But don’t think of this as the end. It’s really the start of something new.

We may never pass this way again, but today is the first day of the rest of our lives.

‘Tis better to have blogged every day in the month of May than to never have blogged at all.

Because I don’t want to miss a thing, and in the spirit of making new friends but keeping the old, here are all the blogathoners whose blogs I have not yet mentioned in a post this month.

Elizabeth Kricfalusi
Embrace Adventure – What do you live for? http://embraceadventure.com

Jackie Dishner
Bike with Jackie http://bikewithjackie.blogspot.com

Jen A. Miller
A blog about the goings on at the South Jersey shore http://downtheshorewithjen.blogspot.com

Leah Ingram
The Lean Green Family (formerly Suddenly Frugal) http://suddenlyfrugal.blogspot.com/

Marijke Durning
Marijke: nurse turned writer http://medhealthwriter.blogspot.com

Meredith Resnick
I’m Too Young to be a Woman this Old http://agething.blogspot.com

Roxanne Hawn
Champion of My Heart: True tales, brags, and whines about my life with a rescued border collie named Lilly http://championofmyheart.com
 
Trish Lawrence
What Came Down Today http://www.real-brilliant.blogspot.com/
Happy Trails!! Don’t stay gone too long! I’ll leave a light on for you!

I don’t want it.

Fit in Real Life is a blog written by Dara Chadwick. In 2007, Dara was the Weight-Loss Diary columnist for Self magazine, where she chronicled her fitness efforts for 1.5 million readers to see. With courage like that, she’s sure to be someone I can learn from. At Fit in Real Life, she shares about maintaining the weight-loss and fitness levels she’s attained.

I’m writing this while snacking on some trail mix, so we’re going to move right along to the next blog I know I’m going to love.

At the Peace of Mind Organizing blog, Janine Adams gets to the heart of the matter right in the title. Organizing is not about impressing our friends, living up to a Martha Stewart-type reality or even because you feel guilty about being a slob. (Nor, I must remind myself, is it because you love to buy swanky containers from Ikea or Target!) Find organizational systems and methods that work for you, and you’ll shave pounds of stress (if stress isn’t weighed in pounds it should be) from your over-burdened shoulders.

I love organizing. I guess it goes hand-in-hand with my love of cleaning doesn’t it? But I still struggle to maintain organization in every part of my home. (It might help if someone would put things back where they got them, but I digress.) Janine professes to have struggled with organization herself, and she shares with readers solutions that have helped her. I intend to visit her site as soon as I get these papers all over my desk filed.

The month of May is nearly over, and I haven’t gotten around to highlighting all of my fellow blogathoners’ blogs. If you haven’t already, you might want to browse the blogroll and see what you find. All of them are professional writers, so if you’re one of my writing buddies, don’t miss the opportunity to visit each one and see what you learn about writing, about the wide variety of niches that are out there, and about whatever else these writers like to talk about!

It’s entertaining, for sure.

The combined benefits of expressive writing and being a part of a blogging community have prompted some hospitals to include blogging in their supportive care for cancer patients.

No wonder I’ve been feeling so… healthy … lately.

Thanks to Barb Iverson at PoynterOnline who pointed out this article in E-Media Tidbits yesterday.

We’re trying something new today. My soon-to-be 2nd grader and I sat down with pencil and paper this morning and made a list of things she can do today so we can avoid some of the incessant “hey moms” that inevitably come just when I had a brilliant point to write in one of my projects.

We’ll see how it works out. The potential snags I can see are that she’ll either need help with some aspect of an activity or that she’ll power through the list by noon.

She’s very efficient that way.

Hey, maybe I should give her some of my assignments.

Not willing to risk life and limb out at the lake, my family is spending a quiet day at home. We’ll take some time to remember those who paid for our freedom, and we’ll relish being alive in the greatest country in the world.

Dawn Weinberger blogs a journey through rough waters at her blog at Carl’s Liver Transplant. See how a boat represents smoother sailing in her husband’s recovery in More Than Just a Sailboat.

Happy boating, you guys.

Anyway, since writers just wanna have fun, especially leading into the Memorial Day weekend, I thought I would post my winning Swiftie, as well as the ones that didn’t make the cut. (What’s a Tom Swifty, you ask? Click on the link above – Linda explains it admirably, and you can see a slew of funny ones in her post and in the comments section. Two of my favorites are “I can’t write with this thing; get me some No. 2 pencils!” Tom said pointedly. and, “You need to think of a plot,” she outlined.)

So, my winning entry (ta-da-da-DAH):

“I hate writing articles with bullet points,” he said listlessly.

