Saturday Review 9-6-08

Bulletin Board
*****Natasha at Maw Books Blog is devoting the month of September to Reading and Blogging for Darfur. Let her tell you all about it here.

*****VOTING is on for the Book Blogger Appreciation Week Awards – it started yesterday, and closes next Friday, September 12.  Click this link to get to the voting booth! If you nominated this blog in any of the categories, thank you! It didn’t make the finals, but some of the nominees I submitted DID get in. Best of luck to all the nominees!

*****The Second Chance at Summer (Reading) Re-Gifting Giveaway closed yesterday. The winners will be announced in a post tomorrow – stay tuned!

New in Google Reader
Chefdruck Musings
Burning Wood
Don’t Gel Too Soon

Random reading
My most recent LA Moms Blog post is about step-parenting: De-bunking the “evil” myth, one step at a time. (I actually have a two-part agenda over there – parenting older kids, and step-parenting. I expect a lot of my posts there to hit one of those angles.) The post was linked at Izzy Rose’s stepmom-community website, Stepmothersmilk.com.

I’m really not sure how to summarize this post in linking to it, other than that it’s about an understanding between parent and child. This one has nothing in common with that, other than my not being sure how to summarize it either – dating, compromising, and Los Angeles.

A letter to a dearly-departed grandma

The tether to technology – being where we aren’t, and not being where we are

What do back-to-school and HR have in common? A lot, apparently.

I’ve been sharing quite a few of the more politically-oriented posts from my daily blog reading in Google Reader shared/starred items (starred ones are in my sidebar), which also get picked up in my FriendFeed, if you’d like to check that out. But in connection with that topic, here’s a non-political politics post; I think that on a real-life, day-to-day basis, this is how a lot of us engage with the subject. Somewhat related: choices come home, for mothers and daughters. Also related – politics of education, a guest post by Daisy of Compost Happens for PunditMom‘s “Mothers of Intention” series (BTW, next week’s Mother of Intention guest will be – me!), and the “politics of resentment” resembles the “mommy wars.” Very loosely related: a tour of current events via Julie Pippert’s iPod.

Someone despises that big discount-store chain whose name start with “W” and ends with “mart” even more than I do.

Star Wars meets Girls Gone Wild(?). Meanwhile, Princess Leia makes an appearance in Part One of The Park Bench‘s three-part series “Twelve Fictional Females Who Don’t Take Crap From Nobody.” I don’t agree with Buffy just getting an honorable mention, but it was good to see a few variations from the usual suspects in this list – and I’d add Sydney Bristow, for sure.

For those of you (like me) old enough to remember but too young to have gotten these jokes at the time, a flashback to the original Hollywood Squares.

Book wishlist
Life Without Water, by Nancy Peacock
Hurry Down Sunshine, by Michael Greenberg
Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter, by Phoebe Damrosch (DearReader.com Nonfiction Book Club selection)

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11 comments

  1. Thanks for the link! I always feel political when a big election is coming up. Those in power really do affect my work and my family.

  2. As always, a link loving queen, “a blogger’s best friend” as your friend said. Coming over here is a fab “week in review” of sorts, you know? Hope your day is going well.

  3. Daisy and Morningsidemom – Thanks for providing some great linking material, ladies! It’s funny how much I enjoy assembling this post every week, and it’s nice to know people enjoy reading it.

  4. I have a step-mom (who doesn’t) but I never lived with her. That is why I probably didn’t get along with her for a long time. We are fine now, I think not living with her caused it take a lot longer than it should. I should say that I only saw my dad every other weekend. Not much time to get used to someone.

  5. Mike – I suspect you’re right about that. I see my stepkids two nights a week in addition to every other weekend, plus some longer periods for vacations, so we’ve spent a fair amount of time together, and that’s definitely helped.

  6. Thanks for the mention of my blog! And also for the links regarding steps; my two older kids have a step mom and really, really struggle, and I am looking forward to finding better ways to help them than I have come up with so far. Because no matter hos supportive of her I am, they think that by nature, she is “bad.”

  7. Kori – It’s good that you seem to have a cooperative relationship with your kids’ stepmom; I find that it helps. But yeah, it’s really hard to get past that stereotype sometimes. We had to stop making “evil stepmother” jokes around my stepson. He was almost 7 when his dad and I got married two years ago, had lived with me part-time for almost a year by then, and knew I was a nice person, but it was hard for him to understand that I wouldn’t turn “evil” overnight and try to replace his mom. Good luck, and hope those links are useful!