The Smart Woman's Guide to a Simple Life

RSS Feed Homepage

Q&A with author Allison Winn Scotch
2008-04-21 05:29:00
This week I'm so pleased to feature fellow magazine writer and two-time novelist Allison Winn Scotch , who embodies one of the main themes I talk about on this blog: finding a job you love (after all, we spend the majority of our waking hours at work). Allison's first novel, The Department of Lost and Found, is out in paperback this week, and her newest book hits the shelves in October. I admire many things about Allison, but mostly I'm just in awe of how she beat the difficult odds of breaking into fiction writing (with a positive attitude and a constant willingness to help other aspiring writers). Allison has a writing blog called Ask Allison, and her website is www.allisonwinn.com. Q. You had a successful magazine-writing career when you decided to write a novel. What pushed you to finally go for it? A. Well, I think as in any job, after so many years of doing the same thing, you’re interested in flexing new muscles. I felt like I could practically write some of those m...
More About: Author

Looking for your stories!
2008-04-16 20:47:00
As regular readers know, I make my living writing for magazines. A few months ago I was working on a story for Health magazine about slowing down, and I asked you all for your personal stories. (The results will be in the July/August issue, so stay tuned!). I was so inspired by your amazing answers--truly amazing, because those of you who wrote in really seem to have your priorities straight--that I pitched another, similar story to a different women's magazine, and now I'm looking for your stories again. The story is called “Giving Up to Gain,” and the premise is that, even though it sounds counterintuitive, giving up something in your life—a bad habit, a bad friend, a bad attitude, even an unhealthy obsession with something—can create room for joy, happiness, and respect for yourself. I’m looking for stories of this nature—how you bagged a negative or even just neutral part of your life and discovered some unexpected dividends. For example, one person told me...
More About: Stories

Five-minute skin care
2008-04-14 05:15:00
I'm in New York for the annual American Society of Journalists and Authors conference this weekend so am posting a release I got a few months back with some really cool homemade mask recipes. 5 Skin Care Products to Make at Home for Under $5 and in 5 Minute s Are you tired of synthetic chemicals in all your expensive body care products? Lily Morgan, founder of Lily Organics dew fresh skincare and author of "Beauty, Health and Happiness–-a Way of Life," shares her secrets to making five skin care products in less than five minutes and for less than $5…all with ingredients you already have in your kitchen. 1. PAPAYA EXFOLIANT MASK: Simply take one papaya and put in the blender. Apply to dry face and leave on for 20 plus minutes. You may also add ground herbs, other fruits or vegetables, including cucumber. 2. HONEY LAVENDER ROSE MASK: Grind up into a powder one (1) ounce each of lavender and of rose. Mix into the consistency of honey to make a pasted that will be easily ...
More About: Skin Care

The problem of accessibility
2008-04-07 04:59:00
Last summer while traveling, my daughter Kate and I were using a public restroom, and I heard a woman calling out to us from under the stall. “Hello? Hello?” “Yes?” I asked, wondering if she was all right. “Can you hear me?” she asked. “Yes, are you okay?” I asked her. We came out of our stall and I stood by the door of hers, concerned she was trapped or had fallen or worse. But she began talking more, and I realized with a rush of embarrassment that she was on her cell phone. As I led Kate over to the sink to wash, I heard the woman say, “Yes, I’m in the bathroom at the gas station. We’re on our way....” and so on. She flushed while she was on the phone (as had I, unknowingly) and walked out, not even glancing at us as she made a beeline for the door. Later I thought about why I was embarrassed, when clearly she was the one transgressing social rules by using her phone in the bathroom. Really, are any of us so important that we need to be t...
More About: Problem , Accessibility

