7 Things You Should Be Doing While Cooking

Conserve Cooking Utensils by Planning Ahead

To use the fewest cooking utensils possible, first measure out all the dry ingredients, then the wet ingredients. This way, you can reuse the measuring spoons or cups, and only have to wash them once.

Keep Your Remote Clean While Cooking

If you like to channel surf while cooking, place your remote control in a resealable plastic bag or plastic wrap. The buttons will still be visible, and the control will stay clean.

Prepare for the Unexpected While Cooking

Professional cooks keep small plastic bags nearby in case both hands are covered with dough or food and they need to answer the telephone. Or, you could put your hands in plastic bags before mixing meatloaf or kneading dough.

Get Gloves on More Easily

Sprinkle a little baking soda into each of your latex kitchen gloves and they’ll stick less when you’re putting them on and taking them off.

Using Plastic Wrap

Keep plastic wrap from clinging to itself when you’re trying to dispense it by storing it in the refrigerator. The colder temperature will keep it from sticking.

For the Best Potholders

Your potholders don’t have to look stained and dirty. Wash them frequently, and after each wash, spray them with starch. Spray starch repels grease, so your potholders will stay unblemished.

Measuring Sticky Liquids

Before measuring a sticky liquid like honey, coat the inside of the measuring cup with vegetable oil or nonstick cooking spray. The liquid will pour out easily. You can also run the measuring cup under hot water.

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6 Fun, Inexpensive Ways to Revamp Furniture

Dresser Storage

If your country kitchen is running out of room, consider a dresser. Even though you’re used to bureaus being only for bedrooms, it can be a valuable addition to a kitchen for storing napkins, utensils, and more. Repaint the dresser in colors to match your kitchen and you’ll have guests asking where you got your newest piece of kitchen furniture.

Don’t Discard Dingy Dressers

If your furniture is weathered or out of style, that’s not necessarily a reason to replace it. There are plenty of ways to spruce up old dressers, chairs, and tables. Everybody loves quilts, so why not drape one over that old chair that needs re-upholstering? You can also try using colorful fabrics on the fronts of nightstand and dresser drawers. Just get some scrap cloth from your last project or from a fabric store, and attach it to the dresser drawers with a staple gun. To have even more fun with it, we like to paint part of the piece and color-coordinate it with the cloth we’re using.

Handled With Style

If your cabinets are getting old and worn, you can revive them just by replacing the knobs and handles. A good variety should be available inexpensively at your local hardware store. They’ll make your kitchen or bathroom look brand new!

A Gift for Decoration

Dress up an inexpensive set of plastic drawers by covering them in wrapping paper. Choose some paper you love (you can even pick several coordinating designs), and cut the pieces to fit the size of the drawers. Then spread a crafting glue/sealer, such as Mod Podge, on the plastic and smooth the wrapping paper onto it, being careful to eliminate bubbles. Allow to dry, and apply a coat of sealant on top. Not only does the paper look beautiful, but it also hides the contents of the drawers, making everything appear neat and tidy.

Matching Not Necessary

You’ve probably noticed this at the restaurants you frequent, but it’s becoming more and more acceptable nowadays—even hip—to eat your meals on vintage, mismatched chairs. Instead of spending a fortune on a dining-room set, go for the mismatched look and hunt for your chairs at thrift shops and used furniture stores.

Brighten Up the Bookshelf

If you’re looking for an easy, inexpensive way to add a pop of color to a room, look no further than the bookshelf. You can paint the interior back “wall” of the bookshelf a color that either contrasts or coordinates with your decor. It will add a modern touch for not a lot of money! 

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6 Options to Get a Loan with Bad Credit

If your credit is in bad shape or you’re just starting to build credit from scratch, you might feel shut out of opportunities to borrow money. While having bad credit can be a roadblock when applying for a loan from a traditional lender, the good news is that there are alternative options.  

In this article I’ll cover 6 ways to get a loan when your credit is less than perfect.  

Free Resource: Richer Life Lab Podcast—gives you everything you need to take control and upgrade your money, career, and life! Follow along for inspiration that sparks a revolution in your mindset and results.

How to Check your Credit Report

If you live in the U.S. before applying for a loan, I recommend that you take some time to review each of your credit reports with the three nationwide credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.

Federal law requires each of the bureaus to give you a free credit report every 12 months if you request it. You can get your reports from the individual bureaus or access all of them at annualcreditreport.com.

Any inaccurate information—such as late payments, accounts you don’t recognize, or open balances that were previously paid off—could be dragging down your credit scores without you knowing it. Lower credit scores typically cause you to pay higher interest rates on credit cards and loans, so cleaning up your credit file can really pay off.  

If you have old debt in collections, consider negotiating a settlement with your creditors. Arranging a payment agreement today won’t remove the bad debt from your report tomorrow, but it helps clean up your report.

Remember that credit accounts remain on your credit history for many years after you pay them off. Debts with positive payment history stay in your credit file for 10 years and those with negative information stick around for 7 years. So even after you settle or pay off a bad debt, it always remains on your credit history for 7 years after the date you originally became delinquent.

See also: The Statute of Limitations and 4 Options for Old Debt

6 Options to Get a Loan with Bad Credit

No matter if you’ve already been turned down for a loan or you just like the idea of using a non-traditional lender, here are 6 options to get a loan when you don’t have excellent credit:

Option #1: Apply for a loan at a credit union

Since the purpose of a credit union is to serve its members, they’re known for offering top-notch customer service and can be more flexible and forgiving of consumers who have less than perfect credit.

Credit unions are similar to banks; however, they aren’t legally allowed to serve the general public like banks do, so you have to be a member.

Different credit unions have different membership requirements, such as working for a certain employer, in a particular industry, or living in a certain city or county. However, in some cases joining can be as simple as making a one-time $10 donation to a charity that the credit union supports. Also, most credit unions extend eligibility to the immediate family of all their members.

Since the purpose of a credit union is to serve its members, they’re known for offering top-notch customer service and can be more flexible and forgiving of consumers who have less than perfect credit. Additionally, they generally offer competitive interest rates that can save you money.

You can search for local and national credit unions at:

• Findacreditunion.com
• Mycreditunion.gov
• Findabetterbank.com
• Depositaccounts.com

See also: Bank or Credit Union—Which is Better?

Option #2: Use alternative lenders

Traditional brick-and-mortar banks tend to have stringent underwriting guidelines for loans. However, there are many alternative companies that offer loans even if you have average or poor credit.

Check out these online lenders:

• SoFi – uses a modern, radical approach to lending that evaluates applicants based on a holistic view of their financial well-being rather than on their credit score. They offer student loan refinancing, personal loans, and mortgages based on factors such as your career experience, income versus expenses, financial history, and education.
• Avant – looks at a variety of factors when determining your eligibility for a personal loan. Checking your rate results in a soft credit inquiry, which doesn’t hurt your credit. 
• LendingTree  - is an online lending exchange that connects borrowers with multiple lenders, banks, and credit partners who compete for your business, even if you have bad credit.

Some lenders allow you to get rate quotes with a soft inquiry to your credit report that doesn’t affect your credit—but many do a hard inquiry that will temporarily ding your scores.

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The best way to shop for loans is to submit all your applications within a one- to two-week period. Credit bureau algorithms know that a few credit inquiries within a short timeframe mean that you’re shopping and will only be counted as a single inquiry.

See also: FICO vs. VantageScore Credit Score--What's the Big Difference?

Option #3: Try marketplace lenders

Marketplace or peer-to-peer lenders connect people who need money with investors who want to make loans, which creates a win-win transaction. 

Marketplace or peer-to-peer lenders connect people who need money with investors who want to make loans, which creates a win-win transaction. This option is exploding in popularity because borrowers pay less interest than they would to a traditional bank and investors earn above average returns.  

You create a profile and post a loan listing that investors can review and choose to fund. Many are willing to take a chance on borrowers with average or low credit scores.

Check out these popular marketplace lenders:

• Lending Club 
• Prosper 
• PersonalLoans

Option #4: Appeal to a loan co-signer

If you’re having trouble qualifying for a loan on your own, consider finding someone with good credit to be your co-signer. Maybe you have a family member or friend who trusts you enough to share responsibility for a debt.

When you co-sign a loan, the payment history gets reported on both of your credit reports, even if only one co-signer makes the payments. That means if you make payments on time, it benefits both of your credit reports and helps increase both of your credit scores.

However, making late payments damages both of your credit files. And if you default, the lender will hold both of you equally responsible for repaying the full amount of outstanding debt.

Option #5: Use a home equity line of credit

If you’re a homeowner and have enough equity in your property, you may qualify for a low-interest home equity line of credit (HELOC). It’s a second mortgage that you can access as needed using a paper check or debit card.

With a HELOC, you’re limited by the total amount of the credit line offered and only pay interest on the amount you take out. Plus, up to $100,000 of the loan or credit line is tax deductible.

Your credit score typically doesn’t play a role in your loan’s approval or the interest rate you pay for a HELOC because your home is the collateral. That’s great if your credit isn’t good. However, the big drawback to a loan that’s secured by your home is that if you don’t make payments, you could lose your home.

