Why not take the opportunity to be selfish and use the new term to create a new you? This could mean starting a new hobby or kick-starting your love life with some internet dating. Follow these steps and you’ll soon find your identity again – an identity outside the realm of parenthood.

Time for fitness

Looking after children can sometimes mean you stop looking after yourself. Take a look at your diet and day-to-day regime: are you as healthy as your kids? Try to start putting some time aside for a bit of fitness. This could be a 30-minute jog every morning once you’ve dropped the kids at school or an exercise class every Thursday when they’re at an afterschool club. The fitter you are, the better you’ll feel and the more energy you’ll have to deal with the hectic lifestyle of a single parent.

Time for relaxation

It’s also important to find some time to relax. Stress is a major cause of a lot of health problems and can have some very damaging side-effects. Try finding a hobby or a place that relaxes you, whether that’s a yoga class, a trip to the cinema or a certain room in the house. Then, when you feel the pressure building, you will have this comfort to retreat to.

Start to feel good about yourself again with a bit of preening and pampering. It’s amazing what a new suit, haircut or beauty treatment can do. Your confidence will be boosted and you’ll walk out with an extra spring in your step.

Time for socialising

Use the time to reconnect with your social circle. Take advantage of your lunch breaks for catch-ups with friends you may have neglected during the bustle of the summer holidays. Your friends will have you laughing again and re-acquainting yourself with the old you, who may be feeling a bit neglected after the last few months.

Time for dating

It’s easy to lose sight of the whole concept of a love life when you’re a single parent. But you could use your new free time to remedy this: go for a day out in London dating or hire a babysitter and go for dinner while the kids do their homework. This could be the perfect time to introduce a special new someone into your life.

Use the new term and the free time it affords to create a new you – a healthy, relaxed, gorgeous social butterfly whose life isn’t entirely dictated by children!

By David Beasley

ATLANTA |
Fri Sep 16, 2011 10:15am EDT

ATLANTA (Reuters) – Grammy Award-winning rapper T.I. is once again out of federal prison and in a halfway house, his attorney said on Friday.

The Atlanta entertainer, whose real name is Clifford Harris, was released August 31 from a federal prison in Arkansas where he was serving an 11-month sentence on weapons possession and drug charges.

T.I. was assigned to a halfway house in Atlanta for the last month of his sentence. But shortly after leaving Arkansas, the rapper was returned to a federal prison in Atlanta because officials had an “issue” with his ride on a luxury bus from Arkansas to Atlanta, attorney Steve Sadow said.

Prison officials believed T.I. was conducting business on the bus, Sadow told Reuters on Friday.

“But we provided them with information that he wasn’t actually conducting business on the bus,” the attorney said.

On Thursday, T.I. was transferred from prison to the Atlanta halfway house, Sadow said. The entertainer is scheduled to be released September 29.

He was sentenced in October 2010 to 11 months in prison for violating the terms of his probation on federal gun charges after he was arrested on suspicion of possessing the drug ecstasy.

It was his second stint behind bars in three years.

T.I.’s career began as a rapper in 2001, but he then branched out into other areas of the music and film industry, finding success both as a producer and actor.

Cable channel VH1 said last month that it had teamed up with the 30-year-old “Got Your Back” singer for a 10-episode series that will follow his readjustment to life outside prison and the making of a new album. The series is due to premiere on December 5.

(Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Greg McCune)

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LOS ANGELES |
Mon Sep 19, 2011 7:55pm EDT

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Charlie Sheen and Warner Bros are close to a settlement on the actor’s $100 million lawsuit against the studio over his firing from “Two and a Half Men,” a source with knowledge of the situation said on Monday.

Sheen, who has been sounding contrite in recent days regarding his troubles with the makers of his old television show, sued Warner Bros in Los Angeles Superior Court in March and the case has been in arbitration.

A Warner Bros. spokesman said no final deal has been reached and declined to comment further. Sheen’s lawyer was not immediately available to comment.

Sheen was the highest-paid actor on U.S. television for the role of womanizing bachelor Charlie Harper. But he was fired after several trips to rehab and for publicly insulting creator Chuck Lorre and makers Warner Bros. Television.

In the months afterward, Sheen posted videos in which he claimed he was always winning while others were losing, boasted he had “tiger blood” and toured a live show called “My Torpedo of Truth: Defeat is Not an Option.” The show met with mixed results.

But in the last few days, he seems to be on a tour of contrition, culminating in his appearance at Sunday night’s Emmy Awards, U.S. TV’s top honors.

“From the bottom of my heart, I wish you nothing but the best for this upcoming season,” he said, addressing the cast and creators of the revamped comedy in front of a TV audience of more than 12 million people. “We spent eight wonderful years together, and I know you will continue to make great television.”

Sheen told “Today” show host Matt Lauer last week that he regrets claiming he had “tiger blood” and “Adonis DNA,” calling them jokes and metaphors that he never really believed. He told Jay Leno that he would have fired himself, given his behavior.

