J- just looked over, hearing me listen to a video and said, “Are you writing a political post?”  He was a little shocked because I am not really a conventionally political person.

I recently watched Milk and The Times of Harvey Milk.  I was a bit humbled that I didn’t really know the whole Milk story when I saw it. I knew they Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone had been killed and that Milk was the first out gay man to be elected to public office in California.  I think that I knew at some point that Supervisor Dan White had shot them.  But, I don’t think I could have said this before I saw the movie, I had forgotten this part of the story at some point.

I was almost 7 years old when the murder took place, but I don’t remember it.  We had recently relocated to Sacramento from Santa Cruz when it happened and I wonder how my parents reacted.  Did I know about it and just not remember or did I not see the news that night?

My first memory of the story was sometime around 3rd grade (around 1980) when we went on a field trip to the Crocker Art Museum.  I think it was a sculpture that had a twinkie that was referencing the “Twinkie Defense“.  I can almost picture it. Bright colors and chaotic lines and a piece of a Twinkie sticking right out of it.  My mom explained the Twinkie Defense to me, but like many things at that age, I was just beginning to make sense of things and be able to understand the difference between imagination and reality.  Dan White and the Twinkie defense was filed in my brain next to the Greek mythological gods that I had learned about. It seemed partly true, clearly important, but it also had an aura of remoteness, something that was before my time.  I learned about the defense, but I didn’t know who was killed or who did the killing.  I was 30 years from understanding how this could be relevant to my own life.

The Milk documentary was filmed in 1985.  Memorable scenes were an interview with a union man that said he was homophobic before he began working with Milk.  He agreed with everything that Milk said, and this is what made him change his feelings about gay people.  But, he straightforwardly assured the audience, most people still feel how he used to, shamefully.  Also, I believe it was Milk’s colleague Jeannine Yeomans, who describes the fear of people at that time.  They saw that things were changing and did not understand what that would mean for San Francisco and their lives in it. They were used to power being one way and power was changing.

Interestingly, when I finished watching The Times of Harvey Milk, I saw this article that the day before, Speaker Nancy Pelosi compared the extremist and violent rhetoric being used today in the debates on health care to late 1978 in San Francisco, the time when Milk and Moscone were shot.  The comparison is striking for the obvious reason that the US now has its first black elected official.  I was struck by this statement because I related to the times portrayed in the movie.  I was really moved by the scenes in the documentary that showed the candlelight vigil, with thousands out mourning the deaths of Milk and Moscone and the scenes of angry riots following the weak sentencing of Dan White.  Although I am not usually very interested in politics, it was impossible to not feel inspired and have some hope the night that Obama was elected.  I walked out to my back porch and in all directions, I heard whooping, music, horns and celebration.

Rachel Maddow discusses Pelosi’s speech on her show.  She shows the clip of Pelosi then follows with Dianne Feinstein’s 1978 announcement of the murders.  The emotional turbulence of both are remarkable.  A bit later, she plays a clip of Republican John Boehner reacting to Pelosi’s comment, in which he describes the exact fear that Yeomans had described in 1985, cinching the similarities of three decades earlier.

I wonder how much of the Bay Area’s queer culture that I love has to do with politics and specifically, the politics of Harvey Milk.  My bias is to think very little.  It is hard to believe that if politics does make a difference, that 30 years later, Proposition 8 still failed in California. Demographics, geography and economics are what have provided the conditions for queer community to flourish here.  On the other hand, iconography, political figures and historical markers are all building blocks for shifts from a subculture to a culture.

So the fact that our tapestry of our dominant culture continues to be rewoven with queer, black and “other” as thread with a new political context does change things. It ultimately forces the change of  the relationship of the “isms” – sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. – to the dominant culture.  The question that I suppose I am consciously leaving unanswered surrounds the compromise that these historically discriminated against groups inevitably concede to in order to play the game at all.  And of course, whether this is really “the game” that any of us should want to be playing.  And sadly, the celebratory hoots of victory from Obama supporters have become few and far between since long before the health care debate began.

I am really into intimacy.  I have plenty of friends that I have casual friends with that I see around, but my close friends are people that I can say anything to. And they can say anything to me.  And we do. I love to be up in people’s business and well, they don’t really have to be up in mine because it is usually spread out on the table.

I was shocked to hear a friend say that her best friend was keeping a secret from her husband for 12 years.  I asked, “Was she keeping it from you, too?” She said, “Well, it’s not all that relevant for our relationship.” I simply couldn’t imagine any of my best friends keeping secrets from me, let alone from their partners.