So before tapping your home’s equity always be sure that you have secure and steady income. You can apply for a HELOC with the lender that handles your first mortgage or shop around with other banks or credit unions.

See also: Best Tips to Improve Your Credit Score

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Option #6: Take a loan from family or friends

If you accept a loan from family or friends, view it as a business transaction and create a proper loan agreement to avoid future disagreements.

If you can’t get a loan using these 5 options, the 6th is to borrow from someone you know. Taking a loan from family or friends is a decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly since feuds over money can destroy relationships.

If you accept a loan from family or friends, view it as a business transaction and create a proper loan agreement to avoid future disagreements.

ZimpleMoney and LendingKarma are unique platforms that manage person-to-person loans. Both handle loan documents and payment arrangements to make your life easier. You can also draft your own promissory note with the agreed upon loan terms using sites like Rocket Lawyer or LegalZoom.

How to Raise Your Credit Score

If you exhaust these options and still can’t get a loan, the best way to qualify is to raise your credit score. One of the easiest ways to build credit fast is to use a secured credit card.

Also, check out a multimedia tutorial I created called the Credit Score Survival Kit. It’s a free download that includes a video, audio, and e-book that teaches you 3 smart and legitimate strategies to build excellent credit.

See also: How to Get Credit With No or Bad Credit. 

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How to Cook the Perfect Steak

Jonesing for the perfect steak? John Tesar has your walk-through, with his Back to the Pan method replacing the grill for the tastiest, most perfectly-cooked steak of your dreams. 

1. CHOOSE YOUR MEAT.  When you find a good source of steak, stick with it!

2. SELECT WHAT CUT YOU WANT. Marbling, cost, tenderness, aging?

3. GAUGE THE SIZE OF THE STEAK AND GET A FEEL FOR IT. Thick or thin?

4. PULL THE STEAK FROM THE REFRIGERATOR. Defrost to room temperature—never microwave.

5. DRY THE STEAK COMPLETELY. Remember—moisture creates steam, steam prevents crust! We want to remove all surface moisture.

6. HEAT THE PAN. 3 to 4 minutes should be fine.

7. GENEROUSLY COAT THE MEAT ON ALL SIDES WITH SALT AND BLACK PEPPER. Salt either 3+ hrs before cooking, or immediately before. AKA—not 5 minutes before.

8. ADD FAT. Don’t use butter or olive oil—canola, peanut, grapeseed oils are better.

9. THROW ON THE STEAK. Pick up the steak once, let oil flow, and place back down.

10. FLIP THE STEAK AND ADJUST THE HEAT. Look for a reddish brown color, then flip. Turn down heat.

11. GAUGE THE DONENESS. Have a good idea of how you like your steak cooked.

12. REST THE STEAK, BUT NOT TOO MUCH. Thin steaks for a minute, thicker for a few minutes.

13. SERVE THE STEAK. Always slice the meat against the grain.

Check out Knife: Texas Steakhouse Meals at Home, available from any book retailer.

The above is adapted with permission from Flatiron Books from Knife (c) 2017 John Tesar. All rights reserved.

Myths about Sulfites and Wine

If drinking red wine gives you a headache, you’ve probably had someone tell you that sulfites are the likely culprit. Perhaps you’ve been advised to stick to white wine, organic wines, or wines made in Europe on the grounds that these will be lower in sulfites.

Let’s clear up some of the most common myths and misunderstandings about sulfites, wine, and headaches.

Sulfites in Wine

First, a little background: Sulphur dioxide (or SO2) is a chemical compound made up of sulfur and oxygen. It occurs naturally but can also be produced in a laboratory.  It’s used to preserve foods and beverages, which it does by acting as an antioxidant and antimicrobial.

Sulphur dioxide has been used in winemaking for thousands of years, ever since the ancient Romans discovered that it would keep their wine from turning into vinegar. To this day, winemakers use sulphur dioxide to preserve the flavor and freshness of wines.

By law, wines that contain more than 10 ppm (parts per million) sulfite must be labeled with the words “contains sulfites.”   There are also upper limits to how much sulfite a wine may contain but the regulations vary by region. In the European Union, wine may contain up to 210 ppm sulfites. In the U.S., the upper limit is 350 ppm.

Myth #1: Organic or bio-dynamic wines are sulfite free.

In order to be certified organic, a wine must not contain added sulfites. However, sulfites are produced naturally during the fermentation process as a by-product of yeast metabolism. Even though no sulfites are added, organic wine may contain between 10-40 ppm sulfites.

You may also see wines labeled as being made from organic grapes, which is not the same as organic wine. Wine made from organic grapes may contain up to 100 ppm sulfites.

If you do get a hold of wine made without sulfites, I don’t suggest keeping it in the cellar very long. Wine made without sulfites—especially white wine—is much more prone to oxidation and spoilage.

Myth #2: Red wine is higher in sulfites than white wine

Ironically, the exact opposite is likely to be true. Red wines tend to be higher in tannins than white wines. Tannins are polyphenols found in the skins, seeds, and stems of the grapes. They also act as antioxidants and preservatives so less sulfite is needed. 

In fact, while European regulations allow up to 210 ppm sulfites in white wine, the limit for red wine is only 160 ppm.

Other factors that affect how much sulfite is needed are the residual sugar and the acidity of the wine. Dryer wines with more acid will tend to be lower in sulfites. Sweet wines and dessert wines, on the other hand, tend to be quite high in sulfites.

Myth #3: Sulfites in wine cause headaches

The so-called “red wine headache” is definitely a real thing. But it’s probably not due to sulfites. For one thing, white wine is higher in sulfites than red wine but less likely to cause a headache. That suggests that it’s probably something else in red wine that’s responsible for the notorious red wine headache. Other candidates include histamines, tyramine, tannins, not to mention the alcohol itself!

See also: What is Histamine Intolerance? and Nutrition Tips for Headache Prevention

Which Foods Contain Sulfites?

A small percentage of the population (about 1%) are sensitive to sulfites--most of them are asthma sufferers. Reactions can include swelling, hives, asthma, and migraines. If you have a sulfite sensitivity, you probably want to avoid wine. But you’ll also want to steer clear of soda, candy, prepared soups, frozen juices, processed meats, potato chips, French fries and dried fruit, all of which contain much higher concentrations of sulfites than wine.

If you don’t have a sulfite sensitivity, there appears to be little reason to fear sulfites in otherwise healthy foods.  For example, you don’t have to settle for dried apricots that are tough and brown if you prefer the kind that are soft and orange.

If you have questions or comments about today's episode or a suggestion for a future show topic, post them below or on the Nutrition Diva Podcast Facebook page.  And be sure to subscribe to the Nutrition Diva podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen, so you don't miss a single episode!

2 Potent Ways to Kill Fat Cells and Lose Fat Fast

Think about the last piece of fat loss advice you received. Let me guess? It went something like this:

“Move more.”

“Eat less.”

“Try this pill.”

“Read this diet book.”

And sure: fat loss and the attainment of a sexy, lean body begins with getting off your butt, moving more, working out, and slowly lowering the doughnut from your gaping maw.

But when it comes to losing fat fast, staying shredded, rippedm and toned year round, and getting to the body weight you want—without two-a-day workouts and being hungry all the time—there are potent strategies that fly under the radar: strategies that go beyond fat loss.

For example, let’s take the flawed concept that, no matter what, you’ll always be stuck with the number of fat cells you’ve built earlier in your life. This commonly accepted dogma in the fitness and diet industry dictates that if you’ve ever had excess weight or bits of undesirable adipose tissue on your waist, hips, and butt, then the fat cells in those areas will never actually disappear, but will instead simply shrink. Those fat cells will then hide, waiting in the wings for the next time you mess up and eat a few too many bites of steak or an extra scoop of ice cream—at which point those food calories are doomed to wind up getting shoved directly into the eagerly waiting fat cells—resulting in a constant uphill battle against the bulge.

But this simply isn’t true. I realized this when I interviewed Dr. Cate Shanahan on my podcast.  Dr. Shanahan explained that if you banish just one particularly notorious biological variable that is present in most people eating a standard Western diet, then you can actually induce fat cells to not only die, but to get transformed into other physiologically useful tissues, such as muscle cells, stem cells and neural cells. So what is this variable?

It’s not excess calories. It’s not chocolate. It’s not, to the chagrin of diet book authors worldwide, gluten. It’s not a low-carb, high-fat or a high-carb, low-fat diet.

It’s inflammation.

That’s right: inflammation—particularly from exposure to a toxin-laden environment, consumption of heated and rancid vegetable oils, and a stressful lifestyle combined with not enough sleep - can make fat cells resistant to dying and resistant to getting converted into other tissues, particularly because excess inflammation creates excess insulin, and insulin is the hormone responsible for shoveling calories into fat tissue. So to achieve lasting fat loss, the solution is simple: shut down inflammation.

