Perigee Bookmarks

Some Words of Advice for Prince William and Kate Middleton on Their Special Day…

Posted by Maria Gagliano

All this talk about Prince William and Kate Middleton’s Royal Wedding made me realize that my own one-year wedding anniversary is just a week away. I don’t know how things work in the Royal Family, but around these middle-class parts, we write our own thank-you notes in appreciation of our guests’ thoughtfulness and good wishes. I can only wonder whether Will and Kate will be hand-writing their own cards, or if their royal situation allows them the luxury of a little help (based on this guest list, they have a lot of writing to do!).

Etiquette expert Emily Post says you have three months to send a thank-you note after a wedding gift is received. Whether they have help or plan to write notes themselves, I can only hope that Will and Kate don’t let their first year of marriage fly by as quickly as I did. Yes, 51 weeks after my wedding, I still have a solid stack of thank-you notes collecting dust on my desk. Every weekend I promise I’ll finish them and every weekend the layer of dust thickens. It’s not that I’m not thankful to everyone who came to our wedding. I felt so incredibly blessed and grateful! I can’t explain how the days and weeks and months (and year?!) pass. I’m more than a little embarrassed.

So, Will, Kate, in an effort to keep you from treading down the dark and unintentionally tasteless path that I did, I’m sending you some sage advice from our veteran etiquette expert, Rosalie Maggio. Her book, How to Say It, offers tips on what to say (and yes, how to say it) in any situation, from business letters to thank-you notes. Take her advice, and you’ll remain as classy as only a member of the royal family could be:

 

How to Say It When Writing Thank-You Notes:

• Describe in some detail what you are grateful for (not just “the lovely gift” or “the nice present”).
• Express your gratitude in an enthusiastic, appreciative way.
• Elaborate on your appreciation. Tell how useful or appropriate it is, how you plan to use it, where you have placed it, or how it enhanced your life, home, etc. Be specific about what pleased you.
• Close with one or two sentences unrelated to the object of your gratitude (expressing affection, promising to see the person soon, sending greetings to family members, saying something nice about the donor).

How NOT to Say It When Writing Thank-You Notes:

• Don’t dilute your thanks by including news, information, questions, and comments; save them for another time.
• When you receive duplicate gifts, don’t mention this to the givers.
• Don’t mention the amount of a monetary gift. Instead, speak of the giver’s kindness, generosity, or, perhaps, extravagance.
• “Never express more than you feel” is a good guideline, especially in thank-you letters, where we try to make up in verbiage what we lack in enthusiasm. A simple “thank you” is effective.

 

How to Say It by Rosalie Maggio

New Year/New You – Again, Already?

Posted by John Duff

It’s a new year and everybody is suffering through and writing about new year/new you angst. There’s nothing new to this at all since people have been making resolutions of one kind or another since we first realized that the earth had, in fact, made one complete rotation around the sun -- or vice versa depending on your science. But today, the phenomenon has become completely commercialized. And publishers are as guilty as anyone, from gyms to food manufacturers to motivational speakers. In fact, getting on those front-of-store NY/NY tables and NY/NY promotions online has become one of the most competitive aspects of the business. Book sales are strong after the holiday season and a lot of the purchases are books that will help us feel better, lose weight, put our finances in order, or simply assist us to start doing something good for ourselves and others or stop doing things that are bad for us.   

However, it is common knowledge—or at least it’s my observation—that if everyone who bought a self help book at the top of the year actually followed the advice in the book, we’d be out of business in short order. But people don’t: They start out with every good intention—they might even actually read the whole book—but the follow through just isn’t there.

I think the main reason for the lack of success is the absence of what is now called a good mindset. This word is popping up everywhere, including in our forthcoming Diet-Free for Life by Robert Ferguson, which is described as “a revolutionary food, fitness, and mindset makeover to maximize fat loss.” That’s quite a promise, especially when you think that this mindset business is probably the key to all successful change.

Each one of the titles that we are publishing at the turn of the year offers great advice for readers concerning diet and fitness, finances, personal empowerment, ending a relationship, or understanding a mental condition. And while they may cover different aspects of life, they all start with changing one’s mindset because how we think about things is vital.

The best self-help books not only offer good advice and a plan to follow, but also show you how to find the inner motivation to get you on track—and keep you there. Sure, it’s appealing to want to look better, feel better, have more cash, or feel like you can accomplish anything. But sometimes we have to dig deeper to find the motivation to keep on keeping on. Each of these books—and others like them—guides readers toward an essential mindset makeover! Now that’s a promise worth $25 (or $14.95 in paperback).