This often carries over with my clients.  Sometimes I see myself as sort of a bartender, where people can bring their troubles to me, if it feels right. It makes sense since there is such a connection with physical holding and stress/emotions and with massage and emotional release.  J- thinks I should start an advice column, actually.  I think that would be the greatest job (next to being a forest ranger).

So, usually this goes okay for me and I am able to be empathetic, non-judgmental and supportive without stressing myself out or taking it on.  Well, just the right issues came together this week to totally trigger me and it took me about 24 hours to figure out why I was getting so wrapped up in them. Two of my friends are both dealing with the loss of children in very different ways.  I felt so drawn to supporting them and felt their grief as if it were my own.  I saw each one of them on two days in a row and I could really think of nothing else for those two days.

Meanwhile, I am spiraling through PMS and wanting to cry at everything from seeing my dogs play to a cheezy movie.  Luckily, it was my day off and I was able to just take some time to myself, walking with my dogs and such.  As soon as I walked into my acupuncturists office and sat down, I realized that this was all triggering the sadness of my own loss of the girls.  I had actually made that connection with each of the situations separately, but for some reason, recognizing the common thread between the two situations had a huge impact. To spell it out: definitely time to get back into therapy for me.

Knowing Sarah

I met Sarah’s mom before I met Sarah.  We were at an earthquake preparedness meeting where we were discussing, as a community, how to be prepared and connected to people in our own neighborhoods and how to get in touch with people in other neighborhoods if lines of communication go down.  At that point, Sarah “Bean” (a nickname that we all use as a way to differentiate her from other Sarah’s that we know), was practically a legend in my mind.  My friends had been asking me for over a year whether I knew her.  She was roommates with a close friend, but never seemed to be around whenever I was there.

Finally, a few months later, I met Sarah at a party and I adored her immediately.  We decided to  begin trading massage.  I am a professional massage therapist and am fairly picky about who I will trade with.  Sarah’s modality is different than mine (her Tui Na to my Deep Tissue).  Although I prefer deep tissue massage, I have benefited and enjoyed all modalities when done well.

A practitioner can be good with touch intuitively or be mediocre, even with a lot of training.  Sarah is a talented bodyworker because of her ability to connect with others.  She did not have much training when I first started receiving massage from her, but she always had a wonderful touch.  Throughout the year that we traded, her work evolved as she furthered her training and offered more fully integrated sessions.

Like many young people in the Bay Area (and many bodyworkers), Sarah is a person of many hats.  She is a teacher, a thinker and a healer.  Given the opportunities, Sarah’s possibilities are boundless because she is the kind of person that turns everything that she touches into her own.  She was working hard in many apsects of her life, including preparing for her trip logistically and learning Arabic.

Sarah gave me this photo before she left for her trip

Despite her light and easy presence with others, she takes the world and her position in it quite seriously.  I’ve always been impressed by the gravity that she holds the well-being of others, which translates into her politics, her employment and her friendships.  She often spoke of her love and concern for her family and friends and was fiercely loyal and loving to both.

The Hikers

What I really appreciate about the campaign to get Sarah, Shane and Josh released is the focus on the fact that they are hikers.  Of course, this does not comprehensively define them, but is a part of a lifestyle that I share with Sarah.  I can imagine her joy in being able to explore this area. The Free the Hikers website is filled images of them in nature.

Shon Meckfessel, who was travelling with them (but did not join them on the hike) explains their discovery of the area.

Every one of them told us to visit a place called Ahmed Awa. Not one of these people mentioned that Ahmed Awa was anywhere near the Iranian border. In fact, on the wall of our hotel there were three photos of tourists standing near the Ahmed Awa waterfall.  Ahmed Awa seemed the clear choice for appreciating the stunning natural beauty around Sulaimania, far from any sort of risk. However, it may have been unclear to the people who encouraged us to visit Ahmed Awa that we intended to go hiking in the area, rather than simply visiting the waterfall.

News reports say that the hikers may have entered Iran and it is plainly obvious to anyone who learns anything about them (including the involved governments) that they would not spy and also would not have entered Iran intentionally.  Either one would be antithetical to their personalities and life choices.  This was simply an awful, tragic mistake.

I have not followed much of the media, but I was particularly struck by Sarah’s mom reading an email that Sarah had sent just before they traveled to this Kurdish region or Iraq.  She assures her mom that the area is completely safe and pro-american and there is no history of American’s being harmed there.

