Current Obsessions

It's been an official two month hiatus today.  My.  That's a rarity.  My husband would certainly argue that I've not had a dearth of things to say in that time period, but my bloggy muse needed a break.

Would you humor me for a diatribe regarding things I'm excited about currently?  Because in general, I find that my life is a series of things I'm excited about.  Nonetheless:

 Arkansas Women Bloggers Unplugged Conference (#AWBU) at the Ozark Natural Science Center on June 10 - 12.  If you've been around me for even a minute, you know I'm fired up about this.  It's a treat to be focusing on women's events at ONSC (such as our upcoming Women's Yoga Retreat on June 3 - 5), but there is a particularly fun energy surrounding this small but mighty group of female voices in Arkansas.  Join us, or tell a bloggy friend if you like.  We're delighted by the addition of our presenting sponsor, Collective Bias, and their proprietary Social Fabric community - do read more about them.  Event details on our website or the Arkansas Women Bloggers site, which you should check out anyway (and list your blog)!  I realize this is sort of work-related, but it's that lovely intersection where work meets passion, so I hope you'll forgive.

The Chez Stephens Kitchen is capturing my energy and attention.  So far, we've removed about seven layers of wallpaper and various other debris.  After living under a wallpaper border featuring adorable bunnies, flowers and watering parts lo these many years since we moved into our 1905 house in 2004 (and yes, of course we had a centennial party - please!), it was time to break free.  The Handyman and I discovered early in our marriage that we were not fond of wallpaper and carpet, and we've been extracting them ever since enthusiastically.  Soon, soon I'll be able to share photos of our calm, mocha kitchen with popping red accents.  I can see it now.  I've just got to escape a few more bad judgment calls.  Sigh.

My new book club is a source of delight - and I say "my" rather loosely since I simply attend.  The lovely Jennifer Pratt of J. Pratt Books is our fearless leader, and I can honestly say I never previously thought a book club would be my bag.   I judged them by their covers, I suppose.  It turns out to be a great delight, and is certainly pushing me to pick up things that are outside of my normal genre.  Define that genre, you ask?  Ugh.  I think it sways toward travel or place-based (by this I mean Love in the Time of Cholera, not Under the Tuscan Sun), rather epic and overly-descriptive (i.e. Hemingway and Steinbeck) with a few oddly uncategorized greening and organizing books thrown in for good measure.  It's a sickness.  I enthusiastically recommend finding a book club, preferably one that centers around wine, as well as checking out Goodreads.

Pinterest has captured my heart.  Megan at Sorta Crunchy (whose blog you should visit regardless!) did a wonderful overview for the novice pinner, and I found myself immediately intrigued.  I'm still exploring it myself, but let me know if you'd like to connect.  The bottom line is that it is a lovely "catalog" site that creates visual display boards, with a social tie.  Sounds overly-basic, I know.  But it's so fun to see things I love from Remodelista or moments in time captured in one of my favorite blogs, Catherine et les fées, which speaks to the mommy, organic, green and francophile portions of my heart on a visually delightful pinboard.  That's all.  You must give it a whirl when you need some inspiration. 

What's your latest obsession?

In Praise of Reader's Digest Condensed Books and Toast

If you're much of a reader and not already on Goodreads, I enthusiastically suggest you check it out.  I always compare it to Facebook for readers, although you won't want the throngs of friends you may have on the former.  I keep my Goodreads circle to an intimate group of book club cronies and those whose opinions about books are of great interest to me - maybe two dozen or so.

While reading France magazine, I saw an interesting article about Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon, Beloved) and Michel Houellebecq (La Carte et le Territoire), who both recently received the prestigious Légion d'Honneur award in recognition of their contributions to literature.  I thought Houellebecq's novel, "a fictional account of artist Jed Martin's personal evolution as he achieves fame photographing Michelin maps," sounded interesting, so I hopped on the Goodreads app to add it as well as Morrison's books to my "to read" list.  I digress.

While on Goodreads, I saw the following review of Edge of Glass by Catherine Gaskin posted by my dear friend Heidi:

I was excited to find this story in a 1968 Reader's Digest Condensed Books Book. Is it just me, or are those books so comforting, like you're spending the weekend with your Grandma and as you read, she's making you some sort of delightful meal that somehow only she knows how to make? This is a super easy read, but really enjoyable.  

