Ecofabulous living ideas!

ECO CHIC: GREEN INTERIOR DESIGN + HEALTHY LIVING

SARAH BARNARD, INTERIOR DESIGNER AND LEED AP MUSES ABOUT SUSTAINABLE BUILDING, GREEN INTERIOR DESIGN, ECO-FRIENDLY DECORATING, HISTORIC PRESERVATION, HEALTHY LIVING, TRAVEL AND PETS.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 24, 2012

KITCHEN CURES: Tried & Tested Home Remedies

Interiors by: Sarah Barnard 

Text used with permission from: 

LEMONS AND LAVENDER: The Eco Guide to Better Homekeeping by Billee Sharp.

Many remedies can be made from what you have in the kitchen, from spices as well as plants. Here are a few simple tried and tested recipes:

Nutmeg

Grated nutmeg soothes diarrhea and upset tummies. Use a nutmeg grater tograte a small amount (about 1/8 teaspoon) into warmed milk (cow, soy, rice,or in oat milk).

Cayenne

Use this pepper as a remedy for colds, coughs, sore throats, heartburn,hemorrhoids, and varicose veins, or as a digestive stimulant and to improve circulation. Make an infusion by adding 1/2 teaspoon cayenne powder to 1 cup boiled water. Add 2 cups of hot water to make a more pleasant and palatable infusion. Add lemon and honey to taste.

Cabbage

This commonplace vegetable is a fantastic antibacterial and anti-inflammatory. Cabbage can be used for stomach ulcers, arthritis, and swollen joints, or as a liver tonic. To create a cabbage tonic, dilute 1 part cabbage juice with 2 parts water. For swollen joints and arthritic pain, lightly crush a few green outer cabbage leaves with a rolling pin, and then lay over afflicted area with the inner side of the leaf on your skin, securing with a bandage. Some prefer to boil the leaves, let them cool, and then apply. Going to bed with a cabbage bandage on is also good, giving the leaf time to work its magic.

Black and Green Teas

Use black tea for an upset tummy and diarrhea. Green tea strengthens theimmune system, and you can reuse tea bags to stanch cuts or calm insectbites.

White Tea

White tea, green tea, and black tea are all made from the leaves of Camelliasinensis. White tea is made from the youngest leaves of the plant; it is a sweet brew and has less caffeine than green or black tea. It is also rich in antioxidants and is recommended for reducing "bad" cholesterol and improving artery health. White tea is a little costly but a good choice for health and flavor.

Lemon

Use this citrus for colds and infections. Add the fresh-squeezed juice to hot
water, with honey to taste. For a fast sore-throat curative, use unsweetened
lemon juice with warm water as an antiseptic gargle.

Turmeric

This spice is a natural antiseptic and antibacterial. Turmeric is also a liverdetox and curative for acne and common colds. Make a turmeric tea by adding a teaspoon of the powder to 4 cups of boiling water. Simmer over low heat until it dissolves, adding milk and honey to taste.


Kombucha Tea

Some people love the taste of kombucha tea; others don't relish it at all. It hasbeen credited with miraculous properties and is a probiotic, making it verycurative for digestive issues. Kombucha also comes recommended for acne,constipation, arthritis, depression, and fatigue, and is hailed as a protectionagainst cancer. I regard it as a tasty tonic, and my family drinks it daily. Mysons were the first to taste kombucha, and they loved the fizziness and flavor. This healthful drink is easy to make so long as you have a "ferment" (some people call it a "mushroom" because of the way it looks). To procure your ferment, try to find somebody who brews kombucha already. They should have plenty of ferments to share, as every batch of tea grows an extra ferment on top of the original.

a large wide-necked glass jar, cloth or paper towel to cover jar, rubber bandto secure cover

7 tea bags, black or green (preferably organic)

1 cup sugar

2 quarts water

kombucha ferment

Boil the water and add it to the tea bags in the jar. Let it steep for 20 minutes.Remove the tea bags and add the sugar, stirring to dissolve. When the tea has cooled, add the kombucha ferment with some of the liquor that it came in, roughly 10 percent of the total tea in your jar. Cover the jar with the cloth or paper towel, and secure with the rubber band. The lid will serve to keep dust and flies out while allowing the tea to breathe. Let the jar sit in one place (moving can disturb the fermentation process), out of the direct sunlight, and at room temperature. The fermentation process will take seven to 12 days, depending on the room temperature. Your batch of kombucha will ferment more quickly if the room is warm. You have to check to see when it is ready, and you'll be able to tell by the taste. When fermented, the tea can be decanted into glass bottles with screw lids and kept in the fridge. Remember to keep a little of the kombucha tea to add with your ferment for your next batch.