 

The Real Cost of Living

 

 

 

 

 

Diet-Free for Life

 

 

 

 

8 Ways to Great

 

 

 

 

 

I Hate You—Don’t Leave Me

 

 

 

 

 

Making Divorce Work

The Magic of Turkish Delight

Posted by Meg Leder

When I was a kid, I loved to read. I’d stay up late and tear through books, and then spend the next day pretending to be my favorite characters. I imagined my life on the prairie like the Ingalls. I daydreamed about meeting my own Gilbert Blythe, just like Anne Shirley. And to this day, I feel wistful when I open new closets, a part of me still wishing that Narnia and Mr. Tumnus really were on the other side.

While I’m an avid reader today, I’ve lost some of the magic of those early reading experiences—of new worlds opening in such real and immediate ways. I want that magic back.

In Turkish Delight & Treasure Hunts, Jane Brocket has given readers a way to revisit the footsteps of their favorite childhood heroes. A collection of recipes and activities from classic children’s books, the book is so vivid and loving and charming and excited, you know from page one that Jane Brocket is clearly a book-kindred spirit.

Not only is the tone companionable, but while I was editing the book, something magic happened: the characters I loved so much as a child began to stir to life again.

The activity that totally warmed my heart: Making Sugar on Snow, like Laura and Mary Ingalls do in Little House in the Big Woods. I remember reading about that when I was a kid and thinking, Candy from snow? SIGN ME UP! And while it took me more than twenty years, I now know how to do it (and am eagerly waiting for the first big snow in Brooklyn).

Since I’ve read Jane’s book, I’ve also been re-enjoying dark and stormy nights, like Madeline L’Engle’s Murry family. I’ve practiced learning my favorite poem by heart, like Anne Shirley. And I’m gearing up to make some Turkish Delight (There’s rosewater in it!).

To put it simply, Turkish Delight and Treasure Hunts reminds me of all the books I loved as a child, and brings them to life so keenly, it’s like I’m reading them for the first time all over again. The experience is nothing short of magic.

 

Turkish Delight and Treasure Hunts

Tips for Growing your Springtime Vegetable Garden

Posted by Author Annie Spiegelman (www.dirtdiva.com)

 

1. Find an area of your yard that gets 6 to 8 hours of sun a day. If this is a new plot of soil that has never been amended, you might want to do a soil test first. This will tell you the pH of your soil. Most vegetables grow best in a pH of 6 to 7, which is a bit on the acidic side. You can find a simple soil test kit at your local plant nursery. If your soil test shows a very low pH (acidic) you can amend it with limestone. If your soil test shows a very high pH (alkaline) you can amend it by adding sulfur. Both of these amendments are available at your local nursery.

2. Before you add any amendment, weed the area by hand. There are many new weeding tools on the market that are shaped like a claw and can make weeding fun! (Sort of.) After it’s weeded, loosen the soil a bit if it’s compacted. Then rake in any pH amendments and add a 2 to 3 inches of compost to the top. If your soil has been neglected for years, you can also rake in an organic fertilizer at this time. E.B. Stone’s ‘Sure-Start’ is one that I like. It’s effective and is pet & kid-friendly.

3. Now you’re ready to plant. For some helpful planting designs visit my favorite local place to buy seeds, www.reneesgarden.com. She has some vegetable plot spacing information on the website as well that’s useful and clear. You can also plant some herbs and flowers like nasturtium, Shasta daisy and yarrow, nearby your food. This will help to invite beneficial bugs to eat up any pests that come to visit your vegetables.

4. If planting from seed, straight into the ground, make sure to lightly mist your seeds every day till they come up as seedlings. You’ll want to do some thinning once the seedlings are a few inches tall. See directions on the seed package. If you’re planting a 6-pack of vegetables (seedlings), watering with a drip system or a soaker hose is ideal. This way you’re not getting the leaves wet and spreading fungal spores to your plants.

5. If your crop develops a pest or disease problem, find some garden geeks at your local Master Gardener office. (Look up local offices nationally at the American Horticultural Society’s website, www.ahs.org) Take a specimen in to be diagnosed. They’ll recommend the most environmentally sound way to approach it. Safer, cleaner gardening product recommendations can also be found at www.ourwaterourworld.com)

Talking Dirt by Annie Spiegelman

As gardening week continues...

