Because it’s not really fall, until you have a bowl of chili in front of you.
Read in full on AARP The Girlfriend.
Category: home
The Girlfriend’s Guide To Renting Out Your Home While You’re Away
My Texan girlfriend Paulina is one smart woman. She has demonstrated how to parlay their home investment into disposable income for her family of four. Five years ago, she listed their Austin home on the popular short-term home-rental site Vacation Rental By Owner (VRBO), and her efforts have paid off.
You can list your home for rent not only through VRBO, but also through Airbnb or HomeAway vacation rental marketplaces. But you need to know what you’re doing.
Read in full at AARP The Girlfriend.
The Girlfriend’s Guide To Essential Oils
Essential oils have won me over because they stand ready to meet today’s smelly challenges, and more.
So, how do I love thee, essential oils? Let me elaborate here:
1. Last time I opened my washing machine I nearly fell over backward after inhaling rank mold and mildew. It was disgusting. I bet I’m not the only one with a smelly washing machine,no? To banish the stench, I recommend following this formula, which includes 20 drops of any antifungal essential oil. Antifungal oils include: citronella, eucalyptus, geranium, lavender, lemongrass, orange, palmarosa, patchouli, peppermint and tea tree.
2. Shoe deodorizer fueled by the power of natural essential oils? Yassss, please! Try Poo-Pourri’s spray, Shoe-Pourri. It deploys cedarwood, eucalyptus and grapefruit to extinguish shoe odors and earns a solid five-star rating from over a hundred customers. You also might want to try Natural Shoe Deodorizer Spray, which seeks to eliminate odors with antibacterial and antifungal oils.
Read in full on AARP The Girlfriend.
Stirring Up Peace In The Home, Complete With Love And Mutual Respect
With all the confrontation and strife around us, who doesn’t wish for a more peaceful world? I’ve watched people become embroiled in polarizing issues and hope that they’re paying attention to the sphere of influence where they are in control. As one concerned parent, I’ve decided to look first into the place where I can directly stir-up peace: my own home. Here are some straightforward tips to help encourage other parents in the realm where they hold significant influence.
Resist yelling around the house, no matter the size of your home. Walk into the next room and talk face-to-face with your child.
With her characteristic transparency Lori Borgman, grandmother of eleven, syndicated columnist and author of, “I Was A Better Mother Before I Had Kids” pleads guilty to sometimes raising her voice around the home. But, she says, that though it may be momentarily expedient, in the long run, it’s “a horrible habit to develop”. So, if we mess up from time to time, don’t give in. Work intentionally—like Borgman does—to prevent this oops from morphing into a hardened habit.
“Face-to-face is always better,” Bellaire High School counselor Susan Childs told me. She continued, noting that when one person’s voice is raised, it’s reciprocated and pretty quickly, no matter the topic, the point of conversation is lost. Meredith Bodgas, mother and editor-in-chief of WorkingMother.com agrees that the message is affected by its delivery: “Get down on their level so you’re talking to them, not at them or above them. Not only will they may be more inclined to listen to what you’re saying but you’ll also be less inclined to raise your voice since you’ll be so close to their little face.”
Read in full on Houston Family Magazine.
Living in Jane Jacobs’ Neighborhood
In the Rainey Street District of Austin, Texas, a stranger approached my dog, hand extended. “Puppy!” she shrieked weirdly, a piercing decibel, especially for the hour of day. My first thought is that she closed the bars and is drunk, but, she’s not. She and her friend are in fashionable workout gear, probably all ginned up on coffee and ready for some speed-walking.
Otherwise, relative calm prevails early mornings in my neighborhood when I slip out the door to take Ezzy for her walk.
My neighborhood is a trendy downtown bar district, home to live music, food trucks, drinking holes and raucous partying. But early mornings, it’s even better, with neighbor brushing against neighbor and work crews quietly coming and going, cleaning up what was left behind from the previous night’s revelries. I stop to put a beer glass on an outdoor table that someone has left on the sidewalk outside of Bangers and exchange hellos with the manager.
“How’s the girl?” Brian says. My daughter worked for him the summer before college. He wrote a warm reference letter on her behalf for a volunteer program she’s now involved with at university. When my husband and I stop in for drinks, Brian sometimes says they’re on the house and we trade stories about vacation and raising teenagers.
In the early 2000s I read Jane Jacobs’ magnum opus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, on the workings of a great city. This 585-page hardback enjoys a prominent place on my shelf, standing proud though dozens of fuchsia post-it-notes marking the best of the best sections from my first read protrude like a child’s unruly tufts of hair. Jacobs was a long-time resident of Greenwich Village and she starts her book at the beginning, with the humble sidewalk, the fundamental building block of a city.