My fellow Quick And Dirty Tips podcast “The Nutrition Diva” has in the past delved into some of the most potent dietary strategies to decrease inflammation, so be sure to check out her many episodes on the topic. Other practical methods and useful resources for lowering inflammation, lowering insulin, and killing fat cells or converting fat cells, include:

-Avoidance of any oils exposed to high amounts of heat, pressure or other forms of oxidation, including rancid forms of canola oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil and most packaged foods that produce a crunchy sensation, including so-called “healthy” trail mixes coated in oil and “healthy” nut butters and off-the-shelf snacks (hint: doughnuts, potato chips and french fries are the three most notorious food-based culprits that maintain the body in a constant state of inflammation)

-Paying attention to the results from a 2010 research study at the University of Sao Paolo, which reported on something called the “Inflammation Factor Rating”, which accurately predicts food inflammatory responses in human subjects. Charts that list both the inflammatory and the anti-inflammatory potential of just about any food can be found at “InflammationFactor.com”. For example, suggestions from that website include limiting coffee, alcohol, high fructose corn syrup and wheat, and instead eat choosing foods such as kale, raw seeds and nuts, coconut and avocado.

-The fact that during your deep sleep stages, particularly between 2 am and 6 am, your body’s core temperature drops, nervous system repair and recovery takes place, and cellular inflammation is “cleaned up”, so if you struggle through the day with appetite cravings and resistance to weight loss, inflammation related to poor sleep is usually to blame.

-Identify and decrease exposure to over-processed and refined foods, chemical additives, antibiotics and pharmaceuticals, pesticides, herbicides, chlorinated water, artificial sweeteners or anything else that might be considered “unnatural” enough to churn up high amounts of inflammation. For more on how to do that, ready my article on “How To Detox Your Home”. So what are some other potent ways to kill fat cells?

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-Former NASA materials engineer Ray Cronise taught me about how burn fat without exercise. Considering that you can run a whole marathon and only burn 1/2-3/4 pound of fat, this is important information to include. Ray’s trick is to implement a daily “hot-cold contrast shower,” which is better for enhancing fat loss compared to the the currently popular “cold thermogenesis” practice of cold showers and cold weather exposure. For this tactic , you simply take a shower and alternate between 10 seconds of warm water to 20 seconds of cold water 10 times through. That’s just 5 minutes, but it’s free fat burning!

-Paying attention fascinating results of a University of Connecticut study (in which I was personally a study participant) that conclusively proved a high-fat, low carbohydrate diet could increase fat oxidation from an average maximum of 1.0 grams per minute to over 1.7 grams per minute.

-Reading up on why the “fat burning zone” is a myth, and the results of a recent study that revealed that runners exercising at over 85% of their maximum intensity still experienced fat oxidation contribution as nearly a third of their total energy expenditure, which I covered in the episode “How To Train Your Body To Burn More Fat”.

-Implementing quick and easy fat loss strategies throughout the day, including one short, aerobic workout as many mornings as possible a week, preferably in an overnight fasted state, avoidance of the commonly recommended practice to frequently snack or “graze”, saving all carb intake for the end of the day and up until that point, eating high amounts of healthy fats with moderate amounts of proteins, staying mildly physically active all day long (e.g. standing workstation, jumping jack breaks, etc.), keeping the metabolism elevated by exposing your body to frequent fluctuations in cold and hot temperatures, including a a three-fold combination of endurance training, high intensity interval training, and weight training in an exercise protocol, and exercising (if possible) every day for 20-60 minutes.

As you can see, many of these strategies outlined in this episode are lifestyle based. For example, you can start off each day, before eating, with 10-30 minutes of very light activity (yoga, walking the dog, doing yard chores, etc.), take at least one cold shower each day, visit the sauna at least once per week, avoid non-nutrient dense carbohydrates, and be as active as possible all day long. Then, you can put the “icing on the cake” by alternating between one day of high intensity cardio and one day of weight training.

Finally, the nitty-gritty details for one of the most effective fat loss techniques that I personally used when racing Ironman triathlon to stay extremely lean, and that I now implement with clients worldwide to great success is the three-fold combination of a 1) consuming ~100-150mg of caffeine from green tea or coffee; 2) a 20-30 minute morning, aerobic, fasted, conversational workout with the caffeine in the system (the caffeine mobilizes fatty acids from adipose tissue); 3) the completion of this workout with the hot-cold contrast shower described earlier.

Summary

If you’re implementing all these strategies, and nothing still seems to be working, you may want to look into blood, urine, stool and saliva testing works best to elucidate why your body may be resistant to fat loss, and what to look into from a biological self-quantification standpoint when nothing else seems to be working. My two top such tests that I recommend are a DUTCH test for hormones and a comprehensive blood and biomarker test for things like micronutrient deficiencies and thyroid issues and beyond.

Want more? Check out  twelve of my most effective unconventional ways to burn fat, which teaches you how to “biohack” your entire life to maximize fat loss, rather than relying on the inconvenience of a gym and strict diet to do achieve a lean body forever.

Throughout this episode, I’ve let you in on a little secret that I’ve hammered home over and over again: exercising and beating up the body with a ton of physical activity is not an ideal way to put yourself into maximum fat burning mode or to shrink your waistline. Instead, light levels of physical activity or mild “discomfort” throughout the day is the true way to maximize activity of fat burning enzymes. This includes using strategies such as a standing workstation, taking cold showers, avoiding sitting for long periods of time, using deep diaphragmatic breathing, implementing intermittent fasting, and using a host of other “unconventional” fat loss techniques.

So what are you waiting for? Are already be taking a cold shower each morning. If not, start doing it, and if so, start doing it A) before you’ve eaten and B) with green tea, coffee, or some other caffeine source in your system. Combine this tactic with limitation of vegetable oil and quelling of inflammation with sleep and lifestyle strategies, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for fat loss, without spending hours in the gym or without eating a restrictive diet for life.

Do you have more questions about how to kill fat cells and lose fat fast? Then join the conversation over at http://ift.tt/1xq4tPg. And don't forget to subscribe to the Get-Fit Guy podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen. If you have questions, comments or feedback, join the conversation on Facebook or Twitter.

How Customer Pictures Can Improve Your A-Game

I love being an individual! It means I can think my own thoughts, and I have free will, and everything’s hunky dory. Do you think your own thoughts? Do you have free will? You just thought “Yes, of course I do.” I knew you were going to think that.

And if I knew you were going to think that, and you did think it, do you really have free will? (You just thought “of course I do.”)

Have you ever wondered why movie theaters show trailers of popcorn once the movie starts, even though it’s too late for you to buy a popcorn? Because they’re establishing a link in your mind between movies and popcorn. And next time you walk into a theater, you’ll be more likely to buy popcorn. You have been assimilated! 

“No I haven’t!” you’re thinking as you munch your popcorn. “I just like popcorn! I only eat it at movie theaters because, er, I don’t have recipe.” I knew you were going to think that. And if I knew you were going to think that, well, do we really need to review the free will discussion? No? Good.

See popcorn at movie, go to movie, buy popcorn. That’s called brainwashing, and it works. It works so well that we have an entire industry devoted to it that has mind control down to a fine art. We call it “advertising.” 

Visible customers rock

In his book Pre-suasion, psychologist Robert Cialdini tells of a consulting firm that worked in a glass-walled conference room at a client site. They did superb work. When they worked elsewhere, however, their work quality suffered.

It turned out that just seeing their clients in their peripheral vision kept the consultants mindful of who they were working for. Just having their clients in their field of vision kept the consultants on track.

The consultants figured they’d use this technique with their next client. But when they tried to knock down the conference room walls to install glass windows, their new client got a little testy. So they had to come up with a new solution.

They took pictures of the client employees, blow them up into cardboard cutouts, and put those pictures around the confined, airless, windowless conference room. And guess what? It worked! They did great work for the new client. 

My interpretation is that maybe the client’s employees just had the personality of cardboard cutouts, so the brain found either equally inspiring. But apparently that wasn’t it at all. The correct interpretation is that just being reminded of the real people they were working for was enough to unconsciously influence the team to do work with those clients in mind.

Design your own environment

If the consulting firm can design an environment, so can we! Let’s reconstruct our environment so we really produce the work that our customers need (be they external customers or internal). 

Think who uses your work. If you stock supermarket shelves, it’s the shoppers. If you write sales reports for marketers to use, it’s the marketers. If you’re a writer, it’s your audience.

Now get pictures of those people. Real live pictures. And put them around. You don’t have to look at them consciously. Just keep them in your environment. And you’ll begin, unconsciously, to orient what you do around them. 

You'll begin, unconsciously, to orient around them!

You can do this for your whole job, for single projects, or for tasks. Giving a team presentation? Put yourself where you can see your team members as you create your presentation. Or have pictures of them in your office. Do use pictures of them that were taken around the office, maybe for the office holiday party. Don’t use pictures of their backyard pool party you took with high-altitude drone. People might mistake your motivational techniques for something a bit more … stalkerish. Either way, having your audience in your field of vision will tell your unconscious mind to craft a presentation that’s going to be perfect for them.