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Billee Sharp was a contemporary art curator and gallerist in London, working with the YBA group of artists before moving to San Francisco in 1993, where she started a family and record label with her husband Jonah Sharp, a pioneering electronic musician, founded a green cleaning business and curated many multimedia cultural events.

SARAH BARNARD is a member of the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID), is certified by the National Kitchen and Bath Association (NKBA), and is recognized by the International Institute for Bau-Biologie & Ecology as a Building Biology Practitioner (BBP) and by the United States Green Building Council as a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Accredited Professional (LEED AP). She serves on the Santa Monica Conservancy’s board of directors and specializes in green interior design and historic preservation.

Sarah is intrigued by clients who have unusual requests and lives for a challenge. She hasn’t met one yet that she didn’t like. Sarah loves designing for anyone with pets! She adores people who are avid collectors of anything they love. Sarah is often retained by clients who have never worked with an interior designer because they thought designers weren’t for them (until now). She is known for delivering, on time, all the time. Sarah is incredibly down to earth and people love her for her frankness. Sarah and her staff will do just about anything for a client, build a custom sunroom for the kitties, organize and alphabetize boxes in the garage, take the kids out shopping for their own bathroom tiles…

Sarah Barnard Design undertakes residential interior design projects, commercial spaces and even single rooms. She can help you with space planning, color counseling, kitchen and bath remodeling, historic preservation, and all aspects of green design and healthy living: organic, non-toxic, sustainable and fair trade materials, energy and resource conservation, air and water purification, natural furnishings and fabrics and much more!

Healing and Dealing—with expert advice

Good Grief August 2012 Quickly becoming the "national face of widowhood," Carole Brody Fleet, founder and CEO of Widows Wear Stilettos, has become to the go-to person for comfort, wisdom, and support both for widows and those who help them. In a recent Huffington Post article, she gave some useful advice to friends of those in mourning with 15 Things You Should Never Say to the Bereaved. This was one of the most commented and highly ranked articles on HuffPo. She also did a video with State Farm to spread the word about being financially prepared for whatever may come. This video has come out to thousands of agents all over North America to help families during the most difficult time. You can hear Carole speak her message of hope and healing at these events: 8/31: Awakenings, Laguna Hills, CA - 7pm 9/18: West Hollywood Library, West Hollywood, CA - 7pm 9/30: West Hollywood Book Fair, West Hollywood, CA - 10am 10/4: Special Ops Survivors Conference, San Diego, CA More · Buy Happily Even After A Guide to Getting Through (and Beyond) the Grief of Widowhood By Carole Fleet Happily Even After includes answers to thousands of actual letters to the Widows Wear Stilettos website, and is written in Q&A form for easy reference. From child rearing and finances to issues of intimacy, it also addresses some of the most difficult and heartbreaking issues that many widows face; such as receiving a call or personal visit breaking the news about a husband's death from his mistress; or how to deal with widowhood and grief when a marriage is deteriorating or in the midst of divorce; and the technically unmarried widow, or “widow of the heart”—anyone who has lost the person with whom they expected to spend the rest of their lives. When Carole lost her husband at age forty, there were no resources that spoke directly to her needs as a young widow. The books she turned to spoke only about grief, but Carole knew that focusing on grief was going to keep her in a place of sorrow. Twelve years later, she is the Founder and CEO of Widows Wear Stilettos, Inc., a non-profit organization and website founded in 2006 and devoted to service.  Live the Life You Want

Viva Editions, an imprint of Cleis Press, 2246 Sixth St., Berkeley, CA 94710

Excerpt of the Day: "Better Than Great" by Arthur Plotnik

Sadly, in this "age of awesome," our words and phrases of acclaim are exhausted. Even so, we find ourselves defaulting to such habitual choices as good, great, and terrific, or substitute the weary synonyms that tumble out of a thesaurus - superb, marvelous, outstanding, and the like. The piling on of intensifers such as the now-silly "super," only makes matters worse and negative modifiers render our common parlance nearly tragic.

Until now.

