Top Tips for Girls: Real advice from real women for real life - Softcover

Reardon, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307406695 ISBN 13: 9780307406699

Verlag: Crown, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

REAL LIFE MADE EASIER

In today’s lifestyle guru–obsessed world, where we all turn to magazines and TV personalities to teach us how to organize our lives, cook, look, and live better, it’s refreshing to hear clever, who-would’ve-thunk-it suggestions from regular women.

In Top Tips for Girls, today’s primer for women in the know, Kate Reardon has collected just that—literally hundreds of tips on all areas of our lives, be it raising kids, staying fit, dressing well, planning a wedding, gardening, dating, dieting, traveling, or working. Far from garden variety, the tips you’ll find here are surprising—the sort that women used to get word-of-mouth from their own moms, grandmothers, aunts, and best friends. Some of the many helpful, and even hilarious, tips you’ll read here include:

•To avoid blisters from new shoes, coat your feet with Vaseline.
•Invest in a certain number of “nice” hangers. When you start having to use the metal ones from the dry cleaner, it’s time to clean out your closet.
•Impress guests with homemade-tasting mayonnaise by adding fresh lemon juice and capers or thyme to ordinary mayo.
•Perk up wilted ferns by spraying them once a month with weak tea.
•To find your car in an unfamiliar area, use the camera on your cell phone to take a picture of the nearest street sign.
•Tone up your butt by squeezing it in quick reps of fifty while watching TV.
•To safely dispose of receipts and bank statements without buying a shredder, simply keep a container of water to pop them in and let them dissolve.

And many more!

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

KATE REARDON is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and has worked for Vogue and Tatler. Visit her website at toptips.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

• Home •

or, Martha Stewart,

eat your heart out.

Just imagine, if you had absolutely nothing else to do at all, how magnificent your home would look. I’m thinking fresh flowers, bread baking in a spotless oven, no piles of laundry, perhaps a filing system for socks. Yup, we’d all be five-star generals of the home—if only we didn’t have jobs, and children, and a life. Modern woman is cursed by unrealistic expectations; just as she is expected to snap back into a girlish figure moments after childbirth, her home is now also supposed to be effortlessly perfect. The home is becoming an ever-more competitive arena. Women who once competed for the attentions of alpha (or perhaps beta) males can now devote years of experience and cunning to outdoing one another on the domestic front. For an unfair advantage, read the following.

d

How to get rid of houseflies

h

Put some eucalyptus oil on a cloth, open the door wide, and wave the cloth vigorously, working toward the door. Flies will rapidly disappear.

—Caroline

d

How to get rid of ants

h

Ants pretty much steer clear of anything that is “powdery,” so to speak. I believe it has to do with the fact that any powder disrupts their senses and makes their little legs not able to, say, climb a wall; they just fall right off. I’ve had really good luck with using baby powder.

—lisaveronica

d

How to clean windows and

shiny metal without chemicals

h

For floors and counters, use 1 part vinegar and 3 parts water. For glass, use 1 part vodka, 1 part grapefruit juice, and 6 parts water.

—Amy

d

How to clean windows

h

Add dishwasher rinse aid to your bucket of water instead of soap.

—Moodykat

d

How to remove sticky tape from glass

h

Put some nail-polish remover on a bit of cotton and rub away.

—buckridge

d

How to make a candle fit

a too-small candlestick

h

Hold the end in very hot water and it will become soft enough to be jammed in tight.

—Tawny

d

How to keep candles burning longer

h

Store them in the freezer—this will add hours of additional burn time.

—Estelle

d

How to get candle wax off

wood furniture or carpet

h

Get a large brown envelope or a paper grocery bag and a hot iron. Place the brown envelope over the wax stain, then press the hot iron on top of the envelope. The iron heats up the candle wax and the brown paper absorbs the hot wax, thus removing it from the carpet or furniture.

—lulu8749

d

How to build a great fire

h

If you want big flames, build a tepee shape with your logs against the back of the fireplace.