Be my cardboard cutout

Now I have an extra-special request for you. You may think a podcaster’s life is all champagne and multi-floor suites at Caesar’s Palace, just full of adoring fans throwing flowers. No. I work in my basement. Alone. There’s no champagne. I’m alone. There is a glass of soda water, and instead of flowers, I have a wilted bouquet I took as a souvenir from a friend’s wedding. Nine years ago.

Of course you know what’s missing from this picture: you!! I have no idea what my fans look like. But Cialdini’s technique works as well for me as it will for you. So let’s change that! I would love to have an office with pictures of you so as I write and record episodes, it’s with you as my subliminal influence! 

If you’d like to be part of my workday, please send me a picture of you! Send it to hi@getitdoneguy.com, along with a note giving me a sense of who you are, so when I’m in a creative mode, I’m creating for you.

This is Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. I run programs to help people have extraordinary careers. If you want to know more, visit http://ift.tt/1l2uWN6 . 

Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!

How Much Solar Power Will We Lose During the August Solar Eclipse?

On August 21, 2017 there will be a total solar eclipse that spans the continental United States from Georgia to Oregon. During the event, the Moon will pass between the Sun and the Earth and cast a shadow, completely blocking the Sun’s light for nearly 3 minutes and partially obscure it for over an hour. Such events have long been seen as portents of doom in many mythologies and blamed on hungry frogs, wolves, or even vengeful deities devouring the Sun. Animals often begin to behave as if night has fallen and there can be a noticeable drop in temperature.

Such spectacular events happen, of course, due to a total cosmic coincidence. The Moon is much smaller than the Sun (roughly 400 times smaller) but it is nearly 400 times closer on average. Thus both celestial objects appear ~1/2 a degree in size on the sky from our perspective.

There is some variation in the Earth-Moon and Earth-Sun distance, so annular solar eclipses also occur, where the Moon passes between the Sun and the Earth but does not entirely obscure the Sun revealing a glowing ring.  Depending on your viewing angle, you may also only see a partial eclipse while other observes on Earth have a face-on, total eclipse view.

Total solar eclipses, like the one occurring in August in the US, happen once every 1.5 years somewhere on the globe, and so are not really all that rare. However, the August eclipse will be the first total solar eclipse visible from the US in 38 years. Thus, campsites and hotels spanning the eclipse’s path of totality are filling up fast. Check out NASA’s infographics page for a map on what locations in the US will see the eclipse in totality versus only partially.

How much solar power will we lose?

While ancient civilizations may have considered total solar eclipses to be a bad omen and thus prepared for them accordingly, humans today are now making a different kind of preparation: how much solar power will we lose?

Although Californians will only experience a partial solar eclipse, the impact is predicted to be largest there since they provide nearly half of the solar electricity generating capacity in the US. And although the eclipse is only partial, roughly 68% of the Sun will be obscured in Southern California and up to 76% obscuration in Northern California. The California Independent System Operator, which provides access to the state’s power grid, predicts that contributions to the solar power grid will fall by 70 megawatts per minute or 6,000 megawatts during the total duration of the eclipse which is enough to power a large city.

Although still far behind California, North Carolina, which will also experience the eclipse in close to totality, is fourth on the list of largest state contributions to the solar power grid. Utility operators in both states are preparing by coordinating with industry to temporarily ease up on demand while also reserving spare energy from gas and hydroelectric power plants.

Solar power is on the rise.

Another sign that solar power is on the rise is the news this week that Tesla solar roof tiles, solar panels designed to look like standard roofing, have already sold out well into 2018. They became available for preorder with a $1,000 deposit in late 2016 but given their high cost – a predicted $21.85 per square foot according to Tesla – critics were hesitant in predictions of their popularity. You can estimate the cost savings that such solar tiles would provide for your address, based on the size of your roof and the amount of sunlight your corner of the world gets, thanks to an interactive tool from Google Project Sunroof.

We will have more coverage of the total solar eclipse here at Everyday Einstein in August, but please remember it’s never a good idea to stare directly at the Sun, even during an eclipse. If you want to participate in this potentially once in a lifetime event (at a given location), start looking for your own special eclipse viewing glasses now!

Until next time, this is Sabrina Stierwalt with Everyday Einstein’s Quick and Dirty Tips for helping you make sense of science. You can become a fan of Everyday Einstein on Facebook or follow me on Twitter, where I’m @QDTeinstein. If you have a question that you’d like to see on a future episode, send me an email at everydayeinstein@quickanddirtytips.com. 

Image courtesy of shutterstock

6 Ways to Embrace Pregnancy as a Mother

Pregnancy is truly one of the most incredible journeys you will ever have! As the mom of 8 who struggled with infertility for 5 years, was blessed with a joyful adoption, and then experienced 7 pregnancies and deliveries I can say without question you will be in sheer awe of this miraculous time.

Depending on how your body handles a pregnancy coupled with your emotional state during these 9 months is another story altogether. Just like no two children are alike, you may soon find out that no two pregnancies are the same either.  Your first pregnancy might have been easy-breezy and you enjoyed every precious second while the second one finds you feeling green around the gills and drop-dead exhausted from the moment you find out you’re expecting again until you have your first contraction. 

Your first pregnancy is all new.  You’re most likely excitedly enjoying all things pregnancy, even the unpleasant parts like morning sickness, swollen feet and unexpected mood swings but while doing so you’re probably being pampered by your spouse, receiving all kinds of attention from friends and co-workers and have the luxury of a little extra self-care—napping, sitting with your feet up at the end of a long day, quietly reading books on pregnancy and newborns—your only focus is you and your unborn baby.

Jump ahead 18 months and now you have an active toddler, possibly still working full or part-time and all of a sudden you find out you’re expecting baby #2!  Pregnancy is still a miracle but now you have to figure out how to navigate morning sickness, your job, food shopping, housekeeping, paying attention to your spouse oh and chasing a spirited 2-year around all day long.  Help!

You may not be able to curl up and nap when the mood strikes, but you can embrace your second and subsequent pregnancies with younger kids in tow.  Mighty Mommy shares 6 ways to manage pregnancy and motherhood without losing your mind.

#1.  Have Realistic Expectations

I used to be a perfectionist (in my former life before I had 8 kids!).  One of my coping mechanisms when I was struggling with infertility was to focus on the upkeep of my home.  There was just my husband and I and our two adorable cocker spaniels.  I decorated for the seasons, alphabetized my pantry and actually vacuumed my closet floors.  Today, I’m lucky to see the floor of my closet and as we head into June I’m ashamed to admit I still have a few Christmas odds and ends lying out and about so I learned quickly that priorities do indeed change once you are in the throes of parenthood. That said, give yourself a wonderful gift during your second and future pregnancies by letting go of pre-motherhood standards and try your best to go with the flow.  Dusting, neatly folded laundry, and tidy kitchen counters may have to be pushed aside for a bit while you adjust to your new pregnancy and the demands your toddler and other children place on you each day.  I picked two afternoons a week as my designated “trash and tidy” time slots and what I couldn’t get to on a daily basis I would try and manage during those two time frames.  Doing this eventually gave me a peace of mind that kept me both motivated and calm when the house looked like it was falling apart.

#2. Plan Ahead

Some people say plan is a four letter word, but I say it’s a mother’s best friend!  Use your energy (even if it’s quite limited throughout your pregnancy) to stay organized and if possible, one step ahead of your family.  For instance, I had extreme morning sickness with all of my pregnancies for the first several months so I knew I was practically useless until later in the day.  Once I felt better in the afternoon I would use that time to prep ahead for meals, stay on top of appointments, think of fun games for my younger kids to play while I was not feeling well, throw in a load of laundry etc.   Shifting your schedule to meet how you feel is an easy way to meet the demands of pregnancy and motherhood.

#3. Snooze When Possible  

I had a unique situation for my first pregnancy.  We adopted our first baby and then I got pregnant when she was not even three months old, so at the same time I was discovering how to care for a newborn, I was also experiencing extreme morning sickness, working full-time and trying to sell our home because we wanted to move closer to our family.  I went from nothing to everything in the span of a few short months!  In addition to throwing up all morning long I was absolutely exhausted.  The advice I kept getting was to nap as often as I could.  Nap with a newborn?  I thought this advice was just nuts until I found ways to sneak them in because the benefits were amazing. 

In 8 Ways to Manage One Child at Home When You’re Pregnant, a study by NASA found that a snooze as short as 26 minutes can boost alertness by 54 percent — ideally one taken between the hours of 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. “When you find yourself dragging in your first (or second, or third) trimester, these little catnaps are key. Sneak them in while your toddler naps or is off at pre-school and don’t feel guilty about them. By fighting fatigue now, you’ll have more energy later to take on that mommy and me class or get dinner in the oven.”   I would put my newborn baby in her baby bouncer chair on the floor next to me in the living room and would catch a power nap almost every night while dinner cooked.  It was only for a quick half-hour but it was enough to reenergize me for the rest of the evening. See Also:  6 Ways to Find Time For Yourself This Summer

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#4. Accept Help

When I told our pediatrician that I was finally pregnant after adopting our baby, she hugged me and then offered me her best advice—don’t be too proud to accept help from family, friends, neighbors, and anyone else you trust while you’re expecting and caring for your baby.