Better Than Great is the essential guide for describing the extraordinary—the must-have reference for anyone wishing to rise above tired superlatives. Arthur Plotnik, the wunderkind of word-wonks is, without mincing, proffering a well knit wellspring of worthy and wondrous words to rescue our worn-down usage. Plotnik is both hella AND hecka up to the task of rescuing the English language and offers readers the chance to never be at a loss for words!

Take a look:

Great

-Extremely Good

-Prized

-In Excellent Shape

-Distinguished

-Of Worldly Perfection

-Rich in Virtues

-Smart

A Tough Word to Beat

Toward the end of the 20th century, the venerable word great reigned as the default term for describing specialty. Used at all levels of speech, the term never seemed to exhaust itself, even within a sentence. Major events called for pile-ups, something like, “This great float honors one of the great gentlemen of the great State of California, and tomorrow two great teams will play what’s expected to be a great game before the greatest fans in this great nation.”

Today, if the word doesn’t quite put listeners to sleep, neither does it wake them to the wonders of anything. Approaching some two billion appearances in a Web search, it certainly has lost whatever specialty it had. If two billion things are special, what’s left to be ordinary? In conventional uses, great generates about one nanowatt of energy. Lately the word amazing has become slightly more energetic than great, but it, too, is accumulating usage numbers that suggest serious loss of clout.

The problem is that great, considered by itself, is still a great word, understandably employed for more than a thousand years for a range of uses detailed across two pages of The Oxford English Dictionary. Force comes from its very sound, starting with a growl (gr), which can be drawn out, followed by its long-a attention-getter, and concluding with an emphatic dental mute, the t. Quick and punchy, it serves as both adjective and noun (“one of the greats”) and shifts easily to the adverb greatly.

The word’s early meanings of “thick” and “coarse” suggest its relation to Old English grytta (coarse-ground meal). Even if its grit has been chewed to mush in overuse, it can still be freshened by novel intensifying devices. At least that is the rationale for including, among our alternatives to great, suggestions for intensifying this worthy old utterance: a blitzkrieg of greatness, fist-pumpingly great, great served hot, greatness in high relief, and thwackingly great, to name just five of dozens.

What will the next hot modifier be? Hard to say; such terms slide in and out of fashion, emerging from standard synonyms, street-slang favorites, and pop-star locutions. “You look mahvelous,” intoned comedian Billy Crystal, and suddenly everyone was intoning it. Even tha shiznit got its run after Snoop Doggy Dog rapped it, never mind its etymology. But the zing of any term fades after the first few thousand uses and even faster among youth subcultures. Campus superlatives such as bonus, core, key, or summit? So 20th century. The once-hot teen superlatives phat and fetch? So yesterday for teens (though still in play for the rest of us).

Fading or not, certain acclamatory terms—great, amazing, brilliant, terrific, and wonderful among them— continue to serve as what Stuart Berg Flexner described as “blurred words”:

“… used quickly and without much thought, almost as

automatic responses, because they are easily available….

The words are not always precise, which is one reason

we like them so much…. [We] avoid arguments and fine

distinctions we would rather not make.”

—Listening to America

But Flexner notes that while the words are imprecise, “we do want them to be forceful.” Unfortunately, wanting does not do the job. For serious word users, it is invention, experimentation, discovery, and open-mindedness that puts the grrr back in terms of acclaim.

Excerpt of the Day: "Drunken Angel" by Alan Kaufman

Son of a French Holocaust survivor, Alan Kaufman drank to fill the huge hole in his heart, wrecking himself and everyone in his path.  In Drunken Angel, the poet and critically acclaimed writer recounts with unvarnished honesty the story of the alcoholism that took him to the brink of death, the PTSD that drove him to the edge of madness, and the love that brought him back.  Kaufman minces no words as he looks back on a life pickled in self-pity, self-loathing, and guilt, delivering a lacerating, cautionary tale of a life wasted and reclaimed.

Have a look:

Chapter 82

Why an angel? Because I believe that, in time, that is what we become in sobriety, if we last long enough, to the end. Not the winged kind, no. Not some haloed cupid or sword swinger but a kind of flawed angel, without wings, that belongs to no religion but rather to a species of human heartbreak unlike any other known.