The reports of a settlement came hours before the premiere on Monday of “Two and A Half Men” starring newcomer Ashton Kutcher, and a Comedy Central roast of Sheen.

The case is Sheen et al v. Lorre et al, Los Angeles Superior Court, No. SC111794.

For Sheen: Martin Singer of Lavely Singer.

For Lorre et al: Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump Aldisert.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis)

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LOS ANGELES |
Mon Sep 19, 2011 7:07pm EDT

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Dolores Hope, the wife of late entertainer Bob Hope, died on Monday of natural causes at the age of 102, a family spokesman said.

Hope, a singer who put her career on hold after her marriage, died in the Toluca Lake area of Los Angeles, said spokesman Harlan Boll. Bob Hope, her husband of almost 70 years, died in July 2003 at the age of 100.

Dolores Hope had a singing career in New York before she met her entertainer husband and married him. Together, they moved to Los Angeles so he could pursue a career in film and television.

The couple raised four children and Dolores often accompanied Hope on his many visits to entertain U.S. troops overseas.

At the age of 83, she revived her singing career, recording several albums and performing with Rosemary Clooney. She made her last visit to U.S. servicemen at age 84, during the 1991 Gulf War, when she performed “White Christmas” from the back of a truck in the Saudi desert.

Bob Hope is among the most beloved U.S. entertainers of the 20th Century. He got his start on vaudeville, worked on radio, acted in movies where he was perhaps best known for his road films with Bing Crosby, and in later years appeared in numerous TV specials. Hope would frequently mention his marriage to Delores on TV talk shows.

Like her husband, Delores Hope was a keen golfer and received multiple awards for her humanitarian work, especially for causes that benefited the poor.

She leaves two children, three grandchildren and a great grandson.

Boll said funeral services would be private and Dolores would be buried next to her husband at the Bob Hope Memorial Garden at the San Fernando Mission outside Los Angeles.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)

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By Mike Collett-White

LONDON |
Mon Sep 19, 2011 11:59am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) – The public adored John Martin’s apocalyptic images of destruction and chaos yet the art establishment shunned him, helping to consign the British artist’s works to the storage vaults.

Now a new show at London’s Tate Britain gallery seeks to remind modern viewers what all the fuss was about nearly 200 years ago, when thousands of people queued to see Martin’s work.

Charting the artist’s rise to stardom, fall from grace and brief posthumous rehabilitation, “John Martin: Apocalypse” represents the largest display of Martin’s works seen in public since 1822.

The exhibition, which runs from September 21-January 15, 2012 also features Martin’s “lost” masterpiece, “The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum,” painted in 1821 but badly damaged in a flood in 1928.

Experts have carried out a painstaking restoration of the large, dramatic canvas, and the work will be seen in public for the first time in almost a century.

“His images touched the lives of thousands of ordinary people in Britain and around the world, but his reputation has suffered from art world snobbery and misunderstanding,” said Martin Myrone, curator of the show.

Martin is best known for his large canvases depicting spectacular scenes from the Bible, legend and history in which the romanticized backdrop — architectural or natural — dwarfs the human element.

Among the earliest examples on display in the exhibition is “Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion,” dated 1812, based on James Ridley’s popular Orientalist fantasy “Tales of the Genii.”

Myrone said the picture was deliberately designed and executed to have maximum impact at the Royal Academy exhibition where it was first displayed.

He said Martin chose the upright format rather than the more familiar landscape, and painted in bright red to draw viewers’ attention to the dramatic work.

“John Martin was trying to make a name for himself and grab public attention,” Myrone told reporters at a preview of the show.

The tactic worked, and Martin built on his early success with a series of blockbuster paintings, notably “Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon” (1816), “The Fall of Babylon” (1819) and “Belshazzar’s Feast” (1820).

Two were purchased by Martin’s former employer in 1821 and went on display in a touring exhibition around the country that was highly profitable for the organizers but made little or no money for Martin himself.

The artist, never slow to eye a commercial opportunity, aimed to match the success of that tour with his own solo exhibition in London, where “The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum” was the centerpiece.

Soon after, he turned his attention to producing a series of mezzotint engravings to illustrate John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” after receiving a hefty commission.

His work with prints helped spread his fame around the world, although they did little to enamor the critics who became increasingly hostile to his work.

John Ruskin, the arbiter of artistic taste in the 19th century, once wrote: “Martin’s works are merely a common manufacture, as much makeable to order as a tea-tray or a coal-scuttle.”

Myrone said he suspected “some form of class prejudice” in such judgments, while Tate Britain director Penelope Curtis saw parallels between Martin’s self-promotion and that of contemporary artist Damien Hirst.

The exhibition, organized roughly chronologically, dedicates a separate room to Martin’s “Last Judgment” triptych painted toward the end of his life.

According to the Tate, the pictures were on show from 1854, the year of Martin’s death, until the 1870s, travelled across Britain as well as to New York and Australia and were seen by up to eight million members of the public.

By the turn of the 20th century, they were out of sight and out of mind, dismissed as examples of Victorian “bad taste.”

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

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