Don’t be too proud to accept help from family, friends, neighbors, and anyone else you trust while you’re expecting and caring for your baby.

I’m the oldest of five children and have always had the role of mothering my siblings, many of my friends and even my co-workers.  It’s just in my “make up” and my personality.  Now, however, the role was quickly reversed because I was a new mom and newly pregnant all at the same time and wasn’t able to take on all the responsibilities I had so easily handled most of my life.

My spouse was the first person I turned to for respite with our baby for those 2 a.m. feedings and early morning wake-up calls, but I also learned to lean on my inlaws (yes, it can be done!) as well as my retired neighbor who would come and take our baby for walks in the neighborhood so I could either catch up with laundry or run to my OB/GYN for check-ups.  I eventually found a tween in our neighborhood who became my mother’s helper.  She was a godsend and came a few afternoons a week and played with my younger kids so I could rest or take care of other household matters.   See Also:  6 Reasons to Embrace Parenting Later In Life

#5. Keep Your Younger Kids Involved

If your younger child is old enough to communicate and understand instructions for simple play or clean-up activities, get him/her involved in your pregnancy as early on as possible.

While this is an ongoing activity throughout childhood, pregnancy is a common time to take stock of what skills your child is able to learn and start fostering his independence.  Pretend play with her own baby doll to care for can be fun for your toddler while you sit down and read a magazine for a few moments.  While you’re making breakfast, let her pick out her clothes for the day. Depending on the age of the child, this may include cleaning up spills, tidying toys,  increasing their bathroom independence, setting out lunch dishes and utensils, putting clothes in the hamper, and so on.  See Also:  4 Fun and Constructive Ways to Spend Time With Your Toddler

#6. Stolen Moments

Just as every pregnancy is different, every mom-to-be has a different lifestyle and daily challenges depending on her family’s circumstances.  This means each of us has to be creative and many times even a bit impulsive when it comes to taking advantage of quiet, stolen moments throughout your pregnancy.  Even if you tend to operate as a detail-oriented, scheduled person keep your eyes and ears open for little pockets of time throughout your day and week to simply focus on yourself and your growing baby.  If you’re lucky enough to go to your OB appointment alone, enjoy the peace and quiet of the reception area with a good book or magazine.  Take a walk through your neighborhood, alone, when your husband gets home from work, so you can clear your mind and get some fresh air.  Listen to some meditation tapes when you’re folding laundry. Whenever you can find them, use those little snippets of time for recharging your batteries and not for housework.   See Also: 5 Ways that Selfish Parenting Can Benefit Your Family

Are you expecting?  How do you care for your family and yourself during pregnancy? Please share your thoughts in the comments section at http://ift.tt/1zMEe2L, post your ideas on the Mighty Mommy Facebook page. or email me at mommy@quickanddirtytips.com. Visit my family-friendly boards at http://ift.tt/1wyJKr5.

Be sure to sign up for the upcoming Mighty Mommy newsletter chock full of practical advice to make your parenting life easier and more enjoyable. 

5 Ways to Rebuild Broken Trust

Trust is so frequently lost and broken that you’d think some insurance company would have made billions off it by now. But trust can’t be guaranteed. And once it’s gone, especially in a relationship, it takes lots of time and effort to rebuild.

Listener Kate wrote in and asked how to rebuild trust in a relationship, but specified that broken trust goes beyond cheating. She’s right: there are many ways partners betray our trust besides an affair. It may be relapsing on drugs or alcohol after a promise to stay sober. It may be letting us down at a time when we were seriously ill, grieving, postpartum, or otherwise vulnerable. It may be lying about where they’re going or who they’re with. Or it may be hurting us when they were supposed to protect us.

No matter the specifics, betrayals of trust shift your world. As your relationship has grown, the two of you have gotten good at predicting each other’s behavior, you’ve made mutual plans and goals—like saving for the future or starting a family—that depend on each other. And of course, you simply like each other. But a breach of trust can disrupt all those things.

After a transgression, you start to wonder if you’re crazy or if you can trust your own senses and experience. It gets to the point where you can’t even trust chocolate chip cookies because they might turn out to be raisin.

If it’s been a long time since you felt able to trust, here’s a reminder of what it feels like: According to trust researchers, trust is comfort in your partner’s presence, while distrust is unease, anxiety, and discontent. Trust means that depending on your partner gets you more, while distrust means that depending on your partner makes you lose out. Trust means not having to protect yourself around your partner, while distrust means feeling secretive, suspicious, protective, and even making efforts to avoid your partner. Overall, trust is the willingness to be vulnerable because you know you’ll be cared for, while distrust is an unwillingness to be vulnerable because you’re afraid you’ll get hurt.

Is Your Relationship Worth Rebuilding?

Only you can decide if your relationship is worth rebuilding. To do that, take an honest look at your reasons for wanting to trust again. Ask yourself: what do you get out of the relationship?

If your answer is extrinsic factors—that is, benefits like money, social connections, status, or access to things you might not otherwise have--this might not work. Why? Trust needs to come from the essential nature of the relationship, not from transactional benefits. Now, it’s important to note that many partners really are financially dependent. But ideally, financial security should be a bonus, not the central reason for wanting to rebuild trust.

On the other hand, if what you get out of the relationship is intrinsic—that is, the satisfaction of being a team, making each other laugh, mutual respect, or being each other’s biggest fans—you have a shot.

In other words, what you fundamentally get out of the relationship should be something intangible rather than something transactional. If you can truly say that, and you want to rebuild trust, you’re on your way.

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How to Rebuilt Trust

Now, these five steps aren’t a one-size-fits-all template, but they do speak to five essential components of rebuilding. The wrecking ball has already had its turn; now it’s time to set up the construction zone.

Step #1: Know this will take time.

Depending on the severity of the transgression and how hurt you felt by it, regaining trust takes time—months, a year, or even more.

Depending on the severity of the transgression and how hurt you felt by it, regaining trust takes time—months, a year, or even more.

If your partner guilts you with “you should be over this by now” statements, it’s a red flag that they don’t understand the impact of what happened or aren’t prioritizing your well-being.

That said, it’s equally important to refrain from dredging up the transgression to punish your partner whenever you’re less than happy.

The upshot: like grieving or other emotional healing, take all the time you need, but with a goal to get to the end. If you look at your partner’s transgression as your ace-in-the-hole, you’re not playing fairly.

Step #2: Look for a real apology.

If your partner has transgressed, he or she owes you an apology. A real apology starts with “I’m sorry I,” not I’m sorry you, such as “I’m sorry you’re mad,” nor I’m sorry but as in “I’m sorry but it was only that once.”

If you hear an apology that tries to justify or otherwise excuse what happened, blames you, or minimizes your feelings—“Come on, it’s not that bad!”—you didn’t get a real apology, you got the beach umbrella of apologies--shady and easily collapsible.

In short, a true apology takes responsibility, expresses true remorse, understands why you were hurt, and promises to make amends.

Step #3: Gather evidence of predictability and dependability.

A classic study from 1985 found that there are three dimensions of relationship trust: predictability, dependability, and faith.

We’ll talk more about faith in Step #5—not the religious kind, but the confidence-in-your-partner kind. But before we do that, we have to establish predictability and dependability. This is necessary to help the wronged partner regain a sense of control.

Evidence of predictability and dependability are established by going through situation after situation in which the partner could potentially be secretive and selfish, but instead chose to be open and kind.

Some of these examples should be directly related to the transgression, like coming home at the time they say they’ll be home, doing 30 AA meetings in 30 days, or going to couple therapist with you (and doing more than just stay awake during session).

No matter the specifics, it’s essential that expectations are communicated, not set up as secret tests of your partner. Talk about your expectations and decide on goals together. You may have some non-negotiables, like getting sober or breaking off an affair, but whether they’re negotiable or not, expectations and metrics of success need to be discussed.

Of course, the process of rebuilding trust will go faster and be more genuine if some evidence of trustworthiness is also initiated by the partner—she finally gets help for her depression, he takes a greater interest in the kids by coaching their Little League team, she decides to see her friends two nights a week instead of five.

When to stop? Essentially, accumulations of trustworthy behavior need to continue to the point where a subsequent mistake that breaches trust will be seen as the exception that proves the rule.

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Step #4: Focus on the here and now.

If you were wronged, you may be trying your hardest, but just can’t seem to trust again.
If that’s the case, ask yourself if you’re prone to rumination or worry. Rumination is negative, repetitive thinking about the past, while worry is negative, repetitive thinking about what might happen in the future. It’s playing lowlights of the past or possible future over and over again without coming to a solution.

If that’s the case, when you catch yourself, bring yourself back to here and now. Look at your partner’s current behavior and the current state of your union rather than what happened or what might happen. You can call this mindfulness, or you can simply call it seeing your life as it is.