The review delighted me for several reasons: first, I simply adore Heidi and anything that comes from her brain.  Secondly, the book cover reminded me of the stereotypical 60s era Nancy Drew tomes, which was fun on its own.  Most importantly, though, I could relate specifically to her experience.
I used to spend summers at my grandparent's house in Mena, Arkansas, where I would blow dust off of and then devour their aging copies of Reader's Digest Condensed Books.  My grandmother would make me toast (not because I was incapable, because she was nice), and she would stack it on the plate with the buttered sides pressed together.  I found this ingenius, and it made the butter all warm and melty.  I took it as a particular gesture of kindness.  In fact, as I type this it occurs to me that I often feel a sense of surprise that my daughter doesn't realize what a tremendous favor I'm doing her when I do the same for her.  Or, perhaps like me, she does and never says anything - I didn't express that sentiment to my grandmother, but toast makes me think of her warmly (of course).


One of the books that I read as a condensed version was The Charm School by Nelson Demille.  I found it exceptionally intriguing, and years later bought a copy to read in its entirety, which I still have today.  I love the idea that a book can transport with not only its topic but the place and time you consume it - on deck on a sailboat in the Caribbean, by the shores of a quiet lake in Wisconsin or in a far less exotic and rather humble backyard under a tree on a spring day.

The Charm School remains in my short list of all-time favorite books.  It could be the story line, the memory, the sense of specific time and place or the feeling as a teenager that I was delving into adult-caliber reading.  Regardless, those are exceptionally strong sentiments, and Heidi's note brought them into a more brilliant light.

Here's to summer reading!

Keys to a Well-Read Life

One of my favorite magazines is Fast Company (http://www.fastcompany.com/), because I find it to be outstanding in terms of pushing and expanding my thoughts, keeping me tech savvy and introducing me to non traditional approaches to management of both my personal life and business techniques.  I also like that it is as appropriate for entrepreneurs as for nonprofit executives and business owners from small to global in scale.

The May issue letter from the editor (which I often find to be the best spot for oft-overlooked and well-written musings in a magazine) by Jane Berentson caught my eye with its quip regarding the habit of article clipping by the editor's parents.

While not earth-shattering, I think this is an interesting trend among fantastic parents (obviously, mine did it and continue to do so into my thirties).  It indicates, obviously, that the parents are well-read, which is the best indicator that a child will develop a lifelong love of reading and learning.  There's an obvious degree of caring, as well, and well-intentioned involvement.  The clippings I received ranged from  investment advice to travel articles, not-so-subtle Dear Abby columns, gardening pointers and even a number related to interests of mine that my parents may not necessarily share, such as snippets on France or green living.

Regarding the point about well-read parents: I cite this as the most obvious reason my sister and I both possess above-average language and grammar skills.  I don't say this to be haughty - I'm simply struck by the number of our contemporaries who struggle with spelling and grammar.

I always laugh about how I "got away" with reading under the covers late into the night with a flashlight, far past my bedtime (as if my parents were't aware).  Dad's office was a virtual library of the classics, and I'm now more prone to pick up a classic than a modern release.  I'm prone to a number of melancholy greats (Hemingway, Steinbeck) as well as lighter, worldly fare (Peter Mayle, Isabel Allende).  The point being, I'm thankful every day for these assets and the treasure of a literary upbringing, and hope to instill the same in my growing family.

Incidentally, www.goodreads.com is an absolutely fantastic site for finding good book recommendations.  Unlike most social media tools, I don't connect with the world - just a handful of well-read friends whose judgement I trust (a significant number of whom are or are becoming librarians, not ironically).  Do give it a whirl, and I suspect, like me, you'll find your "to read" list far outnumbers your "read" list in short order.

http://www.fastcompany.com/

The technology, aps & websites currently garnering my attention

Don't say you weren't forewarned about the lack of pattern or relationship between my posts.  Leaping from social media to gardening back to technology and over to random musings is... well, a typical day for me.