Helping

Unfortunately, those of us hoping for the release of the hikers are currently subject to a bit of a waiting game. My understanding is that the situation is precarious because the US does not have diplomatic relations with Iran and communication with and about the hikers has been somewhere between non-existent to scarce to not trustworthy.

It is my understanding that what they need most, other than raising awareness for the situation is money.  T-shirts can be bought here (which will do both).  The list of ways to help and ways to follow the situation is being constantly updated here.  I hope that I will be able to plan some sort of fundraiser for them and encourage others to do the same.  I also know that the families are already traveling for meetings and media opportunities and are welcoming the donation of frequent flier miles.

My take is that no one really knows at this point what will help expediate the release of the hikers and because of that, it is difficult for the families to know what to ask for.  Because of this, I am beginning to try and work with the folks involved to support them personally.

Massage is a really wonderful thing to be able to offer.  In times of stress, trauma and crisis, massage can relieve the physical and emotional holding patterns that begin to happen for people.  It also helps clear the mind; “let go” is not the right word, but maybe reorganize a little.  I have been lucky enough to be able to work on some people on their team that cannot right now afford much time or money to devote to their own self-care.

The story actually begins February 22, 2006, but I really didn’t want to ruin such a great title by being picky.  It begins with the day I received a GPS for my birthday and became a geocacher. As a geocacher, I became obsessed with the idea of leaving no cache unfound.  I couldn’t consider passing one up.  I would take my dogs to the hills for hikes and bushwack or do what it took to claim the find.

Enter poison oak.  I had gotten poison oak a couple of times after owning the woods for many years, thinking that I was immune.  Well, you know the school of thought that says the more you are exposed to it, the worse your allergy becomes?  I am a believer.  It started with getting a rash in an area of contact and later became something that spread quickly to areas of my body that were completely covered.  Not only that, but I became so sensitive that I would have no direct contact with it, wipe my dogs down when I got home and I would still get it.  My favorite story is that I did brush against it and got it through my shirt.  I washed the shirt and I got it again.  This actually happened 4 more times until I washed it with tecnu (it was one of my favorite shirts) and could again wear it without consequence.  (Tecnu really is amazing, folks. Apparently, nobody really knows why it works. But IMHO, it is a miracle. If I know I have been exposed to PO and wash immediately with when I get home, I do NOT get a rash!)

In late 2007, I did a bunch of web research about building immunity since I could not imagine giving up geocaching or hiking in the hills.  Being in the hills for long, sometimes all day walks was part of my identity; it is what I did for myself to feel like myself.  I began taking rhus tox homeopathically on my own.

Along the way, I had seen the webpage for a local homeopath who treated poison oak. When I saw his name again in a Sierra Club magazine, I decided to make the call.  He was fantastic, but unfortunately…it didn’t work.  We tried everything and it only seemed to get worse.  I decided the only thing that I could do was cold turkey it. No more hills at all. I wasn’t going to be exposed and neither were my dogs.

Meanwhile, I had several other skin outbreaks that I assumed were  a fungus.  They were itchy and scaly (some areas worse than others). I treated them as such and put anti-fungal cream on. Ate endless raw garlic, grapefruit seed extract and mostly cut sugars out.  It, too ONLY GOT WORSE!  I had treated fungus on my own several times, so I knew something was amiss.  I was at my wits end at this point and went to a dermatologist.  He felt it was a clear cut case of psoriasis.  He took a biopsy (this is now sometime in 2008) and since things like this are never really simple for me, it went through a number of different tests because it did show markers of a rare kind of lymphoma.  In the end, they decided that it was psoriasis and the steroid cream that they prescribed worked. The dermatologist said that psoriasis can run many different courses in people and that it was very common for someone my age getting it for the first time to just go away again.

End of story?  Of course not.

I never really thought of myself as vain until I got a rash on my face.  For most of 2009, my face was somewhere between dry- irritated and swollen- red-oozing.   I was very surprised how much it disturbed me and how self-conscious I became. Using a topical steroid would help, but only for a week or so.  Eventually, my skin became reactive to metal, I had trouble wearing my glasses and my wedding ring.  Although psoriasis typically spares the face, my dermatologist and I both attributed my issues to that, for lack of any better explanation.

