Link Love

Here are some fun things I’ve found around the internets while lazily surfing this week:

1. The Pioneer Woman Cooks! – thanks to Lisa of Mamalife. I love how this recipe comes with visual aids that are just the right amount of cheesy. I can’t wait to try “Mexican Chicken” on my family.

2. The Inspired Mom – “This blog celebrates moms who are doing all kinds of interesting things: starting charities, running marathons, opening business, taking art classes etc.” Found this on Jen’s List, which, if you live in SoCal, you should be receiving, because it’s a great resource for word-of-mouth recommendations. The Inspired Mom’s post from yesterday was all about saying “no” to new requests, or more specifically, saying “I’ll get back to you on that” before committing to a new project or obligation. This is forefront in my mind as I relax this week having only one task: to support my sister and her family. It’s been so nice to relinquish control.

3. Good Mom/Bad Mom – I’m sure everybody and their mother knows about this site already and as much as I like to reserve my link love for those blogs who would enjoy more exposure (like, ahem, mine) I found this post and it reminded me of a fiction writing class I took at UCLA several years ago in the fall, when the campus was leafy and turning colors just like at Notre Dame, and it made me feel nostalgic for college just to be attending that class, and I think that’s why I took the class in the first place, not because I really wanted to work on my fiction writing. Because, let’s face it, I am not good at writing fiction, unless you like to call my embellished real-life tales “fiction,” which they are not, mostly. Not in the way James Frey wrote a “memoir.” So anyway, in this class, one of the assignments was to write a certain number of “first lines,” as in the first sentence of a short story, as an exercise in grabbing the reader. I don’t exactly remember any of my first lines, in fact I don’t think I even know where any of my assignments from that class ended up – the best I can guess is that they are on some moldy floppy disk in the bottom of a box or even, as a result of my reverse nesting from last year, in some landfill somewhere. None of my stories were good enough to show people, much less keep for posterity, unless I planned to use them to remind myself that I’m not good at writing fiction. But why beat that dead horse?

4. Rattling the Kettle – One of my blogger peeps, Dave keeps the “selling out” discussion alive over at his place. Won’t you jump in and post your two cents (surely you must have gotten at least that much from your BlogHer Ad banner)?