Step #5: Take a leap of faith.

Having faith in your partner is the hardest but most necessary part of rebuilding trust. The same classic 1985 paper defines faith as the belief that your partner will act in loving and caring ways whatever the future holds.

Letting yourself be vulnerable is the only way to discover if your partner will be responsive and caring, or will let you down again.

By contrast, if you avoid contentious issues or have everything defined by rules, there’s no room to take that necessary leap of faith. To understand that you’re truly safe, you ned to go beyond the evidence of predictability and dependability you accumulated in Step #3.

This means letting your partner out of the holding pattern. It means deciding to trust your partner even though you don’t know what the future holds.

But once you do, it means getting back a trusting relationship. And that is something worth taking a leap of faith.

Other studies that informed this article can be found here and here.

Get more savvy by subscribing to the podcast on iTunes or Stitcher, or get the episode delivered straight to your inbox by signing up for the newsletter. And check out the new Savvy Psychologist Twitter account for even more helpful tips.

The History of English Spelling

You may have noticed that in English, most word spellings don’t correspond exactly to the way they are pronounced, which can be frustrating and make some people cry out for a spelling “update”—but doing that would not benefit anyone. We’ll explore this topic in two parts: Part I is about the history of English spelling and spelling reforms, and Part II is about the reasons to keep our writing system just as it is.

The main reason that spelling doesn’t match pronunciation very well is that most of our spellings come from a time from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, and back then, many people couldn’t read or write well, or at all, so attempts to standardize the way people spelled took time and were difficult to enforce. Even Shakespeare spelled his own name different ways, on occasion. (4)

St. Augustine Started Writing in English

According to linguists Anne Curzan and Michael Adams, St. Augustine and his followers began writing with the Latin alphabet in England around the year 597. The alphabet had 23 letters for around 35 English sounds, so some letters were used for multiple sounds (kind of like today!). Later, when the Norman French invaded England in 1066, some French spellings were introduced, which is why, for example, city is spelled with a C, like cité in French. When scribes at the time needed to create a vowel sound there was no letter for, they sometimes doubled consonants after the vowel, or added an adjacent, second vowel, such as “ee” or “ ea,” to reflect the multiple sounds represented by one vowel, but they did so inconsistently. Remember, back then every document in the world was written by hand, and duplicated by hand, too!

At Times, Spelling and Pronunciation Did Match

At this time, words like knight really were pronounced the way they are spelled, with the K sound at the beginning and the throaty sound you hear in Hebrew for the GH. The I sound was more like the sound in “bit.” So, back then, knight the warrior and night the opposite of day were not homophones, like they are today, but they still rhymed. 

Later on, over a few hundred years and ending during the seventeenth centuries, people started pronouncing almost all the English vowels differently. This change is noticeable to scholars—partly because it occurred just after spellings had started to become standardized—so there's actually a name for it: the Great Vowel Shift. By the end of the shift, words like mouse and house that had been pronounced like “moose” and “hoos,” started sounding like the we say them today: mouse and house. But since spelling had become more standardized, the spellings stuck even after the pronunciations changed. (2)

Gutenberg Began to Standardize Spelling

One of the key elements that allowed spelling to eventually become fixed was the printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-fifteenth century. Around that time and later, a spelling reform of sorts took place because printed works and their various haphazard spellings were becoming much more widely distributed. (4). But, those efforts brought new spelling problems, because they were based on the whims of a small number of men in positions of authority who revered Greek and Latin. Renaissance scholars took it upon themselves to change spellings not to be more like pronunciations, but instead to be more like the classical languages, creating the silent letters in words like debt, and even adding silent letters that we eventually started to pronounce! For example, the Middle English word for falcon was “F-A-U-C-O-N,” but scholars stuck an L in there to look more like the Latin word, and speakers now pronounce the L. (2) That’s also why receipt has a P, and indict has a C (it used to be “I-N-D-I-T-E”!). (4)

Webster Made Some Spelling Changes

Later, in 1898, Noah Webster successfully made some changes to U.S. spellings, hoping to strengthen the cultural divide between the British and the Americans. For example, he took the U out of honour, and took the British spelling of realise (R-E-A-L-I-SE-) and changed the S to a Z. But, many of his proposed changes were rejected because certain spellings were already too well-known and widespread. For example, he wanted to drop the E at the end of determine, which didn’t work out too well, as we know. (2) From today’s standpoint, it doesn’t really seem appropriate to actively make spelling changes to divide speech communities. Additionally, we can all agree that it might be easier for the English-speaking world now if people had rejected Webster's changes, especially for school children who move from the U.S. to the U.K. and vice versa, and are still in the middle of learning to read and spell. In the U.S., most of us learned to spell glamour with that British U, and we are all doing just fine with the U there. 

The Germans Tried Spelling Reform

You may have heard of the attempt at spelling reform in Germany in the nineties. The government did pass a spelling reform law, but there were numerous court cases and legal challenges against it! (6, 1). Even a decade after the reform, many newspapers wound up following some of the new rules, but not others, leading to more gray areas in spelling conventions, instead of fewer. (5)

One take-away from all of this is that meddling and reforming writing systems that are already established typically adds confusion—confusion that only sorts itself out after time has passed, and doesn’t do much good in the short-term, unless there truly is no standard to begin with, in which case, of course, people would need a standard to be established. Even though some of the reforms from hundreds of years ago were chosen arbitrarily, that is still not a reason to further meddle now, especially when we are able to disseminate the written word in mere seconds. Next time, we’ll explore more about why that is.

That segment was by Syelle Graves who has two master's degrees in linguistics. You can read more about her at syellegraves.com. 

References

1.Cowell, A. (1997, July 31). All the sturm und drang! It's not just umlauts. The New York Times. http://ift.tt/2qlDlQV.

2.Curzan, A., & Adams, M. (2012). How English works: A linguistic introduction (3^rd ed.). Longman.

3.Ehri, L.C. (2005). Learning to read words: Theory, findings, and Issues. Scientific Studies of Reading 9(2), 167–188.

4.Fromkin, V., Hyams, N., & Rodman, R. (2014). Introduction to Language (10^th ed.). Boston: Wadsworth.

5.German orthography reform of 1996. Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://ift.tt/1Q4NA28

6.Johnson, S. (2005). Spelling trouble? Language, ideology, and the reform of German orthography. Multilingual Matters. http://bit.ly/2qpoRyv

“Burned” Versus “Burnt”

I used to be a terrible cook. One problem was that I would get distracted and end up burning things a lot, but in such cases, Should I say dinner is burned or should I say it’s burnt? Why do we have two forms of that word?

The Verb: 'Burned' Versus 'Burnt'

Burned and burnt are both acceptable past-tense forms of the verb to burn, but which one you use depends on where you live because the verb burned is the much more common form in the United States and Canada. Burned and burnt are used more interchangeably as a verb in Britain, so I tend to think of burnt as a British form of the verb. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary, which takes a British approach given that it is published in Oxford, says that burnt as a verb is “always permissible,” but burned is “slightly archaic and somewhat more formal” than burnt. So, you might say 

Mom burned the muffins. (US)

Mum burnt the crumpets. (UK)

Also, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage says that the two forms can have slightly different meanings. For example, if you say a house burnt down, that implies it happened quickly, but people are more likely to use burned for something that took a long time, like the fire burned for days. But this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule.

Burned is the older form of the word, and we only have burnt because of a British trend toward adding -t instead of -ed to verbs that started in the sixteenth century. It’s the same reason we have the pairs learned and learnt, spilled and spilt, spelled and spelt and so on. (1)

Over the centuries, people on both sides of the pond sometimes liked burnt and sometimes didn’t, but the burnt form eventually stuck in Britain. Americans haven’t been so sure about it. Burnt was more popular than burned in America in most of the eighteenth century, but then burned overtook it again in the nineteenth century, (1) and that’s what we’re more likely to use today.

We roasted s’mores as the campfire burned.

As soon as a redwood is cut down or burned, it sends up a crowd of eager, hopeful shoots, which, if allowed to grow, would in a few decades attain a height of a hundred feet, and the strongest of them would finally become giants as great as the original tree. —John Muir.

The Adjective: 'Burned' Versus 'Burnt'

But if we consider burned and burnt as adjectives, then the two words are on more equal footing in the US. In fact, you’re more likely to see burnt as an adjective than as a verb here.

For example, burnt is an adjective when you’re talking about burnt sienna, the color of a crayon—and apparently a beloved color because the Crayola company retired some colors in 2003, but let people vote on one to save. Burnt sienna was the winner, beating out blizzard blue, magic mint, mulberry, and teal blue, which are no more.

Burnt Sienna Is Actually Burned

And this is a fascinating aside: sienna is a type of dirt that contains ferric oxide, basically a component of iron, that’s used as a pigment, and it actually is burned—roasted—to make the reddish-brown color. It’s yellowish-brown if it isn’t roasted. 

So burnt is an adjective because it’s describing the type of sienna.

