so many different reasons to have a cake."
Through trial and error, Wright has developed about 60 of her own cake recipes. She said most recipes take her a few days to perfect, but some, such as her popular carrot cake recipe, have taken months.
For each new recipe, she researches about 10 existing recipes, determines what ingredients they all have in common, and adds different flavorings and extracts to her basic cake recipe.
"I think my husband has gained about 50 pounds, with me being like, ‘you need to try this, how does it taste? Does this taste like eggnog?'" Wright said. "I've gone through as many as 30 cakes to come up with one recipe."
Wright's signature cake flavors include eggnog, red velvet cake, chocolate peppermint, mimosa (made with orange juice and ginger ale), carrot cake and the traditional vanilla and chocolate.
Wright uses all of her original cake flavors in her cake pops as well. She first got the idea for the bite-sized delicacies from a TV show - in which a bakery presented a woman with baby-themed cake pops for her baby shower.
"I was just kind of thinking to myself, those are really interesting," Wright said. "It's relatively new, it's not something that a lot of people do or see. It's very unique."
The process to create the miniature sweets on a stick wasn't easy, however. Wright looked up several recipes, then went to work experimenting with different combinations. First, she added too much frosting and corn syrup, and the cake pops turned out sickly sweet, she said. On her second try, the chocolate solidified instantly when it came in contact with the sugar in the batter.
Frustrated, Wright just couldn't seem to make it work - until her husband came home one day with a cake pop maker for her birthday. The small plug-in machine has six round wells, each of which holds one flat tablespoon of any kind of cake or donut batter, Wright said.
After just six minutes, the machine produces six perfectly cooked balls of cake, which Wright gently removes with two spoons and places in a pan to cool. Although the machine has a non-stick surface, she always sprays it with cooking spray to ensure easy removal, with some types of cake batter more prone to stick than others.
Before dipping the one-inch cake balls into chocolate, Wright freezes them. Without this step, Wright said the cake will simply fall apart in the melted chocolate. Once the cake is frozen, she dips the lollipop stick in the chocolate first, something she said keeps the cake from falling off the stick later. She then carefully inserts the stick about halfway into the cake ball, then swirls it around in the melted chocolate until the cake is completely covered.
Once the chocolate is dry, Wright said the cake pops can be stored in the fridge - not the freezer, otherwise the chocolate will crack and shatter - and can be decorated for all sorts of occasions. She likes to dye the chocolate pink, green, blue, red or other bright colors, and then pipes a frosting Christmas tree, Valentine's Day heart, Fourth of July star of Halloween jack-o'-lantern directly onto the cake pop.
Wright makes her cake pops to order in any flavor, for any occasion. She charges $5 per half dozen, with an extra $5 for the entire order for frosting decorations. Chocolate, nuts and sprinkles are free.
Wright likes to make the cake pops on an assembly line - her freezer is always stocked with bags of cake balls ready to be dipped and decorated. A rack in her kitchen is piled high with packages of powered sugar, lollipop sticks and other baking supplies.
Wright said she's currently saving up for a down payment on a brick-and-mortar store, but for now, her three-year-old business is doing well. She keeps busy with orders for parties and events year-round.
"I love to do deliveries - I love to go to the child's birthday party, and deliver them their cake, and just see the look on their face," Wright said. "It's just amazing to me, just to make people happy. That's the best part."
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Valentines Flowers Delivery - Movie review: 'The Flowers of War'

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"The Flowers of War" has broken new ground for China's movie industry: It's among the first domestically financed films to star a high-profile Hollywood actor (Christian Bale), and its reported budget of close to $100 million makes it the country's priciest production to date. But when it comes to storytelling, Zhang Yimou's 19th feature is decidedly backward-looking: A lavish period weepie set against the atrocities of the Nanking Massacre, "Flowers" abounds with well-worn movie archetypes and slathers on schmaltz.

Based on Geling Yan's novel "13 Flowers of Nanjing," the story gathers an improbable collection of people — Bale's freelance American mortician, a group of convent schoolgirls and the women from a local brothel — in the nominal refuge of a Catholic cathedral as the capital falls to Japan's Imperial Army. Zhang marshals his creative team to deliver stunning cinematic sequences and period detail, particularly in Yohei Taneda's production design for the church and the character-defining costumes by William Chang Suk-Ping.

But "Flowers," China's official submission for the foreign-language Academy Award, remains an uneasy mix of action and melodrama.

Having helmed "House of Flying Daggers," not to mention the Beijing Olympics' opening and closing ceremonies, Zhang is no stranger to spectacle. Its place in a tale of brutality and emotional devastation is another matter — even if, in their very muchness, the lurid beauty of the visuals (photographed by frequent Zhang collaborator Zhao Xiaoding) and the hokey exaggerations of the story are well matched. All that's missing are characters as fully realized as their surroundings.

"Flowers" unfolds in December 1937, in the early months of the Second Sino-Japanese War, a crucial chapter in Chinese history that Zhang explored in his first film, 1987's "Red Sorghum." A younger Mainland director, Chuan Lu, created a memorable depiction of Nanking's decimation in the recent "City of Life and Death," a film that uses a broader canvas and a finer brush than Zhang chooses to employ.

The broad strokes of the screenplay by Liu Heng ("Ju Dou") pit the innocence of the schoolgirls against the worldliness of the prostitutes. The story's occasional narrator, 13-year-old Shu (Zhang Xinyi) — whose generic point of view adds nothing to the story — watches with alarm the seductive dance between scruffy John Miller (Bale) and elegant Yu Mo (Ni Ni), the brothel's No. 1 courtesan, herself convent-schooled and conversant in English.
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Innocence-vs.-experience is an undeniably strong theme. The girls' tender adolescence heightens its impact, especially given the historical facts. The Nanking Massacre is also known as the Rape of Nanking, and it's more than a figurative description: The Japanese invaders committed horrendous sexual assaults against the female population. In "Flowers," the girls' safety becomes the paramount concern of the survivors holed up in the cathedral.

But however terrible and real the threat of rape, the clumsy screenplay turns every Japanese soldier into a rampaging maniac, some of them screaming exultantly upon discovering virgins. The exception is commander Hasegawa (Atsuro Watabe), a soft-spoken man who appreciates music. The genteel colonel isn't, however, above arranging for the convent girls to be delivered into the hands of his superiors, setting in motion a contrived series of climactic events that are nonetheless affecting because of their elemental power.

The cultured military leader is one of the character perennials that populate the film, chief among them the whore with a heart of gold and the noncommittal loner who becomes a reluctant hero. From the moment Miller mutters "I'm not good with kids," there's no question that they'll capture his heart or that he'll shake off his boozy haze to protect them.

Mouthing dialogue that thuds more than it sings, Bale never quite shakes off the sense of performance, but at his best he embodies a man stepping awkwardly into costume — Miller drunkenly dons a dead priest's clothing — and growing, predictably, to fill the role. Most of the younger performers, including the impressive Ni Ni, are first-timers doing what they can in thinly conceived parts. All but stealing the film is newcomer Huang Tianyuan as George, an orphaned teen boy who grew up in the cathedral and proves its most steadfast defender.

Zhang often has focused on characters, especially women, enduring the constraints of tradition. In the courtesans of "Flowers" he has a poignant concept, if not vivid individuals. But it's George, who fits no preconceived mold, and whom Huang makes real amid the self-consciously artful visions of murder and mayhem, who brings home the story's central notion of selflessness and sacrifice.