Bits and pieces

Monday, November 24, 2014



I'm going to just jump right in and pretend my last blog post was yesterday - not June 3. Good lord. My early New Year's resolution is to do much, much better.

In my long time away, I kept a list of thing I could - and wanted to - write about, i.e. books read, products found, articles loved. So here are a couple of those thing to kick off the start of a new commitment to blogging.

It feels like a million years ago now, but over the summer I read, among other things, Big Little Lies, The Arsonist, and, most recently, And the Dark Sacred Night by Julia Glass. I hated for this last one to end, so I'm now rereading Three Junes and plan to go back to I See You Everywhere, two earlier Glass books I loved. Quick tip: And the Dark Sacred Night revisits characters from Three Junes, so if you read Three Junes first, it helps (but isn't necessary).

I was chatting with a friend on the playground not long ago about the death of Boston Mayor Tom Menino, which led us to how we keep up (or don't keep up) with the news, and she told me about the skimm. Have you heard of it? It's a daily email highlighting the news stories of the day (or, really, the previous day) and - more important - explaining those stories in simple terms. Whoever writes the skimm is funny and smart and keeps things brief, and I love it.

I'm also loving a new-to-me blog that has nothing to do with the daily news. It's called The Mom Edit, and it's a fashion blog, but a kind of everyday, mom-ish fashion (in the best sense of the word), with articles such as "Seven Ways to Style a Basic Grey Sweater Dress," "How to Tie Your Scarf Like the November J. Crew Model," and "That Time I Wore My Mom's Dress to New York Fashion Week." "The Mom Edit" is really for new mothers trying to get back to their more stylish selves, but Shana Draugelis writes in such a down-to-earth, fun way that it works even for those of us whose babies aren't babies but who still need help getting dressed each morning.


My youngest daughter, Livvy, who is nine, asked the other day if iPhones were invented when I was little, and she was shocked when I told her there were no iPhones when she was born. Imagine. It reminded me of this fabulous article in The New York Times Style Magazine about how - despite what we might tell our children - life wasn't really better in the old days, when we didn't carry our phones with us and there was no Internet to keep us connected 24/7. "We can't become hostages to the romantic notion that the past is always a better country," Andrew O'Hagan writes. "There's a few million girls with flatirons who will happily tell you the opposite."

Photo: Free People

Wet Dog, Muddy Boots All rights reserved © Blog Milk Powered by Blogger