Support My Friends Saturday 4: Help Jump-Start Taste Bluebook!

A Little Background: Let’s Time Warp Back to Austin in 2012!

This article is more than a year overdue. I meant to post this as part of my diary series from the 2012 edition of the South by Southwest conference, but life and other things got in the way. As a result, the original version of this article has been sitting in draft form for quite some time. Luckily, as the saying goes, if you hang onto something long enough, it finds a purpose!

The annual South by Southwest Interactive conference has grown over the years and doubled in size from 12,000 in 2010 to almost 25,000 in 2012. While the conference attendance has exploded, the number of hotels in Austin hasn’t kept pace. Rooms disappeared quickly, even for speakers — and I was one!  People who’d ended up in hotels many miles away, in places only reachable by highway, a situation made even worse by the fact that Austin just doesn’t have enough cabs to support the hordes that descend on it .

I lucked out, though: I found an amazing apartment through AirBnB that was within walking distance of downtown Austin — the abode of one Caroline Fabacher.

I have friends and exes who are twice Caroline’s age and cannot keep a house anywhere nearly as “grown-up” as Caroline can.

Most ArBnB hosts are happy to just give you the keys — Caroline set us up with a beautiful welcome package, as shown below:

The cowboy-boots-as-containers trick was a nice touch, as were the teeny bottles of tequila!

And I can’t remember the last time a host presented my bedding in a bow. Not even the Ritz-Carlton or Fairmont hotels do this:

Her place made an excellent crash pad, and I all-too-happily gave Caroline a great AirBnB review.

Fast-Forward to Denver in 2013

Is there anything Caroline hasn’t done? She went to Vanderbilt, where she did a double major with honours, joined the Peace Corps and volunteered in Niger and Madagascar, went into the publishing business in Austin and is now pursuing a JD-MBA in Denver. And she wants to do more!

Of course, this sort of ambition means that figuring out how to match professional goals and personal life is a big concern of hers. “I’ll be damned if I can’t have my (homemade, of course) cake and eat it too”, and she’s like to help other professional women do the same. She writes:

I have long been a firm believer that you CAN have what you want, you can DO what you want, if you just make smart choices and are educated about the necessary skills. You can kill it at the office and throw a great dinner party. You can know how to fix that excel formula and know how to make jam. You can discuss hot-button legal issues and the basics of investing and this season’s fashion trends. You can pursue the path to partner and out-bake your (future) mother-in-law.

There are plenty of fashion blogs out there. There are plenty of finance blogs out there. There are plenty of DIY blogs out there. But the fashion blogs fail to provide much content that can be adopted by readers who work in conservative offices or favor sandals with their shorts instead of heels. The finance blogs can feel daunting and intimidating to dive into for those who just want to learn SOMETHING about investing. The DIY blogs are full of amazing projects, but those renting apartments can’t squeeze that cleverly converted palette garden on their patio, or take up knitting just to have that cute coffee cozy.

Taste Bluebook is the answer. It will offer a a little bit of everything for the young women who are interested in a little bit of everything. With posts ranging from style and cooking, to health and finance, Taste Bluebook will provide ideas and advice for tackling just about any project. The content will be as practical as it is entertaining.

While it’s easy for me to fund this blog, it’s because I’ve been at it for nearly a dozen years and between my job and the ads (I make about an Xbox a month), I can easily cover my hosting expenses. Caroline’s a student, so funding a blog is entirely a different matter for her. Plus, while I can get away with iPhone pics, a blog like Taste Bluebook will need photos taken with a real camera.

Hence Caroline’s Kickstarter. She’s looking to raise $1000 to cover the cost of materials to help get Taste Bluebook started, which includes a decent camera and ingredients for food and recipe posts. I believe that Taste Bluebook is an interesting idea for which there is an audience, and I’d like to help Caroline get it off the ground. If you can spare even a couple of bucks to help her out, please do!