—Belinda

d

How to stop a fire from smoking up a room

h

Roll up a few sheets of newspaper, light them, and hold them up the chimney before you light the fire. This will heat the chimney and create a draft that will suck the smoke upward. And don’t forget to have your chimney swept regularly.

—Melanie

d

How to save the flattened carpet

underneath your furniture

h

Place a damp towel over the area and iron it. The steam will restore the carpet’s natural fluff.

—Chelsea

Leave a small ice cube in the indent. Once it melts and dries a bit, vacuum with the brush attachment.

—JCF

d

How to clean lamp shades

h

I keep a soft-bristled paintbrush around for this sort of task. It helps remove dust in tight ridges and grooves. I also use it for dusting bookcases and electronic equipment. These brushes are inexpensive and can be rinsed out.

—melaniezelanie

d

How to change a duvet cover easily

h

If you can drop both duvet and cover, holding the corners, over a stairwell and shake, this should work well. (Try storing linen inside one of the set’s pillowcases; it saves a lot of time searching for a matching set when changing the bed.)

—josie

d

How to downsize to a smaller kitchen

h

Instead of putting all utensils, cutlery, plates, and glasses away in their usual place, put them in a separate box or tub each time you finish using them. Within a few weeks, you will see exactly what you actually use, rather than all that junk that’s just filling up your kitchen.

—Helen

d

How to have a tidy house with no effort

h

Instead of sitting gazing moronically at dumb ads on TV, get up and do something useful during every commercial break. That way, tidying, cleaning a sink, sorting laundry, going through paperwork, washing the dishes gets done in short bursts without becoming a major task.

—aitch

Each day, set an egg timer for fifteen minutes and get as much done as you can in that time. Sadly, I get extra excited when I finish and realize I’ve done more than the day before. Ah, the satisfaction.

—CassandraM

d

How to get grease and fingerprints

off the walls

h

Use a slice of white bread to rub off any dirt or stains.

—yvonne1987

d

How to stop children’s junk from

taking over the whole house

h

Let each child choose his or her own big box (mine chose a large, brightly colored plastic one) and a smaller one. At the end of the day, have “tidy up time” and give a treat to the tidiest (my kids chose extra time in the bath or extra bubbles . . . they’re teenagers now, so those treats seem very tame!). All the toys go into the big box; the smaller box holds crayons or “losable” things. Then there is only one box to put away in the bedroom (or hide behind the sofa if mother-in-law is on the horizon).

—faylin4

d

How to make almost any abhorrent

task go faster

h

Set a timer for thirty minutes and do nothing but that task while the timer is on. When the timer goes off, give yourself permission to be done. You’ve been productive and now you can take a break. I find this makes a big difference and helps me get done those tasks I don’t particularly enjoy.

—CeeVee

d

How to put away laundry

h

Always put fresh laundry under the pile of similar things, or at the farther reaches of your closet. That way you’ll actually wear all your T-shirts and underwear, instead of the same three over and over again.

—Tawny

d

How to stop static from building

up from the dryer

h

Pour a bit of laundry softener onto an old washcloth and put it in with your drying.

—Brianne

d

How to hang sweaters on a clothesline

h

Take an old pair of hose and thread the legs through the arms of your sweater so that the waist is sticking out through the neck. Then you can clip the feet and waistband of the tights to the line—it stops those annoying clothespin marks on your sweaters.

—Margot

d

How to get chewing gum out of fabrics

h

If the gum is embedded, rub with vinegar (preferably white), and the gum will break up and fall away.

—Caprice

d

How to remove watermarks on dark wood

h

This is a really yucky solution, but it does work: If you have white watermarks on mahogany or dark polished wood, mix a paste of olive oil and cigarette ash and work it into the mark. It will come out, and the smell will disappear quite quickly!

—Sage

It sounds pretty daunting, but metal polish does...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0307406695
• ISBN 13: 9780307406699
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 241
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland