Starfish Envy

More Introductions!

I seem to be on a People-I-Know-And-Love streak, so to keep that streak going...

Tonight I'd like to introduce you to Maurissa and Jed.  That's Tancharoen Whedon and just plain Whedon, respectively.  The creative talents behind all sorts of good things, from some of the best episodes of Dollhouse, to the brilliant Whedon-family-extravaganza that is Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.  (If you haven't listened to Mo's song in the musical commentary, DO SO RIGHT NOW.)

In addition to being the cutest couple ever, they do these cute little quirky-awesome songs.  In their spare time.  Just for fun.

If I didn't love them, I'd hate them for being so talented.

 

And now that you're in love with them, too, check out Maurissa's brand-new blog, It's So Not Sexy, in which she recounts her ongoing ass-kicking experience living with Lupus.  

Just to be clear, Maurissa's the one kicking ass. 

And taking names.

And, apparently, making sandwiches.

A Little Says A Lot

One of my favorite happiness suggestions from Gretchen Rubin is the One Sentence Journal.

I started keeping one more than a year ago... but then I remodeled and my journal was accidentally packed away.  When I started moving back in, I was so happy to find it again.

Looking back over my journal, what's fascinating to me is how a very brief journal entry (I'm not very good at keeping it to one sentence-- but they're still very, very brief) truly captures the essence of what was going on at that time.  

And while I would never go back and read through an in-depth journal (because that would be flat-out exhausting, as well as time-consuming), it's easy to flip through the One Sentence Journal, and within moments take myself back to a given day or month.

Here are some selections from last January to show you what I mean: 

Jan. 2, 2010: Went to my second yoga class of the year/decade/century.

Jan. 3, 2010: Have my fourth cold in three months.  Arg.

Jan. 5, 2010: Jury duty-- got released early, came home, called architects, and ORDERED SPERM!!

Jan. 11, 2010: Enormous, tragic earthquake in Haiti.  Heartbreaking.

Jan. 14, 2010: Finished shooting Lie To Me episode 214.  Great acting in this one.  Glad to be done.

Jan. 16, 2010:  Brunch with Tracy, and got an apricot tree from Echo Park Improvement Association.

Jan. 23, 2010: Dinner at Liz's-- Jack's growing!  Gretchen's in town on her book tour.  She seems happy!

Jan. 30, 2010: Super lazy day.  Lots of reading in bed!

A mere eight-day sampling covers world events, what was happening in my life (my first sperm purchase!), and what was going on in my career.  

And that makes me happy.

Even with an entry like the one on March 16, 2011: Definitely not pregnant.  Again.

Oh, well.  Someday I'll look back at those words, and be glad things turned out as they did.

At least, I hope I will.

My Christmas Give-Away's On Lay-Away

(Okay, that doesn't entirely make sense, but you get the idea.)

Just popping in to let you know the internet's down at my house, once again, so I'm not going to do the drawing for the Give-away until early next week... when hopefully things will be back up and running.

Arg.

If I weren't about to go to Barcelona, I'd be really grumpy.  

I'm A Versatile Blogger!

I have been nominated for The Versatile Blogger Award!

I'm quite excited about it.  

In fact, other than a Peabody, I think it's the first award I've been nominated for as an adult.  So yay! Screw the Emmys!  

S at Ticking Clock nominated me, which is a particular honor, because she's pretty damn awesome.  Federal agent.  Has her you-know-what together enough at 31 to know she's ready to go down this Single Mom By Choice road.  (Wish I'd figured it out by 31.  Oops.)  Willing to share the nitty-gritty of this trying-to-get pregnant process with her readers, even when it totally sucks.

So, S, thank you. 

Now, as a nominee, I have two obligations to fulfill.  The first is to share seven things about myself, so:

1) I hate putting dishes in the dishwasher.  I don't why, I just hate it.  Hate.  Hatehatehate. 

2) And yet I'm fine with unloading the dishwasher.  Makes absolutely no sense.

3) I just got a Sodastream.  BEST THING EVER.

4) I still have a friend from first grade.  Hi, D!

5) I am so sick of doing IUIs, I can't even tell you.  And yet I'm probably doing at least one more, most likely two.  Because my new doctor agrees that the FIVE IUIs I did-- yes, FIVE-- were completely pointless due to poor timing and an utter failure to deal with my consistently short luteal phase.  Grrrr.  

6) My favorite place in the whole wide world is Lake Vermilion, in northern Minnesota.  Followed closely by Stockholm, Copenhagen, Bruges, Bergen, Asheville, and Vienna, in no particular order.

7) I'm an excruciatingly independent only child.

The second, and most exciting, part of the nomination is having the opportunity to nominate seven of my favorite bloggers.  

Some of my favorite bloggers have been nominated by others-- which is handy, because now I don't have to stress about whether to include folks like Shannon at Chasing Rainbows and SingleMom2B in my list o' seven.  Somebody's already got them covered. Well-deserved, ladies.  

With no further ado, here are my nominees:

1) Gotta start with Jenna at Cold Antler Farm.  Because she's way cooler than me.

2) And then there's Jenny at Chicken Corner (which is apparently now part of LAObserved).   Love having her perspective on my neighborhood.

3) My neighbor, Jesus, writes The Eastsider LA, which I read every single day.

4) Claire, at With All My Heart, recently went through one of the most frightening experiences imaginable when her daughter, Fiona, was struck with a life-threatening illness.  So grateful to Claire for her willingness to share with the rest of us, and happy to report that Fiona has largely recovered and is doing great!

5) I love reading about Liz and Elfe's journey on Inventing My Life.  

6) Jellybean Mama never fails to make me laugh.  And often cry.

7) Finally, Lulu McCabe writes a blog called "What Now? A candid account of my experience with foster/adopting a teenager in Los Angeles."  

So there you have it.  Thrilled to be nominated.  Thanks for thinking of me, S!

100,000 Hits and Counting!

By the time I wake up in the morning-- possibly by the time I go to bed tonight-- this little blog o' mine will have reached the 100,000 hits mark.  

100,000.  

Yikes.  That's a big number.  It kind of overwhelms me, actually.  

At the risk of being cheesy, kinda just want you to know I'm beyond grateful for every moment you've spent here at Starfish Envy over the last nine months.  Hope you stick around.  After all, the really fun stuff hasn't even started yet!

In a happy coincidence, my personal 100,000 hit milestone is happening on the same night as Idol Gives Back.  Now, whatever you may think of American Idol (I love it.  A lot.  And by a lot I mean OMG MAMA SOX ROCKS!!!!!!), Idol Gives Back is a stroke of philanthropic genius.

And while this year's show seems to be padded with too much blathery nonsense, and not enough meaningful content, the cause itself is seriously righteous.   

So, whether you give to support Save the Children's literacy efforts in Appalachia and Mississippi, or to buy malaria nets in Africa, or to put a dent in maternal mortality, or to bring relief to Haiti... just give, if you can.  

You can go to Idol Gives Back online, you can call 1-877-436-5243, or, in what is hopefully the only time in my blogging career that I will quote Ryan Seacrest, "to donate $10 using your phone, you can text the word IDOL to 20222."

Just to put that in context: $10 = 1 malaria net = 1 saved life.

Or, to put it in another context: $10 = 90 lbs of food = 1 family that's not hungry anymore.

Me, I'm going to give one dollar in honor of each hit Starfish Envy has gotten since... oh. Wait.  No I'm not.  Because Starfish Envy has gotten-- did I mention?-- ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND HITS!!!  

Well, almost.  Soon.  By the time I wake up.

I'm gonna go out on a limb, and say tomorrow's gonna be a great day.

Use Your Words

Gretchen Rubin always turns me on to the most wonderful things-- like Wordle, which hovers very near the top of my Most Wonderful Things list.  

Well, today she posted a link to the Discovery site's Puzzlemaker.  WHAT?  I CAN MAKE MY VERY OWN PUZZLE???  IT'S TOO MUCH!!!

Only not so much too much that I didn't go immediately to the site and make-- what else?--  a Starfish Envy Wordsearch puzzle!  

Word search away-- and when you're done, go make your own.  It's free!

Starfish Envy

T G Z S Y H B E L A S O S N T 
W O N W T G X W X E S U I O J
X B Y I B A R I Y T C D N I Z 
J N K I L I R S R C T E G S D 
C I M S T E E F E O B G L I A 
H T U E J Y D S I Y N G E V E 
O A R I S N S O W S H O C E Y 
I H A E G F A X M K H I D L V 
C L Y O U S P Y F E T Y Y E N 
E H L L R A L C Z W R X H T E 
M B J I X F E R T I L I T Y A 
O E B A N N A W M O M H O P E 
M Y I C M R E P S J H J S M J 
S C C C P J P X M B R J F X F 
R R Q B D N L W Q W K D G T S 

BLOG
CHOICEMOMS
DONOR
EGG
ENVY
FERTILITY
HOPE
IUI
MOMWANNABE
REMODELING
SINGLE
SPERM
STARFISH
SUCCESSFUL
TELEVISION
WRITER
YESYESYES

17 of 17 words were placed into the puzzle.

Help! I Need Somebody!

About once a week, usually when I'm extra late getting home from work (like tonight), I absolutely panic about what to write here on this lovely blog o' mine.  I become the blogging equivalent of a frozen, quivering bunny rabbit-- a metaphor that makes my blog a drooling, fang-bared coyote-- yick.

My solution to the quivering bunny/drooling coyote situation tends to be a call to WP, which usually goes something like this: "HiHowareyouCanIpostapictureofJack?"  

Proud Mama that she is, WP always ever so graciously agrees, and I breathe a deep, DEEP sigh of relief.   Because, and here's the thing, who doesn't love a Jack picture?  

No one sane doesn't love a Jack picture.  

It's actually a test the shrink-types are using now.  They show patients a picture of Jack and if the patient likes it, they're sane.  And if they don't... straight to the looney bin, no passing go, no collecting two hundred dollars.  Seriously, it saves the state, like, TONS of money.

So I was thinking about this conundrum on the ride home today, and I realized that WP and Jack aren't my only Blog Emergency resources.  There are, in fact, other people I can count on!  

Who are those people, you say?  

Well.

YOU, of course!!!  Silly you, acting all coy, like you didn't know all along.

Rule Two, of course, remains in place (Oops, I meant Rule One.  They're my rules, and I only have two of them, why do I always get them confused?)-- which means no matter how nicely (or not nicely) anyone asks, I am never going to write a defense of whatever the name was of that Lie to Me episode we did that everyone hates, or the college campus episode of Dollhouse (Joss's part was great), or that stupid black-tar-heroin-in-the-church-candles episode we did on The Shield.  For that matter, I'm not going to get into any of the GREAT episodes of television we've done, either-- and there are far more good ones than bad, thankfully.

But any other topics that interest you are fair game.  What would you like to read about here?  What should I be writing about that I'm not?  Lemme have it.  Help me expand my Emergency Blogging Topics List.  

And... go!

Because the quivering bunny thing doesn't look good on me.  And this blog is way too sweet to be a drooling coyote.

My Second Weekly Reading List

I just LOVE this whole weekly reading list deal.  It forces me to be more engaged and active in my own blog reading, and I'm happy to pass the results on to you...

One of my favorite blogs is Cold Antler Farm.  Jenna has managed to get me interested in something I never in a million years would've thought would interest me: chickens.  Yes, chickens.  I kinda want some.  So I was pretty fascinated when I came across this article on Little House on the Southern Prairie.  

And now for something completely different.  An article on Slate about how many women still believe victims of rape are RESPONSIBLE FOR BEING RAPED.  Because they were wearing something seductive, or were out too late, or had too much to drink, or went somewhere they shouldn't have gone.  There's a significantly longer post to be written on this subject, but for now, it's an interesting-- and horrifying-- article.  

And then there's this report on a current dog walking brouhaha in my neighborhood. Yikes.  But... yeah.  This is pretty much my neighborhood in a nutshell.

I wanted to come up with all new blog-references this week, and not go back to anyone who was on last week's list.  But then I read this post on The Art of Non-Conformity. Some things just need to be shared.  So, this is me, dropping a key.  (Which will make sense once you've read the article.)

Finally, can we, for just a moment, contemplate Roger Ebert?  I love the man.  Didn't really watch the thumbs up/thumbs down show.  Haven't read many of his reviews.  But you know what I do read?  His blog.  The man is an INCREDIBLE writer.  And a beautiful person.  I particularly loved his response to the Esquire article about him, but don't stop there.  Spend some time.  Check out the archives.  And keep reading.  This man's words are worth your time.

My First Weekly Reading List

Some of my favorite bloggers do weekly reading lists, and since copying is the sincerest form of flattery, I've decided to copy copy copy.

Not only are reading lists a great way to introduce people to bloggers they may not know, it's also a way to show my appreciation for the great writing and thinking other folks are doing out there in the blogosphere.

So here goes:

  

I love RealDelia's Five Reasons I Love to Blog.

At Cold Anter Farm, I found Jenna's explanation of what the name of her farm (and blog) means to her to be lovely and touching.

I completely connected with this terrifically insightful post on the difference between unconditional love and loving without boundaries at Live Happier.  

On my favorite neighborhood blog, The Eastsider LA, I was sort of horrified by this link to a Curbed LA piece on what it means to be an Echo Park hipster.  I may live in Echo Park, which certainly plants me in the "gentrifier" category, but I'm definitely not a hipster. (Although I have, on occasion, been known to wear stupid hats.  But mostly because I knitted them.)

The Art of Non-Conformity is a fairly new blog find for me.  I wrote a post a couple weeks ago about the notion of being rigorous, and I think Chris Guillebeau is a perfect example of someone who lives rigorously every day.  Just one example of that is this post on The Art of Radical Exclusion.

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So what do you think?  Are you a fan of the reading list?  What other blogs should I be reading?

Who Do You Love?

What's the best gift you could give your loved ones this holiday season?

The gift of HAPPINESS, of course!  

"But," you say (you cynic, you), "happiness is such an ephemeral thing.  So mysterious.  So fleeting.  Happiness can't be wrapped in a box with a tidy little bow! Impossible!"

Ha!  Shows what you know. 

All you have to do to give the gift of happiness is click on this link right here.  And then your loved one(s) will receive two things: first, a Pre-Order eCard letting them know what's coming; and then, just in time to start the New Year off right, THE BOOK!!!

And by "THE BOOK!!!" of course I mean The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin.

Yes, after much waiting and anticipation, The Happiness Project is finally here!  Or at least it's close.  By the end of the month, I will have it in my grubby little winter-parched hands.  Because, personally, I've already pre-ordered three copies.  One for me, two for my parents.  And I'm making a list right now of everyone else I'd like to give it to.  

I'm doing this because Gretchen's intelligent and thoughtful blog has had a radical impact on my life in many ways, large and small.  The book promises to be just as rewarding and insightful.  And, unlike a website, I can carry it around.  And write notes in it.  And discover where Gretchen goes when she has the opportunity to go deeper, to theorize, and philosophize, and be revealing and honest about the year, the very important year, when happiness became the focus of her life.    

I can't wait to read all about it.

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Also, if you want, you can go see Gretchen when she comes to your town or a town near you!  (Don't worry, she's nice.  She's from the Midwest.)