Read in full on StrongTowns.org
Filipinos Finding Each Other In Washington, DC
I published a personal essay about my childhood in the Philippines in Story|Houston a few years ago. But recently after moving to Washington, DC, I found myself frequently walking past the well-positioned Embassy of the Philippines. It got me thinking about the Filipino-Americans living around me. Although I grew up in the Philippines, I later lived the expat life with my husband (and eventually, kids) in Germany, Dubai and London. Did Filipino-Americans in Washington, DC feel lonely like I sometimes felt as an expat? Did they long to be with others who ‘get it’? Maybe they’d been away from the Philippines so long, immersed in American culture, that they felt detached from their homeland and longed to refresh their understanding of Filipino customs and culture. If so, how did they find each other to reconnect and enjoy mutual refreshment?
The point is, it takes a long time to carve out a place in another country enough to call it home. When you are with others to learn from, to commiserate with, to exchange stories and experiences with, it’s going to be a little bit easier. Gathering with others who share the same ethnic background could set things right.
This article I wrote for Taste.Company shows where this line of thinking took me. Special thanks to Editor Jenny Dorsey and Executive Director Jason Tengco of National Federation of Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA). Read in full here.
Once Upon An Expat
With great excitement I present Once Upon An Expat now available in paperback on Amazon. Connecting with this talented, fascinating group of writers from all across the globe under the leadership of Editor Lisa Webb has provided me a singular writing high point for 2016.
Go to Amazon for your Kindle or paperback copy and while you’re at it, check out my author page!
The One Trip Guaranteed To Majorly Test Your Marriage
If you can get through this, you can get through anything.
If you consider your family life healthy don’t test it by going to IKEA for the day, especially if you have recently moved overseas to an unfamiliar city such as London, with previous stops along the way in exotic-but-foreign places.
I’ve recently recovered from a family outing to a London IKEA after making just such a protracted international move. I’d prepared for our journey to IKEA well in advance, measuring every potential living and storage arrangement possible in our 900-square-foot flat.
Except for clothing and personal effects, we’d moved with nothing. Our flat was empty and a robust shopping trip was needed for items such as tomorrow morning’s cup for my American cup-of-coffee.
Read in full on YourTango.
From Sampaguita to Bleeding Heart: A Story of Resurrection
The earth was cracked and troubled in Washington, D.C. If only you’d been listening, you would have decoded the garbled whisperings of Auntie Kay’s rapid decline, a sampaguita wilting, just like your bleeding hearts in summer, hot as morning mouth. Instead, you obsessed over perennials, especially your bleeding hearts. And, you stupidly pinned your success on them. Now their decline signaled a mocking failure.
Formerly a burned out parking lot, your skinny 15×45 patch of manufactured grass served as an urban backyard. Belying appearances, this defiled earth hid scars of the past that now threatened to slice up your hands. Your gardening gloves mostly shielded you from the harmful objects—glass, rusty metal, bullet casings, and ground-up concrete. Undaunted, you imagined Eden could be realized in one growing season under your coaxing, a remarkable, almost impossible, feat for a veteran gardener. Unluckily, you were an amateur. Unluckily, there was a drought that year. Unluckily, it was Auntie Kay’s final summer.
On the surface it was the bleeding hearts that filled you with a pitiful, throat-catching anxiety. Running parallel, deeper, viciously circling in your gut, was the once unflappable Auntie Kay now wasting away in Chicago. Be honest. Pull back the curtain: that was the throat-catching anxiety.
Read in full at Santa Fe Writers Project: http://sfwp.com/resurrection-by-kathryn-streeter/
Love City, Love Bike
Love City, Love Bike
In downtown Austin, the clerk helps me with my groceries: wine, chocolate, tea, pepperoni and eggs.
“Is a double-bag fine?”
Uh-huh, I nod and add to please pack things tightly.
I load my sturdy basket behind the seat of my old lady’s bike, as my teens call it. I’m mostly worried the eggs won’t make it home on the path that leads to our downtown high-rise apartment.
When we moved to Austin not only did we downsize to fit our family of four into an apartment in the heart of the city, we freed ourselves of our second car. Between bikes, Uber and car-sharing options, having one car was completely rational. Biking around town is our preference, whether to the store, doctor or coffee shop.
Go to Austin American-Statesman for the full story.
kathrynstreeter.com 