Reveille Recommendation from Joan

I don't know about you ladies, but I have been loving our Reveille Readers and our Reveille Recipes!  I am always looking for my next book to dive into and I ALWAYS love new recipes to try! So I decided to give you another one of my alliterations - A couple of Reveille Recommendations!  Why not share other things with one another, whether it's a great new movie, an awesome hotel, your favorite TV show, or a class you tried at the gym!  We have no limits to what we can share, just let us know! 

Here are a couple of recommendations that I came up with to share with the Reveille Community!

Up by Jawbone

There are a number of new devices to track your daily activity, your sleep, your food intake, and calories burned.  I was given the Up band by Jawbone for the holidays and I wear it round the clock. Somehow this little gadget is able to sense when you are sitting idly or up strolling, running and working hard, lightly sleeping, and completely zonked.  Don't ask me how, but it seems pretty accurate. It communicates this info to you through the UP app which you download onto your phone.  You can set goals for sleep and steps per day and it gives you daily blurbs of advice to help you improve.  You can also set an "idle alert" so that if you are inactive for a period of time (mine is set for an hour), the band will vibrate to remind you to get off your keister. You can also use it as a daily alarm - it will wake you up during a preset window of time while you're in a lighter stage of sleep rather than deep sleep.  This way you wake up feeling more refreshed than if it had gone off while you were in deep sleep.  I’ve really learned a lot about my sleep patterns and I have had to take a real honest look at how much activity I’m getting during my days.  I love wearing it to the gym and then seeing my read out at the end of the day.  Good incentive!!

The Butler 

I highly recommend this movie starring among others, one of our favorites, Oprah Winfrey. The acting in this movie is terrific but it was in fact the story that really swept me away. It took us back to a time not all that long ago when America was such a different place to live. I found it almost hard to believe that during my lifetime America was a place where people harbored such hatred and disrespect of each other and could be so uncompassionate and somehow feel that was OK. It is good reminder to all of us that we should appreciate how we have learned to live together fairly and compassionately. I know there are still vestiges of our dark past alive in today’s world but The Butler is powerful because it depicts real people’s lives and how their hopes and dreams were dashed by other peoples need to feel superior. Don’t miss it!

Luminosity

I heard about an app that helps your concentration and focus and improves your cognitive thinking.  There are a number of different apps to do this and I’ve tried a few but I have found that Luminosity the easiest to use.  You can really get hooked on playing the brain games, and bottom line - I feel like it has actually improved my focus and memory.  I’ve never been one for crosswords or Sudoku, so I am happy to have found an app which I find fun to do and feel it’s beneficial.  It tracks my improvement and reminds me each day to go back to it and practice my memory and focus yet again. 

Do you have any Reveille Recommendations to share?  Let us know!