Alcoholics and addicts are unlike any other people I’ve ever met. I am unlike most people. A blazing mutant of some kind. A wondrous freak. In my mind lurks an urge that will be with me to the end, to put a bottle to my lips and drink myself to death. A judge and jury that I wake up to each morning has pronounced a verdict of guilt on me for no crime that I have committed, just for being alive, and has sentenced me to death, not by guillotine or rope but by a single drink.

It is the strangest thing, this sentence of death, this disease I have which tests me to the max and each day holds my existence accountable to the very universe, a god no religion can know as we drunks know it.

A god of drunks who goes with us into our prisons and gutters, bedrooms and businesses, flophouses and alleys, hospitals and mansions, and patiently waits with hand on our shivering shoulders as we groan through yet one more night of near death, waits to see if maybe this time we’ve had pain enough, loss enough, enough hangover, illness, fear, to ask for help.

And yet many cannot ask, and die right before the god of drunks, who I think must weep helplessly when this occurs. So many lose heart and fall. I have seen so many of my brothers and sisters in recovery fall. I have seen so many beautiful people die. The poet found in his room OD’d with a needle in his arm. He was my best friend. The twenty-year-old drummer who killed himself over a romance gone wrong. Nice kid. The young artist who drank and was found murdered in her Tenderloin hotel room. She was so talented. The buddy who drank and wound up facedown in a river in Pennsylvania, drowned. The ones, so many, who jumped off the bridge or the roof or put a gun barrel to their heads and squeezed the trigger, or in private ate painkillers until found on the floor brain-dead, or perished young of a destroyed liver. That young nurse, a mother of three, who had everything, beautiful children, loving husband, looks to die for, a house with two cars in the garage, who also had this little problem that she couldn’t stay sober or stop smoking crack, no matter how many meetings she attended or what advice she tried to follow, and one day returned home to that garage, ran a hose, turned on the ignition, and gassed herself to death.

When you have seen as much of that as I have in my sobriety, in the last twenty years, how can I not regard my own reflection with amazement that I am still here. Why me? How did I get so lucky? Really, I don’t know. I want to think that I’ve done something right, but in truth, I know better. I do believe in a Higher Power and I do work the 12 steps and go to meetings and work with drunks of every kind and description, yet it doesn’t seem like enough, it never does. I never feel that I can repay what has been given to me. The love that has been shown. The patience and straight-shooting counsel that has saved my butt time and again. I have met in recovery men and women who are the greatest human beings I have ever known but don’t want their names advertised. Anonymous, quiet angels, invaded by death, propelled by light, who move among us with quiet grace and private suffering and seek each day to help those around them without fanfare or reward.

Excerpt of the Day: "One and Only" by Gerald Nicosia and Anne Marie Santos

Gerald Nicosia and Anne Marie Santos’ One and Only tells the story of Lu Ann Henderson.  At 15-years-old in 1946, she met Neal Cassidy, fast-talking hurricane of male sexuality and vast promises.  The two married and soon were hanging out with a group of young would-be writers, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.  Lu Ann become the secret link between Kerouac and Cassidy, helping to ignite the Beat Generation and giving Kerouac material for one of the seminal novels of the twentieth century, On the Road.

Take a peek:

From Part One

Lu Anne:

It all started in October 1946. That’s when we took our first trip to New York. Neal and I sort of ran off from Denver because of what happened between Neal and a girl named Jeannie Stewart. She was this girl Neal had been living with when Neal and I met, and she was holding his clothes as a weapon to get him to come back “where he belonged.” She wanted to keep him at her house, and he told her that he wasn’t going to do that. So Neal and I went to her house, and he climbed up three stories and broke in the window, and rescued his clothes and books. His books were the most important thing to him at the time.

We ran off without anyone even knowing, just took off hitchhiking, and we wound up in Sidney, Nebraska, where I had an aunt and uncle living. In Sidney, Neal got a job as a dishwasher, and I got a job as a maid—making twelve dollars a month! When I think back, my God! What child slavery they practiced in those days! They really did. One day off a month—that’s all I got. I had to be up at five in the morning and have the whole bottom part of the house cleaned by the time the family got up at seven, and I finished at seven in the evening. But it all came to an abrupt end very soon.

It was just getting into winter, and we were having our second snow already. The woman, Mrs. Moore, had me out on this veranda scrubbing everything—the railings, even the side of the house. Neal happened to come home that day and saw me scrubbing this idiot thing—he saw that my hands were turning blue. He said, “That’s it!” So that’s when he took my uncle’s car. He just told me he was gonna get a car—he didn’t tell me where he was gonna get it or anything. I almost died when he drove up in front, thinking what I would have to face with the family. But, in any case, we took off at midnight.