I tried a few things to help including changing my facial products and accupuncture, but when my face was better, it didn’t seem to last long and I was beginning to feel more dependent on steroids.  I began to wonder if what I was dealing with was eczema and not a product of psoriasis.  I thought back to all of they lifestyle and diet changes that I have underwent about the same time that I started having issues with my face.  After a bit of research I found this:

The most common food triggers for eczema are eggs, milk, peanuts, soy, and wheat. Among these, eggs are probably associated the most strongly with eczema.

Well, I hate to give such a complicated story a anti-climatic ending, but I think I am allergic to eggs.  About two weeks ago, I eliminated them from my diet almost completely and my skin has been remarkably improved.  It is still too soon to tell whether it will stay improved, but it has not felt this good in some time, especially for this long of a time.

We live in a 1908 Craftsman in Oakland.  It has clearly been remodeled a few times. Luckily we like most of the changes.  Our home has a more open floor plan than many.  The one feature that we miss is that many Craftsman homes of this era have built in cabinetry, which was likely removed from ours at some point.

Fireplace Before

The beautiful paneled walls, bricked fireplace and mantel and box beam ceiling of our dining room had been painted over a stark white at some point. While this choice was slightly redeemed by a lovely clay color chosen for the space above the paneling, The primer-like white was never going to feel cozy or warm.

After several years of home-ownership and with many other more dire improvement projects under my belt, I decided it was time to tackle this. I scoured the internet for suggestions specific to the paneling and fireplace, but found very little. Much of what is posted are photos of display homes of famous architects of the era.  Luckily, I was able to visit a few homes to get some ideas.

Fireplace after

I went down to Eco Home Improvement and looked at the Yolo color palettes.  The palette that I was considering was most like their Canyon palette, but it was a bit on the red side and the dark brown was a bit too dark.  I did choose Canyon 5 for the bricks, which matched our curtains perfectly and is reminiscent of, well…unfinished brick…  For the light trim pieces, I decided to go with Stone 1, which was clearly a contrast with the rich dark colors in the rest of the room, but much warmer, richer and darker than the white that we were moving away from.

The brown was not a Yolo color, but a custom color called “Raisin”.  It was the color that I was and am the least sure of.  It brings a business to the room that I am not thrilled with, but I really liked the idea of  paying tribute to the beautiful dark wood underneath the paint.

And no, I don’t expect that white trim around the door frame to last. Actually, I hope that eliminating that will be the final touch that gives the room the cohesiveness that it needs. And then on to the box beam ceiling, which I am excited about asthetically, but dreading because of the difficulty on the neck and shuolders that I imagine with painting detail on a ceiling.  How did Michael Angelo do it?

I just added Wordpress Stats to my toolbag on this blog. I needed to upgrade my site and I had been putting it off . I was running up against technical blocks that I just couldn’t bring myself to face.  Finally, I did it in one fell swoop, staying up until 2am (which for me is really late) and finishing up the next morning.

I never had the site down, but things did break along the way. Thanks goodness for google, apparently everyone else had run into the same bug and being persistent in searching for the problem finally paid off when I found someone’s posted solution. It turned out that one of the plugins was not compatible with the new version of wordpress, which screwed up the whole dashboard plugin interface.

But what turned out to be far more interesting than these technical details is the affect that adding a stat program to my blog has had on how I perceive the blog, itself.

To back up a little, I had alreadywalked into a blogging identity crisis.  My blogging has really been fueled and buoyed by these really remarkable experiences that I have had in foster parenting. I mean, here are stories worth telling and it is not hard to make them readable and interesting.  Now that I am taking a break from that life, the content and the tone and form of my writing and interest is rapidly changing.

So, how does this relate to adding the stat counter… It related because I am very surprised at where my search engine hits are coming from and this can’t help but influence me in thinking about the direction of my blog. I get multiple hits every single day for an old post that discusses a postural analysis class that I took and “rotoscoliosis”, which I suffer from (a very mild case).  Somehow, it got towards the top of google web and image hits.  Looking at the post in retrospect, if I had known how many people would see it, I would have written it differently and made to be much more useful to people.  I also see that it is also my only single post in my “massage” category (which was a surprising fact, in itself).

Probably many of my regular readers don’t even know that I am a massage therapist!  I have been using my facebook massage page to post regularly about massage and health related topics, although most of what I post is not actually my own writing, but links to useful resources that I find.

So in the end, this question of identity becomes a question of scope.  I have, after all, created all of these categories that I expected to represent the scope of my blog, which in turn represents the scope of my life. (Yes, sometimes I do consider the scope of my life to be a bit broad!) A blog is a  more personal form of writing than many other forms (although there can be exceptions), and this is something that draws me to it. As my life meanders, so will my blog.  It looks like the side of my river has filled up with sediment and the opposite bank is beginning to move.

