Lifestyle Choices

Have you ever heard of an “indoor environmentalist”? Most people associate the environment with the “great outdoors” and the “wonders of nature”. On the contrary, our own “environments” are increasingly indoors, and increasingly “unnatural”. Whether at home or at the office, your skin suffers in special ways from the indoor environment with its closed atmosphere and surrounding work materials. How do you recognize actual or potential irritants? How can you protect your skin from daily damage by the indoor surroundings you take for granted? How can you correct or at least improve your indoor environment? (more…)

Should you work part-time or full- time? It depends on your needs. When I had my first baby I did part- time design work at home. Then I worked full-time from an office with resident home help. Then I worked full-time at home with no home help. Now I work at home, full-time during the term and theoretically not at all during school holidays. I have found it easiest (but not always possible) to go out to work full-time, and pay for adequate home help. For me working part-time seemed to involve twice the work for half the money with none of the office perks and protection. (more…)

Training: If you have had training you can probably find job opportunities through your professional body or through reading or advertising in your professional journal.

Assuming that you haven’t had any training prior to marriage and aren’t coping with pre-school age children, what is available? Most women are unskilled. Only 6 per cent receive any further training when they leave school. However, there are suitable training courses for `mature students’, the official description of any woman over twenty- three. You can exploit a talent which you already possess and are practising in your home (sewing or cooking) or be trained by a firm who wishes to employ you, or at one of the many courses at a local technical college. Generally what is difficult to acquire isn’t really the training, or even the job, but the determination to forget embarrassment, laziness or shyness — and go out and get it. (more…)