Hey! Check out this wall hanging – a flamingo tapestry! Heh. I don’t think I’ve ever owned any Tapestry Wall Hangings. I’m trying to figure out where I might display that flamingo but coming up empty. I think, instead, I’m going to order one for my sister as a housewarming present. I’m pretty sure she has a spare wall or three to hang a tapestry. In fact I’m pretty sure her house was built for these wall hangings.
Daily Dose of Flamingos Read More »
Chris moved home and along with him, is THIS beast. What IS this THING doing IN my HOUSE – Monday or any other day? Kids. Hmph.
Daily Dose of Stuff Read More »
Mrs Shakespeare shares some inside information about her husband, she’s not really his biggest fan. Poetry is just not her thing. She also shares some bedroom secrets, deep dark bedroom secrets worth hearing about.
Very amusing and very quick read.
What is up with magazines? We get a good dozen different magazines, none of which we’ve actually subscribed to. Or if we’ve subscribed to them, we haven’t actually paid for them. They seem to be free one year subscriptions. This has been going on for quite some time now. When one subscription goes away, another one seems to take its place.
Vegetarian Living, Car and Driver, Entertainment Weekly, Computer World, Sports Illustrated for Kids, Red Herring, Eweek, Alternative Medicine, ack the list goes on and on and on.
We rarely read these magazines. We toss some to the big kids. We make big piles of magazines to take to doctor waiting rooms, (but rarely remember to take them). Mostly, the magazine pile just builds and builds and builds.
With all of these magazines, you would think we might actually be subscribed to something we want to read. No, not really. The Vegetarian, we do like and we do read. RJ does still get the Nickelodeon magazine, so that’s good. Chris gets some photography magazine that my mom has been subscribing him to for about five years. So, ok, four magazines we really do want and appreciate. But we actually need some others. Children, in particular, have been asking for some magazines on a regular basis and it seems like this is a good time to start the subscriptions. Actually last month would have been better, but I forgot. Typical.
I’m using MagazinePriceSearch.com and have found I can order the four magazines people have most recently and most frequently mentioned. I like being able to order everything at one time. One stop shopping, I like that a lot.
Now if someone could explain why all of these other magazines have been appearing in my mailbox for a year, or more, I’d be happy.
Technorati Tags: magazines
Daily Dose of Magazines Read More »
I loved The Land of Women. The mixture of Irish and Spanish, the pagan rite of spring, the mythology of The Land of Women brought to life in the dress shop.
I really liked this, I’m glad I ditched Gravity’s Rainbow, heh.
Technorati Tags: thelandofwomen, ireland, spain, motherdaughter, fiction
Gravity’s Rainbow is the last “difficult” and “scary” read from my Summer Reading Challenge and I’m ready to give up. I was ready to give up on page 7, again on page 16, also on page 34, then on page 43 and now on page 116.
I don’t want to give up on it, so now I’m in search of study guides, reading guides, something that will help me follow this, this, this… I don’t even know what to call it.
Anyone out there have any words of wisdom? Anyone out there who can tell me why I should keep reading? 600 pages is a long time to muddle through if I’m not going to get anything out of the muddling.
Help!
Updated – 8/6/6 – I’ve given up, for now. I may go back to it later but another 50 pages last night proved that I just wasn’t going to get anything out of it. Darn it.
Technorati Tags: gravitysrainbow, pynchon, summereadingchallenge
Gravity’s Rainbow – Help Me! Read More »
Friday snuck up on me, imagine that! Little kids come home today, after a very long time away from home. In honor of our evening celebration, let’s go with “Home Sweet Home” cupcake toppers, shall we?
The easy way to do this would be to grab some Monopoly houses (or hotels) and plop those on top of your cupcakes (wash them first, please). If that’s not your thing, then how about the foam pieces at the craft store, they have small house shapes that would fit perfectly on top of a cupcake, laid flat or on a toothpick. They also have tiny wooden houses, pre-painted or unpainted that would be the perfect size for a cupcake topper.
Daily Dose of Cupcake Toppers – Welcome Home Read More »
I know some of you are sick of me blogging about Blogher. I’d say I’m sorry, but I’m not. Attend next year and then you too can bore people to death or annoy the heck out of them afterwards. I think this is my last "real" Blogher post. I’ll have some others, later, about concepts and ideas brought up during and after Blogher – but they’ll be "different"… Onward!
This year’s Bloghercon theme was "How are your blogs changing your world?" so I’m going to spin my real recap to show you how Bloghercon changed my world – or reminded me of things in my world that I don’t really want to change.
1) We’re a weird family and weirdness creeps into our everday life in weird ways. "Sweetney" is one of those words/people/things that I think is going to live on in our world, all because of Bloghercon. TW is a little clueless, cute but clueless and she likes shoes. She talked to a lot of women she did not know, about their shoes. She spotted a woman with cool shoes, so she approached her and said "cool shoes, I think my 16 year old would love those." The shoes, they had skull and crossbones on them. She had no idea that was Sweetney – til later. No wonder the woman looked at her oddly. She, being Sweetney, probably expected some gushing "I love your blog!" and she got nothing but shoe commentary. Yesterday, I took Michelle to the mall to get a bandana (actually I sat in the car and read my book while she ran in) – she got in the car, I looked up and yelled "Sweetney!!" – she had no idea what that meant, but I bet you know what pattern her bandana had on it, don’t you? I’m pretty sure from now til the end of time, when we see skull & crossbones, someone will yell Sweetney!
2) I’m not an identity blogger and I don’t want to be one. I’m also not an outreach blogger and I know I made the right decision about that. There have been times that I just wasn’t sure. After Bloghercon, I’m sure.