I only had one trunk, and we loaded it into the car. It was a wild ride, let me tell you, because the whole windshield was completely iced over, and the windshield wipers wouldn’t work! And of course, Neal always had a terrible fear of the police, so he had me looking out the rear window to see if we were being chased. Since my uncle worked at the railroad, Neal had no idea when he might discover it and turn it over to the police. My uncle would have had no way of knowing it was Neal and I who had taken his car. Whether that would have made any difference in his going to the police I don’t really know. In any case, Neal wound up on the passenger side, driving with his left hand, looking out the window with this scarf tied around his head, and me looking out the driver’s side because all the windows were totally iced up—to see if anyone was following.

I’d never gone through anything like that in my life. My father was a policeman, and I’d grown up with policemen. I had no fear of policemen at all. They were part of me, you might say. But between Neal’s fright of the police and my own fright of my uncle—my fear of being found out by the family, that I would have done such a thing—we were both pretty much out of our heads. We drove the car off the road a few times, and finally it went completely off the road, and he couldn’t get it started again. We’d made it to another small town in Nebraska—I can’t remember the name—but not too damn far from where we’d started. Maybe a hundred miles or so. It seemed like we’d been driving for hours—most of the night. We had intended to drive to this friend of Neal’s, Ed Uhl, whose family had a ranch near Sterling, Colorado. Neal told me we were gonna go to Ed’s and stay the night, and then have Ed drive us to Denver. We really had no idea at that point that we would end up in New York.

Excerpt of the Day: "Apocalypse Not" by John Michael Greer

New Agers are counting down the days until the Mayan calendar ends in 2012. Evangelical Christians long for the Rapture. Extropians dream of the Singularity, when computers will surpass human intelligence and technology will transcend all limits. Doomers stockpile freeze-dried food as they wait for civilization to crash and burn around them.  What do they all have in common?

They’re all wrong.

For almost 3,000 years apocalypse prophecies have convinced people all over the world that the future is about to give them the world they want instead of the world they’ve got. John Michael Greer’s Apocalypse Not is a lively and engaging survey of predictions about the end of the world, along with the failed dreams and nightmares that have clustered around them.

Have a look:

A strong case could be made for the idea that storytelling is one of humanity’s oldest and most powerful technologies. As soon as the extraordinary gift of human language finished emerging out of whatever forgotten precursors gave it birth, hunters back from the chase and gatherers returning with nuts and tubers doubtless started describing their day’s experiences in colorful terms, and their listeners picked up more than a few useful tips about how to track an antelope or wield a digging stick: the glory of the impala’s leap and the comfortable fellowship of gatherers working a meadow together wove themselves into the stories and the minds of the audience, and helped shape their experience of the world. Stories still do that today, whether they’re woven into the daily news, dressed up as religious or secular ideology, or in their natural form as stories one person tells another.

Some of these stories are very, very old. Most of the stories that people nowadays call “mythology,” in particular, have roots that run back far into the untraceable years before anybody worked out the trick of turning spoken words into something more lasting. Read through the myths of every culture and you’ll find certain themes repeated endlessly: stories of a golden age or paradise back in the distant past when things were much better than they are now; stories of a worldwide flood from which a few survivors managed to escape to repopulate the world; stories of terrible monsters and the heroes or heroines who killed them; stories of heroes or heroines of a different kind, who died so that other people might have a more abundant life—all these and others are part of the stock in trade of myth around the world, shared by peoples whose ancestors, at least until modern times, had no contact since the end of the last Ice Age.

Some modern theorists, starting from this evidence, have argued that these core themes and the stories based on them are somehow hardwired into the human brain. This may or may not be true—the jury’s still out on the question— but it’s definitely the case that most of the themes of mythology appear on every continent and in every age. If they were invented, the event happened so long ago that no trace remains of the inventor or the time and circumstances of the invention.

The apocalypse meme is one of the few exceptions. Hard work by a handful of perceptive scholars, most notably historian of religions Norman Cohn, has traced it back to a specific place, time, and person. The place was the rugged region of south central Asia that today is called Iran, the time was somewhere between 1500 and 1200 BCE, and the person was Zarathustra, the prophet of the religion now called Zoroastrianism.