A portrait of stuff
2008-03-31 05:34:00
One of my most treasured books is a Peter Menzel photochronicle of food around the world called Hungry Planet: What the World Eats. Menzel, an award-winning photographer, teams up with his journalist wife Faith D'Aluisio to travel around the world and tell the story of food. In one photo, a family of 13 from Bhutan, a south Asian country between India and Tibet, poses with their food: mostly potatoes and red rice and vegetables, with a little dried fish thrown in. Total cost for a week: $5.03 in U.S. dollars. In Chad, Africa, a family of five in a refugee camp have just $1.23's worth of food for a week: rations of sorghum, dried goat meat, limes, and legumes. They drink water and cook over a wood fire. Of course you knew we'd get to the Americans, right? We of fast food, excess, processed food-at-your-fingertips, we who spend one of the smallest percentages of income in the world on our food and yet have millions of pounds of it to spare. One North Carolina family of four spen...
More About: Stuff , Portrait

Commercial Kids
2008-03-24 04:37:00
A few weeks ago everyone in our family except my virus-dodging husband fell victim to the flu. I spent my time napping, but my intrepid kids, burning with fever, didn't seem to think they needed it. So we let them watch way too much TV in an effort to keep the running around to a minimum. Usually Kate watches PBS, and the worst things she sees are the sponsorships--YoBaby Yogurt, Chuck E Cheese, and others. But this week she watched network TV more than usual, and I could tell the difference immediately. "Mom, where are you? I want a [insert name of toy she's never heard of until the commercial came on]! Can we go to the store when we're better and buy one? Please? Please? Please?" According to the National Institute on Media and the Family, I'm not alone in the battle of commercials and the kids. Brand loyalty starts at age 2, and the average American child may view up to 40,000 commercials a year. Young children don't recognize the difference between TV shows and commer...
More About: Kids , Commercial

Work smarter, not harder
2008-03-17 04:37:00
I used to think willpower could conquer anything--including the ennui that descends after lunch, making me virtually unable to do any "real" work beyond answering emails and filing papers and--to be perfectly honest--surfing the Internet. My first year freelancing, I worked part-time as a staff writer at my city magazine downtown from 8-12, and afternoons came home to grow my freelance business. Looking back on that time, I understand better now why I was constantly cranky, irritable, short-tempered, and always under the gun. In short, I wasn't listening to my body clock and was trying to do creative work at a time when I'm most dull. Some of you know you're night owls or morning people, but I've never had a sense of that myself. But once I figured out what was my best time--those morning hours from 8 to 12--and began using them only to write and do other difficult creative tasks, my productivity increased. I now know that I can work dedicated mornings and get more done than ...
More About: Work

Combating suburban sprawl with smart growth
2008-03-10 04:35:00
You've probably heard the term "suburban sprawl," but if not, here's a little primer. Basically, city-dwellers who felt crowded and stifled decided to move just outside the city limits so they could have big yards and homes and their kids could play in nature. Then the suburbs started getting crowded and filled with all of the people that the original suburban pioneers had moved out there to get away from, so they moved even further out: into the "exurbs." So what's the problem? Well, most of the people moving out to the suburbs and exurbs still kept their jobs in the city. Since much of the growth was poorly planned, we're left with insufficient roads, more air pollution, longer commutes, and less green space all around. This is a problem nationwide, but to give you a specific example, here in Knoxville, I-40 and Kingston Pike are the two main roads going west out of the city. West Knoxville is so sprawled and those two roads so clogged with traffic that it takes two or th...
More About: Smart , Growth , Suburban , Smart Growth

The only 127 things you need
2008-03-03 05:42:00
Who could resist a title like this? When I saw this new book by journalist Donna Wilkinson, I immediately wanted it. (Would that make 128 things?) Looking around my house, I certainly have more than 127 things, and I'd love to know the secret for paring down to the essentials. The book is about simplifying--your diet, your kitchen, your wardrobe...your life. It's written in narrative form, so don't expect a long list (like I did) numbered from 1 to 127. Each chapter, divided into life's basics, from food to clothes to mindfulness, tells just what we need in that category. It's a book you can pick up as you need it--whether you're ready to clean out the kitchen or your emotional closet. Below is a Q&A with author Donna Wilkinson. Q: What prompted you to write this book? A: In 1988 I cut out a small article about summer wardrobe essentials from The New York Times Magazine, written by the renowned fashion editor Carrie Donovan. In the piece, Ms.Donovan outlined a list of basics...
More About: Things

How Lightning McQueen found his pace
2008-02-25 05:44:00
After Pixar’s Cars came out in 2006, the boys in my daughter’s preschool class couldn’t talk about anything but Lightning McQueen and how fast he was. Of course they missed the point, which McQueen himself learns almost too late: life is about the journey, not the destination. (As Sally Carrera, the sporty blue Porsche, describes Route 66 before the advent of the interstate, "Cars didn't drive on it to make great time. They drove on it to have a great time.") Cars is really about finding your own tempo giusto: the right pace for the right time. In In Praise of Slowness. Carl Honore describes tempo giusto, originally a musical term. What is the "right pace"? Most people are in such a hurry they hardly can stop to consider the question, but Honore advocates going fast when it makes sense to go fast, and slow when it makes sense to go slow. In Cars, Sally teaches McQueen about tempo giusto. Sally left life in the California fast lane for a slower pace in Radiator Springs, ...
More About: Pace

The story of stuff
2008-02-18 05:43:00
I was going to talk about the movie Cars today but I'll save that for next week, because I'm too excited about this video to wait to tell you about it. The Story of Stuff The movie is 20 minutes, but I promise you it's worth the time. Annie Leonard tells the story of consumption (and its solution) with clarity and cute graphics. Check it out--it's like Affluenza without the bad hairdos.
More About: The Story

Quality vs. quantity time with your kids
2008-02-11 05:08:00
If you've been married more than a few months you know that everyday life isn't one big date. For most of us, that's a good thing: the artificial setting of dates--primping, prepping, keeping up a stimulating conversation and trying to eat without getting spinach caught in your teeth--can wear on you after awhile. It's nice to get comfortable with each other, still spending time together, but more casually, as long-term companions do. When my daughter Kate was a toddler, I called my sister more than once in despair over my inability to keep up with the excessive playtime the parenting magazines told me I should be doing. "I can't sit on the floor all day pushing a ball around," I said. "I have work to do. But I feel guilty if I'm not playing with her." My sister gave me a good reality check. Her husband's grandmother, who raised five girls on a farm, once told her that she was with her kids every single day, but she rarely played with them. "We didn't have time to pla...
More About: Kids , Time , Quality

The high cost of cheap stuff
2008-02-04 05:27:00
In the U.S., cheap stuff abounds. Dollar stores hawk their wares in every major and minor city around the country. Wal-Mart advertises falling prices. Americans spend the smallest percentage of income on food than any other country in the world. But what is the true cost of all the cheap stuff? Health. A recent Good Housekeeping article told the sad story of a four-year-old boy who died of lead poisoning after swallowing the charm from a free bracelet his mother had gotten with a pair of shoes. Millions of toys and other products made in China have been recalled because of lead concerns, and it seems that every few weeks another announcement is made. When my four-year-old brings cheap toys home from school and elsewhere, I throw them away. Her one-year-old sister is too fond of eating everything, and the ultimate price isn't worth it. Nutrition. Americans love cheap food. Dollar value menus. $1 boxes of Little Debbie snacks. All you can eat buffets. But there's an obvious p...
More About: Stuff , Cost , High , Cheap

More on the proposed government rebate
2008-02-02 04:28:00
The Simple Living Network has sent out a message encouraging Americans to participate in their "Don't Buy It!" rebate campaign. SLN's suggestions on how to use your rebate to effect real change just make good sense--pay down credit cards, save it, buy something that invests in future savings...you get the idea. From the newsletter: Dear Friends of The Simple Living Network, The United States Government is planning to send out rebate checks in the hope that American citizens will immediately spend the money to stimulate the economy, thus avoiding a recession. At best, we believe this is a band-aid solution for a broken system that will not solve the larger economic problems faced by our country. We believe a short-term fix will not repair larger, long-term problems. In fact, the short-term solution may only exacerbate the larger problems. As such, we have started the "Don't Buy It!" campaign in an effort to begin a far-reaching conversation that encourages people everywhere to...
More About: Rebate

Depression II?
2008-01-28 04:19:00
First it was the mortgage crisis and the soft housing market. Now Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, two major investment banks, have declared the U.S. economy in recession (officially, a recession can't be measured until it's at least six months along, since it's defined as a decline in GDP two quarters in a row). Steven Fazzari, an economics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, agrees that America's love of living on credit extends far beyond big houses with equally big mortgages. "For the past 25 years, America has experienced a period of rising consumer debt," said Fazzari, an economics professor at Washington University in St. Louis. "Up to now the high debt levels have had a positive influence on the economy. In fact, it was a stimulus to economic growth. But now it's likely to become a source of economic contraction." Fazzari and a research partner studied the impact American consumers have had on the economy over the past 25 years, as well as the im...
More About: Depression

You are not indispensable
2008-01-21 05:31:00
Now that we're in the midst of flu and cold season, it's worth a reminder that we aren't indispensable at work. I work from home now and certainly have been guilty of sneaking out of bed and to my computer to check email when I should be sleeping off the flu. But even worse is showing up sick at the workplace because you need to finish a vital project, be present at a critical meeting, or even just warm your seat so your boss knows how dedicated you are. In a 2005 survey conducted by OfficeTeam, 80 percent of people go to work while sick. Not only is it terribly unhealthy for you, but you expose all your coworkers to your germs as well. They then return the favor when they show up to work sniffling and coughing. It often follows this pattern: you wake up sick, maybe call in the first day and try to sleep it off. By day two, you're still not up to snuff, but you're afraid to call in two days in a row, so you drag yourself out of bed and barely manage to dress yourself and get...

Hands-off cooking
2008-01-14 05:38:00
Regular readers know that I love to cook, but I should add this clause: I love to cook when the recipe is simple, healthy, and flavorful. I'll watch complicated cooking shows and browse through Mastering the Art of French Cooking like the eye candy it is, but when it comes to my kitchen, recipes can't be pages long or require a run to five specialty stores to gather ingredients. You can be an excellent cook making easy things, as long as the majority of the food starts out fresh and you aim for a variety of colors, tastes, textures, and food groups on the plate. In California last year I ate a yummy multi-course meal made by Ann Martin Rolke, author of Hands -Off Cooking: Low-Supervision, High-Flavor Meals for Busy People. Ann's concept is simple: spend a few minutes preparing dinner, let it cook, simmer, or bake, and do other things while you wait. Start dinner at five with a little prep work and stick the food in to cook, and spend that time setting the table, looking over y...

Screensucking
2008-01-07 05:38:00
Do you make New Year's resolutions? I don't--not specifically, anyway. Exercising, eating right, etc. seem to me like choices we should strive to make all year, in moderation and balance, not in a flurry of post-holiday guilt. I do make a business plan each year, a roadmap of sorts that helps me determine what I want to accomplish this year and in the future. My plan used to be strictly professional, but last year I added a section for creative goals. I realized that building the financial side of my business had begun to trump the craft of writing. This year, I added another section for personal goals. 2007 was an amazing year for me in many ways. I beat my income goal, I broke into several "dream" magazines, I started to write for a publication that makes me deliriously happy. But by the end of 2007 I was...listless. Charging into 2008 just didn't appeal to me, and I didn't know why. But a wise colleague said something that resonated with me and made my inertia clearer. "Som...