3) Mommybloggers rock and I’m proud to call myself a mommyblogger. This was not always the case.
4) Edubloggers, also rock. In my BoF none of them looked at me oddly when I talked about edublogging at the elementary, middle and highschool levels. None of them rolled their eyes. They were all interesting and interested. It’s good to have that type of validation, when there are people (as one person in the live chat) who don’t have much respect for homeschool mommyblogs.
5) Conference food stinks and I’m ok with that. I should come more prepared next time, and I will, thanks to this little Bloghercon reminder.
6) I like swag, not as much as TW, but it’s good. All of it. Heteronormative or not. You can learn things from swag, it can cause you to think about topics or ideas that you might not generally think about in your life. Also, the throwing away of swag simply because it isn’t your thing, bugs me and I’m going to work to make sure people don’t do that. If that bib wasn’t appropriate for you, or the corkscrew or the lotion then why didn’t you find someone who would have appreciated it? Or why didn’t you leave a nice note for those women who were cleaning your room each day and leave it for them. I guarantee you that they would have appreciated the gesture. (pst, check out the swag Poppy Z Brite received recently – was that heternormative?)
7) I don’t drink. I was reminded of that again on Saturday night (and Sunday and Monday and into Tuesday). It’s good to have those reminders and reinforcements.
8) I don’t need a lesbian blogging panel to make me feel like I’m part of the blogosphere. In fact, I prefer to not attend those types of panels. I prefer to attend panels that show me new things or teach me more about a topic I’m interested in. I don’t think a lesbian panel would have met those criteria for me.
9) I need to chill out and relax a little. Watching Grace, constantly moving and hooking people up, reminded me that I’m a lot like that and it’s tiring – for me and for people around me. And that constant movement, constant helping, can make it hard to have a real conversation with people. Good reminder to me – thanks Bloghercon and Grace.
10) I cannot say iVillage without cringing a little – ok a lot. I sort of thought that was behind me, it isn’t – no offense to the nice iV employee who was there. It’s my issue and I need to deal with that.
11) The smokers really are some of the most interesting people at an event. They’re also some of the nicest and friendliest. I thought it was my imagination, or I was using that as an excuse. Nope, they are.
12) I’m too old for the red-eye. I used to really like the red-eye. No more. I’m only slightly functioning 2 days latter. No more red-eyes for any reason.
13) Birds are noisy and messy. RJ wants a bird, I was all set to get them for her. Bloghercon has caused me to rethink this. (Sorry RJ – let’s talk about it some more.)
14) My crush on Badger – it lives on. Blogcrushes are good. Meeting blogcrushes in real life, also good.
15) I still want to marry Nancy White. I thought maybe that would change after Blogher. Nope, it didn’t.
16) Canadians are nice. I sometimes forget that now. They forgive you for hugging them when you aren’t suppose to. They offer to help your daughter fine tune her skills. They give you chocolate (who gave me a Canadian candybar? I’ve forgotten)
17) My daughter, she could grow up to be like Danah Boyd. How amazing would that be? I mean really. Wow.
18) I’ve never had an issue with Arianna Huffington. After Bloghercon, still no issue – and while I found her Michael Jackson joke in bad taste, I can live with that because I have made more than one joke in bad taste, haven’t I?
19) Prince J is just like every other 12 year old boy. I knew that already but it was nice to talk to Patrick Scoble and have that reaffirmed.
20) My idea about visual blogrolling, not a bad idea. Not a great one but it has potential.
21) More people read my blog than I initially thought. Also some people who I thought read my blog, don’t. Both of these tidbits are good to know.
22) Men, they can really sabotage a group made up primarily of women- or more to the point, women sit by quietly and let them do it. It isn’t always intentional, I’m not man-bashing. It happened and it felt weird, sort of amusing because I find unconfortable moments amusing at times, but really very weird.
23) I know a lot about tagging, about building traffic, and a lot about blogging. As a lesser known blogger running in well-known blogger circles, that kind of validation is good.
24) Monetization, it’s not that important to me. I’ve played a lot with ads and such but just half-heartedly to see how it works. I will probably keep playing around with it, as new things happen, but it’s really not my thing – right now.
25) On the spot voice interviews – interesting stuff. Thank you Amy Gahran and George Kelly. Amy and her mic and then George whipped out his – that was a beautiful moment. Has anyone blogged that? Because really, regardless of whether either of you do anything with those recordings, I enjoyed it and it made me think a lot about the power of these kinds of tools for "real people."
Bloghercon did change my world – I learned a lot about myself and other people. Bloghercon also reminded me that there are a lot of things in my world that I don’t want, or need, to change.
Daily Dose of Sweetney err Blogher Read More »
Busy month for the 101 things in 1001 days list. Five more classics down, more birthday cards sent to family members. Blogroll cleaning, feed cleaning, closet cleaning and I’m sooo close to having that garage cleaning thing done… so close, but no cigar. Donated money to bloggers in the blogathon. Almost have my WLC templates finished and a system for keeping them up from here on in, (not that I’ll use them but ya never know when they might come in handy). Blogher, off the list. Busy, busy, busy month.
Daily Dose of Life – 101 Update Read More »
I’ve complained mightily about this book, not as much as Vanity Fair or The Moonstone but close. I shouldn’t have complained. I liked it and I’m glad, now that I’m finished, that I read it. 1000+ pages of difficult language and complex storylines well worth reading.
I understand now, why Kristin Lavransdatter won the Nobel Prize and why it is on the Teachers First Lifetime Reading List. Good solid Summer Reading Challenge book – long as heck though.
Kristin Lavransdatter – Redux Read More »