Today I'm going to leap upon my soapbox to tout the wonders of some recent websites and related discoveries.  I'm truly enthused and amazed at the fantastic arsenal of tools that are released and finessed every day.  While I don't claim my list of favorites (below) to be the most cutting-edge in tech reporting, I do feel compelled to share my adulation of each:

Evernote
My new favorite site allows me to grab favorite websites without the hassle of Del.ici.ous (which torments me with logging in every time when I just want to quickly bookmark a site across multiple access points).  Evernote's web clipper is a stroke of genius.  Even better, when reading magazines I can grab images and articles for future reference and save to Evernote while still passing on and/or recycling the magazine.  In fact, this recent article in Fortune by Josh Quittner titled "The Future of Reading" basically quantified my love of reading a magazine while simultaneously bookmarking via iphone or laptop: http://bit.ly/cefurl.  Just read the first five or so short paragraphs if you suffer from a short attention span.  Then, be sure to visit http://www.evernote.com/ and download it to your desktop to have access to the web clipper and an enhanced version.  You'll want the iPhone ap too, I suspect.

Dropbox
I love Google everything - truly, I do.  From Google Aps to the calendar, reader, Google for Nonprofits, checkout and a gazillion other lovely open source products, I'm smitten.  However, I need to calmly state that Dropbox is so my new favorite, and it really outperforms Google Docs in one major way: it automatically syncs documents across mediums (say, my home and work laptops and my iPhone) without the need for an external hard drive.  More importantly, it does this all automatically, making it far more intuitive than Docs, where I had to remember to save documents and upload them to the site.  Breaking the immediate save-to-My-Documents habit is hard, which is why I love that Dropbox places a nifty folder right in My Docs and automatically opens it for saves.  No more lugging even a laptop home, since I can access everything no matter where I'm working.  Even better, it's all backed-up online due to the likelihood (for me, anyway) that I will crash every computer to which I have access.  In short: LOVE.

There's a nap for that
My Dad has taken to making fun of the iPhone tagline by slurring the words (he's also prone to placing the em-FA-sis on the wrong sy-LAH-bles).  And I, as firstborn, feel compelled to laugh (just don't tell him I actually find it funny... every time).  Regardless, I need to extol some new favorite aps: Dropbox and Evernote, obviously, followed by Opera (the new speedy browser and much better favorite site bookmarking option as compared to Safari on the iPhone) and Kindle for iPhone. 

For social media management via iPhone: I like the LinkedIn ap and Twitterific rather than Twitter, and Facebook really seems to function far better through the browser than as an ap.

For reading/entertainment: Again, Kindle for iPhone, but I also can't part with Mashable (the best for tech/social media news), Huff Post and Treehugger (see below).  My poorly-behaved alter-ego enjoys Epic Fail and ifmylife (foul language alert!), and GoodReads has a lovely new ap for logging books read, to read and opinions of others - I keep the list to a short one of those whose book opinions I truly admire vs. friending everyone on the planet.

Best green aps: Again, Treehugger takes the cake followed by the GoodGuide (for checking and comparing products in the grocery store and elsewhere), CO2 Tracker, EcoSnoop and iRecycle (via Earth911.com), although the latter is not well developed in non-urban areas as yet.  Kiva Alerts is also very cool, for reviewing microloan projects around the world and supporting them through $25 investments - you can also check repayment and reinvestment schedules.  Learn more about them at http://www.kiva.org/.

Lazy Humanitarian Outreach
Speaking of Kiva and doing good, I've been absolutely intrigued by a recent article in Fast Company (http://www.fastcompany.com/) about IBM's World Community Grid: bit.ly/alR5Ri.  The gist of it is this: you sign up for the program and install "dumb" software on your computer (i.e. it does what it is supposed to do but leaves you alone, and doesn't affect your use or track your activities).  WCGrid "harnesses" your idle computer time to run computations related to research to fight cancer, end world hunger and dozens of other humanitarian causes.  By idle time, it means when you pause to think, get up for a cup of coffee or take a phone call.  You don't have to leave your computer on all the time or change your habits.  This basically turns all of our computers into a group supercomputer.  It's truly fascinating.  If you read it and feel comfortable enough to enroll (I would think you would, it's a thorough article), feel free to join my team at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.com/ - Team NWA.  I think it will be fun to see what can happen.

That's the list of the things making me tick this month.  Hope it turns out to be of interest or use!