J- and I have been differentiating “moving on” and “moving forward”. When we think about moving on, we think of recovery and coming back to ourselves.  We think of just taking emotional space to recover from a really hard period of life.  Not only are we resting and being still, but we are also taking on new projects that are unrelated to our life as foster parents that we find satisfying and exciting.

On the other hand, we are still keeping our lives open to parenting again.  None of the decisions that we are making limit our availability for this.  Moving forward for us has been the steps that we take to move toward having children again.  We expect both of these to remain a balancing act that continues until we are parents again. Right now, much more of our energy is going towards moving on, but we expect that to gradually shift toward moving forward.

J- and I spend more time together than the average couple.  We both work from home much of the time and also spend time taking our dogs out together.  We can go days without being apart for more than a few hours.  We manage to entertain each other pretty well and considering all of this time, we still have a surprising amount to say.

For a while, we were barely able to process what went wrong, although we both had some sense of the answers.  Internally, we were already defining for ourselves how to move forward, but knew it was too soon to talk about it.  What we did talk about was the loss; we noticed the moments that we missed them and we felt the emptiness and leisure of our weekends.  We had spent 8 months talking only about adoption and kids and now there was overwhelming silence.

We supported some friends in their matching process and saw how much more critically we viewed everything that the social workers said than we had 6 months ago. We spoke with a friend that was finalizing her adoption who had learned (when all of her daughter’s CPS records were turned over to her) that she had only a tiny fraction of reality disclosed to her when her daughter initially moved in.  With all of this, we were wondering if we could ever have a successful match.  It is hard to imagine not being trigger shy based on any negative information that we received.

Eventually, we started just throwing out random thoughts about moving forward amongst ourselves and our friends. This eventually began evolving into a plan.

We immediately agreed that we would not be able to take two children at once again.  If we were to have two children, it would happen one at a time.  We also ruled out leaving A- County. The driving was so awful for us, we knew that we would not be willing to do it again.  Lastly, we agreed that we would likely not go into a situation promising kids that we would be their forever family.  We realize now that this is not a guaranteed thing and we cannot support the “leap of faith” that our agency asked us to take.  If this means only being foster parents and not being fost-adopt, then that is how it will be.

Previews for this movie had me very excited about the premise. A baby is bred to be a donor for her sister, who is dying of cancer. When she becomes a teenager, she is tired of it and sues her parents to gain the rights to her own body. The book caught my eye when I was in a used bookstore looking at this author, who was on some friends’ “like” lists on Goodreads, so I grabbed it.

Cloning is actually one of my favorite topics. My experience with it is in a futuristic, science-fiction way. Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my favorite books and handles a similar topic. In the case of Never Let me Go, a whole class of clones are being raised to be a source of organs for their sponsors. The book beautifully handles the character’s (who are clones) coming of age and the evolution of their understanding of themselves. Movies that handle the topic nicely are The Island (the first half is a remarkable depiction of an imagined cloning industry, the second an entertaining action flick) and Blade Runner (I can’t believe that I haven’t seen the recommended Final Cut that has been out for several years).

So, that is all just background to say that I hoped this novel and movie would be worthy companions of these other works that I have enjoyed. The setting wasn’t so futuristic, it was actually grounded in reality in a way that made it potentially more interesting, but also may have made it harder to pull off. In the end, I had very mixed feelings about the book. Since I have not seen the movie, I will not touch on it except to say that from what I have read the plot and devices are substantially different from the novel.

I did like the book more than not. Honestly, it was partly because it was easy entertaining reading. Although it never really challenged me or even excited me much, I never considered putting the book down because it was interesting enough to keep me going and occasionally, the language struck me as incisive.

Picoult was successful in grasping the complicated emotional sides of the conflict from a place of respect and sensitivity. She created tangible and multi-dimensional characters that were articulate. Although the Mother, Sara is not always a very likable character, she is defensible and realistic.

“I know I jump at every sliver of possibility that might cure Kate, but it’s all I know how to do. And even if you don’t agree with me, even if Kate doesn’t agree with me, I want to be the one who says I told you so… I have a sister, so I know – that relationship , it’s all about fairness… But being a mother is completely different. You want your child to have more than you ever did. You want to build a fire underneath her and watch her soar. It’s bigger than words.” I touch my chest. “And it still all manages to fit very neatly inside here.”

