By the time you read this, I’ll have already voted. The legendary Chicago maxim – “vote early and often” – aside, you can only vote as often as elections are held, and when they are held, you only get to vote once. But in many places, you don’t have to wait for Election Day any more, and you can easily comply with the “early” part. More and more districts are implementing in-person “early voting” at […]
Can’t wait till November for your daily-posting-for-a-month madness to start, but didn’t want to commit to the post-every-day-for-a-year requirements of Blog365? (Can’t blame you for that one…) Starting March 1, National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) is every month; you can make a month-by-month decision to post every day for thirty or thirty-one consecutive days – but you won’t be able to ease into it with a 29-day month, since it doesn’t begin till February’s over. […]
“Reading challenges” are very popular among many of the book bloggers, but I’ve decided they’re not for me. Even though most of the challenges I’m aware of don’t require reading particular titles, they usually involve a specific genre or category, as well as a minimum number of books to be read. And since I’ve made the somewhat discouraging discovery that I’m not actually reading as much as I thought I was in the first place, […]
This is actually a PSA of sorts. In case you hadn’t noticed it yet, there’s been a tweak in how comments get posted on blogs like this one (Blogger-hosted ones). The way I understand it, if you want to leave an identified comment that links back to your own blog or profile, it’s not necessary to have a Google account – you should be able to use any OpenID, including your WordPress or Typepad ID, […]
A post a day for 30 days. That’s all anyone had to do. And now it’s done. (Actually, according to my NaBloPoMo tag, I did 50 posts in 30 days. Yikes.) The daily-posting part wasn’t so hard for me, since I was almost doing that anyway. I made it a little tougher on myself because I’m a stickler; I don’t always feel that memes are “real” posts, so I’ve felt the need to do two […]
…Sunshine is hosting yet another contest! And everyone’s a winner, because this isn’t really a contest – more like a party, and everyone’s invited. The prize is the joy of giving – and, if you e-mail her about what you’re doing this holiday season to make your world a little bit nicer, a cool holiday button for your blog. (If you’re reading this post in a feed reader, click through to the blog to see […]
Do you get on a roll when you read, so that one book leads to the next, which leads to the next, and so on and so on? I don’t so much mean something like reading a series from beginning to end, but, say, a string of books that all take place in Paris. Or that have anthropologists as the main character. Or were written in the same year. Something like that… Something that strings […]
I have a bit of a fascination with personality tests. I’m not sure if it’s motivated more by wanting to understand myself better or wanting to see if someone else has me pegged, but I’m frequently intrigued. It seems I’m a bit hard to pin down, though – I can take the same test more than once and get different outcomes. Not dramatically different, mind you – not enough to end up in an entirely […]
Time to learn something! 1. Go to Wikipedia.2. Click on “Random article” in the left-hand sidebar box.3. Post it! Valvatida is an Order of starfish in the Class Asteroidea, which contains 695 species in 165 genera in 14 families. The Order encompasses both tiny species, which are only a few mm in diameter, like those in the genus Asterina, and sea stars, which can reach up to 75 cm like species in the genus Thromidia. […]
There are some things in our lives that no one else really can, or should, decide for us, although other people are usually happy to offer their opinions (solicited or not). There are some decisions that, no matter how much data we gather or how much contemplation we give them, we may never be objectively sure areunequivocably “right.” It seems like a lot of those questions come up in the general arena of family – […]
This is a bit of a follow-up to my “Beginner’s Guide to Blogging” post this past weekend. I really didn’t talk too much about links in that post, other than in reference to profiles and blog that don’t post much except for links – that’s what I meant by “being in the ‘linky-linky’ business” – but Penelope Trunk has a really good discussion about them. I don’t know whether my friend’s blog – if and […]
I’m interpreting this prompt very generally – I don’t play many games these days at all, and I’ve never been one for computer or video games, so here are ten games I like, regardless of where or how they’re played. Trivial Pursuit – I rocked the original version 25 years ago, and I’m still pretty good at the general-knowledge version.Scrabble – This is the unofficial “official” board game of my family (all permutations).Dogopoly – This […]