Love lives under stress
2007-12-17 05:42:00
In a poll on ratracerebellion.com, nine out of ten respondents reported dissatisfaction with their love lives due to high-stress, overscheduled living. Several confessed that their definition of "romance" was watching TV together on the couch. Founder Christine Durst said, "The rat race is wreaking havoc on romance, which means that even when we're covered in 'communications' gadgets, people are feeling more isolated. We're turning everything on but each other." Don't worry--this isn't a women's magazine-esque guilt trip about how to how to keep the home fire burning while you're burning the candle at both ends. The real question is, why are we too busy with inconsequentia to connect with the person who is supposedly most important in the world? Of course the reasons abound. I'm sure you can relate. I get caught up in the daily grind of life--the kids, the bills, trying to keep the house from falling apart, putting meals on the table, social obligations, keeping the k...
More About: Love , Stress , Lives

Gifts of time and money
2007-12-10 05:50:00
Last week I posted about they "why" of gift-giving--what motivates us, what should motivate us--and this week I want to offer some practical suggestions for gift-giving. It's easy to talk in theory about reducing the number and amount of gifts we give and receive, and much harder to do in reality. * Give people what they really want. Does it matter whether you approve or agree? How often do we decide someone's wish isn't "appropriate" and get that person something we deem is? We're all guilty of thrusting our own values onto others via a gift: "Oh, they just have to get into the information age. Let's get them a cell phone," nevermind if they want it or not. * Don't buy a present for someone just to reciprocate. This is the trickiest part of navigating the holidays: someone you don't feel that close to hands you a gift. "Oh, I forgot to bring yours," you lie. You open hers, mentally calculate the cost, and one-up her with something slightly more expensive. Resist the ...
More About: Gifts , Money , Time

The $100 Christmas
2007-12-03 05:37:00
Analysts are predicting a slightly weaker year for retail spending this holiday season (good), but the downturn has more to do with consumers' economic fears than their realization that Christmas is much more than a commercial enterprise fueled by Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and shopping malls (bad). In 1998, former New Yorker staff writer Bill McKibben penned a little book called Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case for a More Joyful Christmas. $100 is an arbitrary figure, and in today's world where it's commonplace to buy a child a $30 birthday gift, $100 seems a small total to spend on everyone you're expected to treat at Christmastime. But the idea behind the $100 Christmas still rings true: putting worship and fellowship and traditions above a gift-giving circus. This year I felt rather like the Grinch when I suggested to my sisters that we do a present exchange for the cousins and simply forgo gifts to each other and our spouses. For some of us it's a question of money; fo...

A job well done
2007-11-26 05:45:00
In 1944, C.S. Lewis gave a lecture to King's College at the University of London called "The Inner Ring." The inner ring is, simply put, the popular people. The people in the know, at the heart of the gossip, the trend setters. No doubt you all are aware of an inner ring among your own acquaintances, Lewis told the college boys, and no doubt you have a burning desire to be a part of it. Men tell not only their wives but themselves that it is a hardship to stay late at the office or the school on some bit of important extra work which they have been let in for because they and So-and-so and the two others are the only people left in the place who really know how things are run. But it is not quite true. It is a terrible bore, of course, when old Fatty Smithson draws you aside and whispers, “Look here, we’ve got to get you in on this examination somehow” or “Charles and I saw at once that you’ve got to be on this committee.” A terrible bore… ah, but how much more te...

Count your blessings
2007-11-19 05:33:00
A year ago, I was a day late posting to the blog because my daughter Sophia was born. The last thing on my mind that morning at 4 a.m. as I labored was putting up my blog post! These days if the post is late for all of you email subscribers, it's due to Feedburner's suddenly unpredictable delivery, not because I'm off doing anything especially important like having a baby. (I hope the Feedburner problems are resolved soon, because I know so many of you like the posts to come to your email instead of having to log onto the web to read.) A year ago, I didn't know how amazing it would be to have two beautiful, individual, complex daughters who surprise me every single day. I didn't know that there would be more than enough love to envelope both girls securely, that Sophia would complete our family in ways I could never have planned. Every year, my life is more blessed as I learn and grow and refine what's truly important. I thought about that this morning as I considered what...
More About: Blessings , Count , Sings