Although the scope of morality and ethics within the issue was not as broad as I would have liked, Picoult does handle the humanitarian questions around autonomy and exploitation within the context of the story. As the father, Brian articulates, the only potentially correct answer is that there is no easy or right answer.

“Can you tell me what the right answer is here?” Brian asks, his voice raw. “Because I don’t know where to look for it. I know what’s right. I know what’s fair. But neither of those apply here. I can sit, and I can think about it, and I can tell you what should be and what ought to be. I can even tell you there’s got to be a better solution. But it’s been thirteen years, Mr. Alexander, and I still haven’t found it.”

Unfortunately, the book fell short on many counts. There were plot twists and subplots that didn’t add to book and, moreso served to distract from the overarching conflicts of the book. Similarly, the format of the book was based on switching points of view between 7 characters (see a recent review by martinesque questioning this technique), which was overboard, especially considering that some of the characters should have been relatively minor. Much of what was attempted by this could have been adequately conveyed through either a 3rd person perspective or through the astute observations of the character that I perceived to be the main character, Anna. These shortcomings limited the scope in which these ethical questions could be considered and led to the novel ultimately feeling too fluffy and contrived.

In conclusion, I liked most of what I read, but I often wished that it were in a different book. I see that I am disappointed that Picoult did not take the opportunity to tackle more of the controversies surrounding the issue of genetic engineering by bringing it out of the relatively safe and controlled family situation presented. While I appreciated the richness that she brought to some of her characters, all of her characters were compromised by the narrative strategies that she chose.

During the first few days after the girls had moved out, I felt as if I were recovering from a car accident.  I was in a sort of shock, where I knew what had happened was absolutely horrible and sad, but there was also an insane humor about it.  Like, can you believe that we actually made it through to the other side of this? Do you remember how crazy that was?!

After that, the house began to feel hauntingly empty.  We have a large 3 bedroom house.  2 of the bedrooms and one of the common rooms were being used for the girls in the end.  Jeff went into the rooms about once per week to water the plants, but other than that we didn’t really go in.  We had emptied most of the contents out to either send with the girls or put out of the way so that the girls would not miss it when they moved out.  All that remained was some large furniture.

I felt as hollow as the house.  Every day, I was barely finding ways to pass my time and I often thought “Wow, this would have been a really busy day if…” or “Oh, it would have been therapy day”.  Although I missed T-4, I did not often cry.  The times that I did was when we visited their schools, which I can’t completely understand or explain.  My work had dropped from nearly 10 sessions per week down to 2 or 3.  J- finished his semester and we spent a week going for walks and watching movies.  Then we went on vacation, as I described here.

After that, I began to just forget the empty rooms and began adding things back to my life that I had missed before. Within a few weeks,  my life looked eerily like it had before the girls moved in.  I focused on rebuilding my massage practice, I started playing old-time music weekly, I started writing again, and I began pilates.  J- and I went for walks and visited restaurants that we had missed.  We ate Thai food!  I find it amazing how much has fallen back into place.  The hardest six months of my life just passed and things around me have not changed that much.

That is the short story. The long story would involve telling you about my back going out (in a really, really painful way!) and that being the wake-up call that I couldn’t mope for any longer.  Don’t get me wrong, we are still healing.  We are constantly reflecting on what happened and how things will be different.  Although we have had ideas and thoughts about our future, not a single day goes by that we don’t appreciate the freedom and independence that we have now.

I just wanted to drop a note to encourage you to check out a new group book review blog.  It has no particular focus that I can tell, although probably most of us are serious about our reading and writing and fall somewhere between progressive and anarchists on the political spectrum.  In the long run, I hope that site will have more active reviewers and active comment discussions, as well.

You will find me under the handle gardensofresistance and I will continue posting all of my reviews to this blog, as well.  I will continue to keep a focus on adoption and child-development themed books, but I have also been loving getting back to some fiction reading and thinking critically and constructively about it.

I have also been actively using Goodreads lately.  It is a great spot to look at book ratings and reviews.  My favorite thing about it, though, are that I can see what my friends are reading and have read and how they like it.  I was turned onto one book that 10 of my friends had read and I had never even heard of it.  Users can also create “bookshelves” under different topics (parenting, bodywork, food, etc.) or categories (top 10 favorite books, best non-fiction, etc.)  Now, when I go to the used bookstore, I print my “to-read” list am armed with a list of authors and titles to look for.