I actually wonder how much the popularity of these crayon colors we play with as children has to do with our American acceptance of burnt as an adjective. Besides burnt sienna, we also have burnt umber (retired in 1944) and burnt orange (still in production).

'Burnt' the Adjective: Examples

Here are two more examples of burnt as an adjective: 

My favorite dessert is burnt cream. and

The priest helped with burnt offerings.

That’s your Quick and Dirty Tip: Burned and burnt are both OK. If you’re in the United States, you’ll sound more natural if you stick with burned as the verb and save burnt to use as an adjective.

Additional Source

Anderwald, Lieselotte. Burned, Dwelled, Dreamed: The Evolution of a Morphological Americanism and the Role of Prescriptive Grammar Writing.  American Speech. (2014). 89(4), 408-40.

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How to Solve Your Biggest Summer Problems

Use Vanilla to Keep Mosquitoes Away

Keeping mosquitoes away from you is easier (and nicer smelling) than you might think—just use vanilla extract! Vanilla contains alcohol, which keeps mosquitoes away.

Keep Bugs Away from Your Barbecue

Mosquitoes are a pain each summer, but you don’t have to buy citronella candles, mosquito coils, or the latest gadget—you can just use cardboard egg cartons and coffee trays (the kind you get when you order more than a couple of coffees to-go). Light them on fire, then blow them out and let them smolder in a fire-safe location. The smokes goes up into the air and keeps mosquitoes away. Another way to keep bugs like bees away is to leave open cans of soda around your outdoor party. Bugs will be attracted to the cans, and not your guests! As for ants, simply put the legs of your table in some large plastic cups. Ants can swim, and won’t be able to climb onto the table!

Get Rid of Indoor Ants

Have a bad ant problem that you don’t want to solve with smelly bug spray? Use a clothes freshener spray like Febreeze instead. It contains enough alcohol to kill the ants, but will leave the room smelling fresh.

Help for Bug Bites

Covered in bug bites? Make the itchiness go away with some toothpaste. Just apply some white, non-gel toothpaste to the spot and it will stop bothering you almost immediately!

Check to See if You Have Enough Propane

Nothing gets the summertime party going faster than firing up the backyard grill. Just make sure you don’t run out of gas during your BBQ! Even without a gas gauge, there is a way to figure out how much fuel you have left. Here’s what to do a day or two before the your guests are set to arrive. Boil water, then pour it down the side of the tank. Place your hand on the side: the cool part has propane inside, the warm part is empty.

Clean Your Grill Fast

Our favorite way to clean a grill? With an onion! Pierce a half an onion with a grill fork, then run it over a warm grill. The onion contains anti-bacterial properties that help clean the grill!

Lighter Fluid Substitution

If you run out of lighter fluid, you can use sugar instead. Something else that works well? Doritos.

Keep Burgers from Breaking Up

Do your burgers fall apart on the grill? Keep this from happening by simply sticking burger patties in the freezer for 5 minutes before throwing them on the grill.

For a Guacamole Emergency!

If you bought a whole bunch of avocados for your guacamole and one or two are still not ripe enough to use, try this tip—which isn’t ideal, but will do the trick. Prick the skin of the unripe avocado in several places, then microwave it on high for 40–70 seconds, flipping it over halfway through. This won’t ripen the avocado, but it will soften it enough that you’ll be able to mash it with ripe avocados and your guests won’t notice the difference.

Iced Coffee Cubes

Who doesn’t enjoy an iced coffee on a sultry summer day? To make sure melting ice doesn’t dilute your drink, make ice cubes using the small amount of coffee left at the bottom of your coffee pot each morning. Use them in your iced coffee and it will never taste watered down. This is also a great tip for iced tea!

Cure Cloudiness in Iced Tea

Cloudiness is common in home-brewed iced tea, but it can be easily prevented. Simply let the tea cool to room temperature before refrigerating it. If the tea is still cloudy, try adding a small amount of boiling water to it until it clears up.

Chill Drinks Faster

Because salt lowers the freezing point of water, your beverages will cool more quickly if you use salt in your cooler. Simply layer ice with salt, throw in the bottles and cans, and wait for them to chill.

Keep Electronics Safe on the Beach

When you’re headed to the beach, make sure to keep your electronics in plastic freezer bags. Sand can easily get inside them, so the plastic makes the perfect see-through barrier. You can also bury this bag in the sand under your beach blanket if you’re hitting the water and not leaving anyone behind to watch your stuff. Another great way to keep thieves away? Place your valuables in a balled-up diaper. Would-be thieves will assume it’s dirty, and will never think you hid your valuables inside!

Awesome Homemade Ice Packs

Make homemade ice packs go further with this awesome trick. After you’ve used up body wash or shampoo, add a bit of hand soap to the bottle and then fill with water. Keep in the freezer until you’re headed to the park or the beach, then put in your cooler to keep everything cool. When it’s time to leave, use the soapy water for a quick clean-up!

Help for Sunburn

Did you overdo it at the beach? Instead of buying aloe vera or another expensive sunburn treatment, try vinegar, potato water, or another one of these all-natural sunburn remedies.

What are your summer problems? Let us know on our Facebook page! And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or Stitcher!

Photo by Who Knew?

What Is Lyme Disease?

In recent years, Lyme disease has almost become another one of those fad medical conditions that tends to catch headlines (and audiences), similar to Vitamin D, supplemental testosterone, and gluten sensitivity. I’m not saying these things are not real … they are very real for some.  But they are overly-used and abused in order to gain media attention (sorry again, Dr. Oz).

With Lyme disease being so over-hyped in the media, and with it being such a mysterious illness with common symptoms, it's challenging to decipher fact from fiction. And that’s my goal for today’s episode—to explain what we do know about Lyme disease, and what may be over-sensationalization.

What Is Lyme Disease?

Lyme disease stems from the bite of a tick, of all things. And in the Unites States, it is associated with one blood-sucking species that transfers a bacteria called “Borrelia burgdorferi.”  

After that nasty (and sometimes not noticeable) tick bite carrying the illness, there are three phases of the condition in adults:

1.        Early Localized:  In about 80% of patients with Lyme disease, a particular skin lesion typically develops at the site of the tick bite, referred to as “Erythema Migrans,” within a month after the bite. This one skin lesion itself often expands over the next few days or weeks, and appears as a “bulls-eye” (think “Target,” no pun intended). This stage may also include very non-specific viral-like symptoms (but without the upper respiratory or stomach symptoms), such as fevers, body aches, fatigue, headaches, lymph node enlargements, neck stiffness, etc. Not very unique or distinguishable without that rash, huh?

2.       Early Disseminated: Within days to weeks after the infection, the rash tends to spread. And within weeks to months after, Lyme can spread to the nervous system, heart, or eyes and produce more specific Lyme symptoms:

• Nervous System:  Numbness/tingling in the hands or feet, symptoms of meningitis, or abnormalities of the nerves on the face
• Heart:  Inflammation or weakness of the heart muscles and palpitations caused by heart block on an EKG that resolves in days to weeks
• Eyes:  Inflammation of the eyes or acute vision changes

3.       Late:  This later stage (typically months to a few years after the initial stages) often includes joint pain or arthritis in one or multiple larger joints, most commonly the knee.  Also, if it attacks the nervous system, further neurologic symptoms can also develop, including subtle difficulty concentrating.  These neurologic symptoms are often also non-specific and attributable to numerous other conditions as well. So, it can be challenging to pinpoint.

Some patients may “miss” or skip the early stages altogether and instead initially present in the late stages. That’s what makes this rare disease so tricky to diagnose. So, how do you diagnose Lyme disease?

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Diagnosis of Lyme Disease

Testing for the antibodies for Lyme is recommended when suspecting the disease; this means testing for those proteins that the immune system produces in order to fight off the bug. These include IgGs, which are the antibodies that remain positive for prior infections (often termed “memory” antibodies, since the body remembers it long term via these proteins), and IgMs, which are only produced in an acute and current infection.

Unfortunately, false-positive testing has been reported for Lyme disease, and therefore the blood test alone is not enough to diagnose the disease.  According to the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the guidelines also require the following three:

·         Recent travel to an endemic area

·         Risk factor for exposure to ticks, specifically

·         And very specific symptoms of Lyme disease:  to include symptoms due to meningitis, nerve pain, cranial nerve palsy, unusual swelling of the joints/arthritis, or symptoms due to inflammation of the heart

Here’s the KEY take-home point:  non-specific symptoms (such as fatigue, body aches, headaches, etc), plus a Lyme disease positive antibody testing is NOT sufficient to fulfill a true diagnosis of Lyme disease.  Lyme disease is NOT a “diagnosis of exclusion," which means it “must” be Lyme since all other testing is normal. 

Treatment of Lyme Disease

Lyme disease is treated with the following 3 first-line antibiotics, for anywhere between 10 to 21 days:

·         Doxycycline

·         Amoxicillin

·         Cefuroxime

Another controversial phase after treatment termed “post-Lyme disease syndrome” is also reported to linger for up to 6 months to 1 year after treatment, with continued symptoms of fatigue, headaches, and joint pain.

