Found this daily roundup and am grateful. I wish I had time to agglomerate all the best news from the week. Happy that New Communities Daily by Genius Now Blog is doing this for us. My favorite article featured? The Salon response to the hysteria all over the Interwebs last week when Oxford University’s PR office issued a request that all press releases follow AP style. Serial-comma purists everywhere freaked, thinking that Oxford University was dropping its eponymous comma. Passion, tirades, and hilarity for grammar nerds ensued, for it’s rare that we have opportunities for punctuation smugness outside of The Blog of Unnecessary Quotations Marks.
What else caught my eye? A disturbing article about the misinformation from Japan about the Fukushima nuclear disaster. I’ve already read a report that my local dairy and produce has radioactive materials from the nuclear plant’s meltdown. I don’t know what we can do about local, organic food that tests high for radiation. Buy McD*n*ld’s instead? Hell no. Processed C*nAgra crapola? Of course not. So I feel helpless. And I can’t help thinking about the pain of generations of Japanese parents as I fear for all of us, especially our little dudes.
After that downer, I can tell you something that made me smile this week, though. A fabulous Saturday morning, getting my favorite breakfast next to my favorite random art (yes, that’s a hand-knit bike-rack cozy) and tromping through our favorite creek. Oh, so much smiling that morning. Bread and cheese and yarn bombs and water and lichens and dogs and sunshine and kids. Doesn’t get better, y’all.
What else? Well, there’s the debut of this. A couple of my friends were tired of feeling lost and frumpy and frustrated with their jobs. [Note: *feeling* that way. They are smart and funny and awesome and supportive. So their itching to use their skills for more than reading riot acts and writing lists of house rules I completely understand, but their sense of frumpiness was all in their heads. I thought they were 20 kinds of amazing before their new venture.] Now they’re standing tall in the name of replacing our yoga pants with real clothes. Go subscribe to their blog…it’s new and content is coming fast and furious.
What I dig about Dump Your Frump is the insistence that whatever is important to you can stay important to you, even when parenting (or work of any stripe) dominates your every waking moment. You do matter, and you can take little steps to remind yourself of that every day. The delightful ladies behind Dump Your Frump haven’t inspired me to care about makeup or clothes, but they have goaded me into shaking off my intellectual burlap sack. I have lists and lists in my daily notebook of priorities, as though writing down what’s important will make me cleave to my passions. Hasn’t worked. I still just have lists that make me feel like an underachiever. But Dump Your Frump is making me look at those lists…HARD…and commit to them. Writing. Reading. Exercise. More writing. Doctorate. Novel. Hard work, belief in self, meditation. Okay, fine…maybe some EWG-approved mascara and lip gloss. Because the little things really do make a difference.
now that's dumping your frump!
NaptimeWriting 
Now, that IS a dump your frump picture! Perfect!
Re: the misinformation from Japan — my husband follows this daily. I get to hear his rants almost daily. Such a sad, sad mess it all is.
Jane, I wish we could believe what governments say. I know *why* they don’t want mass panic. Know *why* dairy and fruit and veggie producers don’t want us to notice radiation in our food. I don’t know how to fix/avoid/address the tragedy and its aftermath. Ban nuclear power? Offer the Japanese people support? Pretend we don’t know?
because i know you will lay an egg out your nose from loling:
http://thebloggess.com/2011/06/and-thats-why-you-should-learn-to-pick-your-battles/
Genius.
http://thebloggess.com/2011/06/i-dont-have-a-title-for-this-because-ive-run-out-of-puns-please-insert-your-own/
Genius^2
i might have a job lined up on my mothership – waiting for HR to call this week. yes, packing and panicking all at once.
jc, when Bloggess first went all chicken Beyonce I did my typical Bloggess…laugh so hard I couldn’t breathe or see through the tears. Beyonce the chicken is CLASSIC. The reply about reinvesting in the biz was originally a couple of tweets. She’s hilarious. And good at the social media. She went all giant chicken the week I found this: http://thestir.cafemom.com/baby/116998/lesson_12_working_moms_vs
tara, I was wasting my two hours of child-free time this weekend surfing the interwaves. Some would say pointless, but I felt happy for he luxury. Guess it showed. :-)
Nap, I love that you mixed in happy stuff. Usually when you post articles, I feel small and weak and unable to fix it all. There’s so much crap out there. How do we fix it for our kids? The radioactive organic food just ticks me off.
Faemom glad I had some happiness to mix in. Really, how do we reconcile poisons we can’t escape in our food, water, and air? I don’t know. I just found that I can’t not smile at a bike rack cozy or my kid balancing on rocks trying to cross a creek. Irresistible cuteness is probably all that saves humanity. It’s why lolcats are so freaking popular. And why people still have kids ever after knowing about age Three.
my earlier comment is in mod jail. i put links to some funny blog shenanigans that i’m still giggling over.
Speaking of “Roundup” …why now is anyone surprised that spraying petro-chems directly on food and into our drinking water and air will cause health problems? I stopped wondering why it wasn’t front page nooz years ago, and I’m surprised when it IS front page nooz today, because it looks like some reporters and scientists decided that being in bed with big business wasn’t doing them any favors and hey!, now is a great time to release info going back 30 years!
*headdesk*
When I get to my next place (maybe soon, very very soon), I’m buying an Aquarain filter as a welcome home present to myself on day 1. And I’m going to buy land that I can enjoy and work. I want springs, shade trees, and native flowers. I read Sharon Astyk’s blog (Casaubon’s Book) – she’s writing Adapting in Place, her next book. More and more I see how she is doing it, and I want to go that direction for my life.
you sound somewhat rested and like you may have had 3 and a half minutes to yourself recently ;)
jc, I’ll get you out of moderation soon, but while i’m on holiday I have only the phone. Is the link Get the F*** off Fossil Fuels? Twitter told me to read it. Gobsmacked.
HAHAHA. No, it wasn’t for that post. It was for something else totally… called “knock knock mother******” complete with greeting cards and tshirts as the result of a battle over towel purchasing.
But I’m dyin loling at Sharon’s latest. AWESOME. Although reading about her rolling around in the mud yesterday while the farm animals played Whoo Hoo The Electric Fence is Off – PARTEE Over There was a total crackup. I phuckin love her writing. And twitter ain’t no dummy.
Enjoy vacay!
That hand-knit bike rack – is it by the Orinda Library?
Cathy, that photo is by CheeseBoard and the-sad-empty-space-formerly-known-as Black Oak books. I haven’t seen the downtown Berkeley knitting but hear it’s awesome (or was). The yarn bomber who does this does Berkeley and Kensington but might do Orinda as well.
Oh my…sourdough bread with cheese…Does that qualify as dumping your frump, or enlarging your rump? Either way, yum!
Alas, the summer always turns me into a frump. And I have my 20 year reunion in a little over 3 weeks…no dress, three boys who hate shopping, and a non-existent waistline, regardless of the HOURS of spinning and running…pass the sourdough and yoga pants, please…
Maria, some day I’ll tell you the three hundred and fifteen reasons I skipped my twenty year reunion. Don’t regret it for a second (and try not to smile when I hear how many people regretted going).
The sourdough cheese rolls do not help my physical frump, but they do wonders for my emotional frump. So there you go. ;-)