Crafting is cool
2007-11-12 05:42:00
The other day, a new release landed in my inbox for a book called The Prairie Girl's Guide to Life: How to Sew a Sampler Quilt and 49 Other Pioneer Projects for the Modern Girl. If the book sounds intriguing, you're not alone: crafting is hip again. A brief history: crafts used to be what women did to keep their family in clothes and their furniture in cushions and beds in blankets. It was a necessity. During the age of leisure, sewing and quilting was something to do while sitting pretty in the drawing room waiting for an eligible bachelor to carry you off. During and after the Depression, crafting was a necessity again. In the 50s and 60s, crafts were a time-filler for bored housewives who had less housework, thanks to time-saving mechanical devices like the microwave and washing machine. Then crafting went out of vogue as women entered the workplace en masse. They were too busy proving they were just as capable as men of making executive decisions to sew buttons and knit sc...
More About: Cool , Crafting

The satisfaction of enough
2007-11-05 05:48:00
This month a new book comes out called Get Satisfied: How Twenty People Like You Found the Satisfaction of Enough. While it's great to talk about simplifying in its many facets, from the broad cultural implications to the minutiae of everyday life, this book takes a personal approach to simplifying in the form of essays. Sometimes we need more than just the facts to be inspired, more than just the "rah, rah, you can do it" cheers. Sometimes we need to know that others have done it, and we need to know how. Get Satisfied tells the story of twenty people all over the U.S. who have discovered the satisfaction of enough. What is "enough"? Each one answers the question in his or her own way, and the answers are as varied as the writers describing it. Buy the book from Simple Living America for half off if you're a member, or from the Simple Living Network for regular price if you're not. A couple of essays that stood out for me: * "A Breath of Life" by Tamsen Butler. She describe...

How to grow healthy, well-rounded kids
2007-10-29 04:31:00
Many parents believe that placing their children into multiple extracurricular activities will instill life-long creative values in them while guaranteeing admission into an Ivy League school. Kids seem to thrive on activity, and if you keep them busy with gymnastics, soccer, ballet, piano, and art classes they won't have time to get into trouble, and the structured activities will help them later in life. Right? But all those activities come with a price: the family meal. When you're shuttling even one child, let alone two or more, to their respective activities, there's no time for dinner except on the fly. Once again, science is corroborating with common-sense parenting. Numerous studies prove the importance of the family meal, in truth our secret weapon for healthy, balanced children. Want proof? Here's just a sampling: * The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA) found that teens who have infrequent family dinners (2 or less...
More About: Healthy , Grow , Rounded , Heal

Take back your time day
2007-10-22 07:54:00
This Wednesday, Oct. 24, is Take Back Your Time Day. As I wrote last year, Time Day is held in October nine weeks before the end of the year to symbolize the nine extra weeks that Americans work each year compared to most Europeans. This year's theme is Take Back Your Vacation. From the site: Vacations are vanishing. Only 14% of Americans will get a vacation of two weeks or longer this year. A third of women and a quarter of men get no annual leave anymore, as annual leave benefits are being eliminated like pensions. Many others are afraid to use their paid leave for fear they could be laid off or demoted if they do. No wonder the average American vacation is now down to a long weekend. As purely anecdotal evidence, I'll offer my experience from childhood. We used to pack up the family car and take off for up to a month in the summers. Later, when my dad had a strict two weeks, we still took it all in one chunk. Now, even though I'm self-employed and Derek gets a ve...

Simple living's F-word
2007-10-15 08:10:00
"Fashion," Oscar Wilde wrote, "is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months." One of the biggest blocks to simple living is having a lot of stuff, and the primary reason we have a lot of stuff is because of that f-word, fashion. It goes out of style, you decide to replace it, but the old one is perfectly good and you can't bear to get rid of it so it sits around, unused. From clothes to furniture to cars to accessories and appliances and even things you would expect to be classic, like flowers, stuff cycles in and out of style. But oddly enough, most of us don't spend a lot of time thinking about why we are driven to go get new stuff when our old things are perfectly good. Behind this seemingly simple renewal of things is a complex marketing scheme that makes us feel ugly, old, out of it, behind the times, and ultimately that it's our decision to buy brand-new rather than what it really is, the machinations of marketers. When I'm thinki...
More About: Word , Simple