Category Archives: Social Media

All things internet! We’re in your blogs and on your Facebook and in your Tweets!

Social Media

On house and homes and health

Things that caught my eye and/or heart this week

The Little White House Up on the Hill from The Redneck Mommy. It’s a bittersweet story, and Tanis tells it so nicely. And that photo at the end is just so sad and lovely.

At the top of the shag-covered stairs, there was a stray bullet hole from a rogue hunter’s rifle. Every time I passed by it I was tempted to trace the circular outline with my fingertips and I’d shudder with the weight of my own mortality.

Bugged from An Entirely Other Day. A real-life interaction with our health-care system.

The PPACA is important. It’s vital. When a bug can bring down your family, when there are people who are willing to take away the shield that could prevent that, when we as a country have become so small and stingy and mean that we cheer the idea of ripping medical care away from fellow citizens, offering nothing in its place but sanctimony and self-righteousness… What are we? We’re not a country. We’re not a community. Oh, no.

We’re a zero-sum game. We’re the state of nature. We’re animals, gobbling down as much as we can, as fast as we can, swatting away the weak.

Simplicity and Our Home at the End of the Street from Moosh in Indy. This one reminds me of one of my favorite poems, “The Yellow Bowl” by Rachel Contreni Flynn.

In my home my arms are never empty, there is always a warm body to hold, some of them bigger than others, a couple of them way more furry than the rest. I am never truly alone here.

PMS from Hogan Here. Yep.

Regular reads

I forgot until late last night to pull together a few links from my Google Reader to share with you, so we’re going with the least-textual of them.

The Big Picture is the Boston Globe’s photo blog, and they do a marvelous job highlighting interesting and moving photos that illustrate current events. I love their large-image format, and it functions for me as a jumping-off point for a lot of news stories.

Moment Junkie is a collection of wedding pictures submitted by photographers. I was not kidding when I told you that I love weddings. Some of their photos are just light-hearted, silly candid shots (see: “The Highest of Fives” and “The Armpits“) while others capture such gorgeous raw emotion and intensely private moments (see: “The Weeping” and “The Moving Father-Daughter Dance“).

Social Media

I can’t stop with the politics

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Politics

Andrea’s Who Gets Your Vote? series at Li’l Kid Things asks readers to share some thoughts about politics. It’s been very interesting.

“Superman Comes to the Supermarket” is a super-long read by Norman Mailer about the Democratic National Convention in 1960.

Regardless of your political affiliation, Julian Castro’s DNC keynote address is a beautifully written speech.

And also

Rivers. It’s about parenting, philosophers and high school. It’s not G-rated.

A few regular reads

Meyser at A Cat on the Window Sill said she’d like to take a peek at the blogs I read, so I’m going to start adding a few of them to my weekly link roundup. (Which was going to be every Friday, and then I think it was Saturday once, and today it’s Thursday. We like to keep you guessing here at Butterscotch Sundae.) (No we don’t, really. It’s probably going to be a Thursday thing.) (Probably.)

Kottke.org is not a small, obscure site. It’s been around for nearly 15 years, and it’s popular for good reason. Jason Kottke scours the internet for interesting content, and then he shares the links with a little bit of commentary. He and the occasional guest editor never fail to find great stuff, and I like the site’s simple, clean design, too.

I’ve been reading All & Sundry for a long time. Linda has two adorable little boys, and her family enjoys things like hiking and camping and being generally rugged and outdoorsy. Linda is not afraid to write raw and honest posts about parenting (see: “Mishandled“) and other facets of her life, which makes this one of those blogs that makes me feel like a weirdo stalker if I think too deeply about it.

Heather, on the other hand, doesn’t often get personal at Home Ec 101. The site is “designed to teach real skills as they apply to real lives,” such as how to cook cabbage and how to mop a floor. And if you were to do something like melt a plastic bag on your flat-top stove? Heather would be the person I would turn to for an answer. This is not to say I did that, but … OK fine, I did that. And she knew just what to do.

Social Media

The posts people read in August

Last month was the busiest month visitor-wise that Butterscotch Sundae has seen since I changed to this URL way back in 2009. That’s thanks in large part to the critique of my About page at MomComm, having one of my posts syndicated on BlogHer and iHomeschoolNetwork.com’s curriculum blog hop. I don’t expect to be getting any attention from big sites again soon, though, so I’m steeling myself for September’s numbers to be back to normal. All the while hoping, of course, that the numbers at least settle into a slightly-higher normal.

The top 5 most popular posts in August

  1. What kindergarten looks like in our house. Version Pete.0.
  1. What second grade looks like in our house
  1. Maybe FDR was right about that unreasoning, unjustified terror
  1. It’s an all-new and very exclusive list of bloggers!“
  1. It’s time to shed the flip-flops and backpacks, kids!

August’s top 5 search strings

  1. “ikea kura”
  2. “ikea kura bed”
  3. “fun places in Atlanta”
  4. “how to decorate a pink room”
  5. “how to quiet a cough”

I’m not sure if people are just searching for pictures of the Ikea Kura or if they’re looking for assembly help. I’m thinking about taking Pete’s bed apart so I can make a video showing how to build it, in case they do need help. That would require remembering how to put it back together, though, because I’m 98 percent sure I no longer have the instructions.

People searching for “aquarium make me have bad dreams,” “great booty control” and “dreams about snakes and zombies” also found their way here in August. Hm.