The tricky part about this phase is that these non-specific symptoms can be attributable to numerous other medical conditions. It’s a very small percentage of patients thought to experience Lyme disease chronically after treatment, and is not due to active infection by no means. To give you an example, the more common stress, depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia, autoimmune-disorders, and illicit drug or alcohol abuse can also cause fatigue, body aches, and/or headaches.  Sometimes, it can be quite a challenge to tease it all out and blame Lyme disease for everything little symptom.

My advice is to find a well-respected physician in your community that has extra knowledge and expertise in Lyme disease and your symptoms, in order to find an accurate diagnosis.

Share your ideas and learn more quick and dirty tips with us on the House Call Doctor’s Facebook and Twitter pages!  You can even find me on Pinterest!

Well, thanks again for listening to this episode of the House Call Doctor. If you have any future topic suggestions, you can email me at housecalldoctor@quickanddirtytips.com. Have a healthy week!

Please not that all content here is strictly for informational purposes only.  This content does not substitute any medical advice, and does not replace any medical judgment or reasoning by your own personal health care provider. Please always seek a licensed physician in your area regarding all health related issues.

Lyme disease image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Debt Q&A: Managing Student Loans, Credit Cards, and HELOCs Wisely

Handling debt wisely is one of the most important parts of your financial life. Borrowing responsibly to attend college, purchase a home, or start a business, can be the ticket to growing your net worth and income for life. But taking too much debt or not understanding the consequences if you can't repay can cause a heap of stress and heartache. 

In this post, I'll answer 6 questions that I recently received about student loans, HELOCs, and credit card debt. You'll learn tips to protect your credit, use existing home equity, manage student loan repayment, and prioritize your personal finances.

6 Questions & Answers About Debt

Here are some great questions from Money Girl readers, podcast listeners, and members of Laura's free Dominate Your Dollars Facebook group:

Debt Question #1

Alyssa U. says, “I’ve been listening to your show for a few months now and it’s really inspired me to be proactive with my finances. I improved my credit after it took a hit during an unpaid internship and now I want to help my boyfriend do the same. A friend suggested that I open a credit card with a low limit and add him as an authorized user—would that help him?”

Answer:

Thanks for your question, Alyssa. You sound very considerate, but I’m going to caution you against adding anyone as an authorized user to your credit card. Even with a low credit limit, you could get stuck with way more debt than you’d like if your boyfriend doesn’t handle the card responsibly.

Authorized card users have no legal responsibility to repay debt, even for their own charges. The burden of repaying all debt falls completely on the card owner.

Instead, your boyfriend can easily build his own credit by opening a secured credit card. Secured cards work just like regular ones, except for having to put up a refundable security deposit, which becomes your credit limit. The card issuer holds the deposit as collateral until you close the account and pay your balance in full—or prove your credit-worthiness and transition to one of the company’s regular, unsecured cards.

The minimum required security deposit varies depending on the card you choose, but could be as little as $50. You may also be able to pay a larger deposit in installments over time, such as 60 or 90 days, before your secured card is issued.

The trick to using a secured credit card to build credit is making sure that the issuer reports payment data to one or more of the three nationwide credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion). Don’t spin your wheels with a card that doesn’t. A history of making on time payments—even if they’re just minimum payments—helps build credit quickly.

The trick to using a secured credit card to build credit is making sure that the issuer reports payment data to one or more of the three nationwide credit bureaus. Don’t spin your wheels with a card that doesn’t.

See also: How to Build Credit with a Secured Credit Card

Debt Question #2

Rick F. says, “My father is looking for ways to help me purchase my first home without handing over a large amount of cash. He owns his home and has a lot of equity in it. After listening to Money Girl episode #496 on getting a HELOC, I’m wondering if it would be okay for him to use a HELOC to help me with my down payment?”

Answer:

The ideal use for a HELOC, or home equity line of credit, is to make home improvements that increase the value of your property. However, a homeowner with equity can use a HELOC for any purpose, even giving it away.

See also: Expert Advice on Getting a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC)

Debt Question #3

Sybil P. says, “I got a large tax bill for 2016 and have cash to pay it. But someone suggested that I take out a home equity loan instead so I can write off the interest next year. If my house is paid off, is this a good idea?”

Answer:

As mentioned in the previous answer, you can spend the proceeds from a home equity loan or a HELOC any way you like, including your taxes. And as you mentioned, tapping your home equity comes with a tax break, which reduces the after-tax interest rate you pay.

When you spend a home equity loan or HELOC on home repairs or improvements, you can deduct the interest on a loan amount up to $1 million. But when you spend the funds on anything unrelated to your home, such as income taxes, a gift, or debt consolidation, you can deduct interest on a loan amount up to $100,000.

When you spend a home equity loan or HELOC on home repairs or improvements, you can deduct the interest on a loan amount up to $1 million. 

If you have a healthy emergency fund, I’d consider paying some or all your taxes in cash. However, if doing so would leave you with too little cash, then borrowing against your home’s equity is a wise move. Just be sure to take as little as possible because if you can’t pay it back, you risk foreclosure on your home.

See also: 5 Ways to Pay a Tax Bill You Can't Afford

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Debt Question #4

Joe P. from San Antonio says, “I enjoyed hearing the podcast about getting a HELOC. Could I use one to pay off a mortgage more quickly? And if so, how does it compare with just sending an extra payment to your mortgage every month?”

Answer:

Getting a second loan on your home to pay off the first one generally isn’t a good idea unless you have a wise strategy. For instance, if your goal is to pay down the first mortgage to a 78% loan-to-value ratio so you can get rid of private mortgage insurance (PMI), that makes sense.

Or perhaps you get a much lower interest rate for a HELOC than you’re currently paying on your first mortgage. However, if interest rates have dropped significantly, refinancing your first mortgage is probably a smarter move. Discuss your options with lenders and compare several offers.

If you want to pay off your home loan more quickly, I recommend making extra payments to your existing mortgage, instead of taking out more debt. However, paying off your home should be your last financial priority because it’s a relatively inexpensive debt and the interest you pay each year may be tax deductible.  

If you have extra money to pay down debt ahead of schedule, first make sure you have a strong financial foundation in place. Everyone should have an emergency fund equal to at least 3 to 6 months’ worth of living expenses in an FDIC-insured bank savings account. You should also be preparing for the future by investing a minimum of 10% to 15% of your monthly income in a retirement or brokerage account.

If you have extra money to pay down debt ahead of schedule, first make sure you have a strong financial foundation in place.

Once those priorities are on autopilot, you’re in a good position to begin paying off debt ahead of schedule in order of highest to lowest interest rate. That typically means paying off payday loans, credit cards, and car loans first. Then tackling low-rate debt, such as student loans, mortgages, and HELOCs, last.  

See also: Avoid Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI) on Your Home Loan

Debt Question #5

Polly says, “I love the helpful info you provide on your podcast and website. I still owe over $180,000 in student loans after graduating from pharmacy school 7 years ago. I was excited to hear Donald Trump’s campaign promise to forgive student loan debt after 15 years, since that would only leave me with 8 more years of payments. But nothing has been mentioned about it yet. Should I still work aggressively to pay down my student loans?”

Answer:

Thanks for your question, Polly! Right now, if your student loan payments are high compared to your income, you can enroll in a repayment plan that cuts your payments. With some of these plans, your outstanding loan balance can be forgiven after you make payments on time for 20 years.

However, forgiven debt is taxable, so depending on your effective tax rate, you could still owe a fourth or fifth to the federal and state governments. Also, remember that student loan debt is generally only forgiven when you have a financial hardship and can demonstrate that you don’t earn enough to make payments.

The Trump administration has given no details about what they meant by this campaign promise, but it’s likely that taxation on forgiven debt would continue even if the forgiveness period is cut from 20 to 15 years. So, my advice is to always make your student loan payments on time. But I don’t recommend paying them off ahead of schedule unless you have a healthy emergency fund and are regularly investing at least 10% of your income for retirement. 

See also: A Blueprint to Prioritize Your Personal Finances

Debt Question #6

Michelle B. says, “I took out a Parent Plus student loan for my son’s college with the understanding that he would pay it back after school. He graduated and is making payments, but it’s a lot for him. I’m on a fixed income and can’t help much. What are the options to make this and another student loan more manageable?

Answer:

Any time you have trouble making student loan payments, call your loan servicing company immediately. For federal loans, there are several income-based options that can lower your monthly payment.

But if you wait until you or your son get behind and miss payments, you’ll have less flexibility because those options may no longer be available once you default. Since you’re the parent borrower on a PLUS loan, you’re completely responsible for repaying the loan. So, act quickly by reaching out and to your lender about your financial situation so they can help you make the loans as manageable as possible.

See also: The 8 Cheapest Ways to Pay Off Your Student Loans

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There’s a huge archive of past articles and podcasts if you type in what you want to learn about in the search bar at the top of the page. Here are all the many places you can connect with me, learn more about personal finance, and ask your money question:

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Young Woman Stressed Because of Bills image courtesy of Shutterstock