Annie Spiegelman was on View from the Bay in San Francisco this morning, in all her Diva glory.

February: Spring is just around the corner. Really.

Today marks the on-sale date of Talking Dirt: The Dirt Diva’s Down-to-Earth Guide to Organic Gardening. The timing couldn’t be better, given that most of us gardeners are just about sick of the winter doldrums and dying to get some dirt back under our fingernails.

 

As Annie’s editor, I had the privilege of using this book in manuscript form while starting my first garden. It was late May last year and I had just moved into my ground floor apartment, with its little patch of earth out the back door. I was bright-eyed and ready to grow my own food, by God, if it was the last thing I did. “What could go wrong?” I thought. So I went to the Home Depot, got two six-packs of tomato seedlings, a sixer of cucumber seedlings, and an assortment of other vegetables that I’d dreamed of growing by the bucketload. “I’ll have so many vegetables,” I thought, “I’ll start visiting friends with bowls of tomatoes, copious cucumbers, bags and bags of peppers, and they’ll all start to know me as the garden girl. The dream continued to build as I planted, watered, composted, and visited my little darlings in the backyard every day after work.

 

Fast forward two months. Poor Annie, hard at work on her manuscript, stumbled into the unsolicited job of becoming my garden mentor. Everything I needed to know was in the manuscript draft I already had, but still, I was a new mom (so to speak), scared for my poor cucumbers and tomatoes, all of which had developed a layer of mold on their leaves from the unseasonable rain. The horror!  But Annie, kind, kind Master Gardener that she is, walked me through it. She reminded me of the advice I’d already read in the manuscript, held my hand (via email, from San Francisco to my little pad in Brooklyn), and through the bleary-eyed haze of my panic, helped me harvest my first batch of veggies (and many more followed).

 

I—and my garden—am in a much better place now, thanks entirely to Annie. It’s February, and while it’s too early to put shovel to ground here in New York, there’s plenty we gardeners can do to plan for the months ahead. This week, in honor of Talking Dirt’s launch, Annie is offering Perigee Bookmarks readers some tips for winter garden preparations. Listen to this Dirt Diva. She knows her stuff!

   

--Maria Gagliano

 

 

Posted by Author Annie Spiegelman

 

In February, here in California where I live, we’ve had a few happy moments where we can actually sense that spring is almost here. Yesterday the Magnolia tree in my front yard popped into its spectacular bloom. In a few short weeks, gardening season will officially begin. Yippeee! That's when you'll want to prune back many perennials and divide any plants you want more of or to share with friends. Unfortunately, in late winter/early spring, while you're busy smelling the fresh air and new hope in your garden, this is also the most important time to pull weeds so they don't set seed.  (Sorry to rain on your parade.)   

    Home gardeners are more interested than ever in learning how to grow their own food in an economical, healthy and safe way. If you're going to grow food, be ready to be a doting parent because growing vegetables can be a bit challenging. Erratic weather and pests like to come around and try to make you a failure of a farmer. In late February and early March here in California, we can plant broccoli, kale, sweet peas, lettuces, spinach, beets and chard straight into the ground. (Wait until April or when nighttime temperatures heat up a bit more before planting tomatoes.)

     In colder climates, you'll have to be patient and wait till the snow melts off of your herb garden. Enjoy your time indoors perusing garden catalogues and planning your spring garden. You can sow seeds indoors or in a greenhouse now to plant in the ground after the last frost. (To check frost dates in your area, go to www.farmersalmanac.com.)

The Magnolia tree in my front yard is just
beginning to bloom -- Spring is almost here!

     Wherever you live, before planting vegetables or fruit, find an area that receives 6 to 8 hours of sun. (Leafy vegetables can be happy with less sunlight, 4 to 6 hours.) Then weed the area like mad! Next add a layer of compost. Stop purchasing chemical fertilizers. That's like feeding junk food to your plants. They'll grow unnaturally large but be depleted of true nutrients and be prone to a disease or a pest infestation.  Then you'll want to go buy pesticides. We all need to get off that vicious “fertilizer-pesticide” cycle before we contaminate more land and water, and all end up in the wacky shack!

    Your new mantra should be “compost, compost, compost.” Compost will slowly feed your plants and retain water as well. A thin layer of mulch (leaves, straw) on top of that will keep your crops warm in the early spring and cool in the summer.

     

    Good luck, sweet kumquats.

 

 

Talking Dirt is available in stores today.