And here are the duds:

“I might need corrective lenses,” she speculated.

“That phrase is not redundant!” she repeated.

“The milk’s gone bad,” he uttered.

“The fire has died!” he bellowed.

“She’s a little pigeon-toed,” he pointed out.

“Don’t let the left brain know what the right brain is doing,” she said thoughtfully.

“One of my legs is longer than the other,” she said unevenly.

“If this were a foot-race, I’d be a shoe-in,” he said flatly.

 Sure, some of them bite, but they’re fun to write. Can you come up with your own? Really you should try it! Yours will probably be much better than mine. Put them in the comments! (“There is no prize though,” she said meagerly.)

If you need some inspiration, I made a list of verbs and adverbs (and saved them, which says something about me, but I’ll postulate later on what that is…). And I will gladly share them with you. (Because honestly, what else will I do with them?)

Hey, postulate – that’s a good one. Here are some more:

uselessly
moronically
feverishly
interjected
grinned
frankly
moodily
waveringly
freakishly
melodramatically
soundly
eagerly
wishfully
hopelessly
meagerly
wistfully
seriously
plainly
trivially
tragically
fretfully
cautiously
quacked
croaked
gulped
frowned
posited
recommended
querulously
queried
rakishly
randomly
squeaked
projected
considered
guessed
estimated
longingly
abstractly
frantically
dejectedly
aimlessly
whined
calculated
quoted
sang
rambled
fitfully
mysteriously
stated
frostily
frothily
bubbled
spewed
spouted
sputtered
stuttered
muttered
whispered
persisted
glowed
growled
breathed
hollered
burped
intoned

Wait. Before you label me a neatnik and click away in disgust, you must know this: I am not a neatnik. Actually I quite like letting a thin layer of filth build up before I clean. (Maybe “filth” is too strong a word. Let’s call it debris.) It makes wiping it away all the more satisfying.

I wasn’t always this way. In fact, if any family friends who knew me when are reading this right now, put your eyes back in your head. It isn’t weird. It isn’t strange. I haven’t been abducted by aliens.

What it is is about twenty years of turning a shortcoming into a longsuit, by much trial and tribulation (and some gnashing of teeth) and money. That’s right. Money. I didn’t spend money learning how to clean. I made money.

(This is for those of you who were about to make the joke, “That’s great, Carolyn! Come clean my house.” To you I say this: $35 an hour. Yep. And I am SLOW and METICULOUS. Still want me to come? I’ll be right over.)

Nothing’s better than cleaning a horde of nameless germs off a countertop than being PAID to clean them off a countertop.

Except for maybe one thing: Being paid to WRITE about cleaning them off a countertop. I love writing for  HousekeepingChannel.com. I don’t get a byline, but when you see the articles where someone is enthusiastically bursting with information about what type of bowl brush is best, you may have just hit on one of mine.

Go to this site when you want to know something cleaning-related. (Or regarding healthy homes.) If you don’t find what you’re looking for, come back here and ask me. It just might turn into an article. (And I’ll answer if I know the answer.)

Don’t we feel better now that we got that off our chests?

Yesterday she linked to me and tied it in to her post, Jane’s Top 5 Movies About Writers. Give it a peek. I was surprised to find that I haven’t even seen 3 out of the 5 (or if I’ve seen them I don’t remember), but Stranger Than Fiction and Devil Wears Prada are two of my favorites. A commenter mentioned His Girl Friday as another good movie about writers. If you have a favorite that wasn’t listed, add it to Jane’s comments!

Boy, feeling famous being on the blog next to a pic of Will Smith, Nicolas Cage, Harrison Ford et. al.

Check out the site. These are the kind of reviews I can use, and the celebrity news I’m actually interested in.

P.S. Check this article out on Media Bistro (if you’re a member) about how Jane got her entertainment column, “Reel Life with Jane,” syndicated in more than 300 publications and websites nationwide. Congratulations on getting featured in an article that recognizes your success, Jane!

Yesterday at the grocery store, I tried to find pine nuts. In case you’re also going to make Tyler’s Ultimate pork chops with wild rice pilaf, let me help you out: The pine nuts are over by the bagged salads, cut fruit and bean sprouts. You may already know this but if you do, I’d say you’re in the minority. It took no less than 4 store employees to find them. (We couldn’t find pilaf anywhere!)

But while I was out shopping for our biweekly sustenance, look what I found:

That’s right. Pink garden tools at my local grocery retailer. I didn’t buy any though. Even though they had tags sporting the National Breast Cancer Foundation, Inc. name, let’s just say I would want them tested for lead before I bring them home for my gardening buddy and I to use. (Now that I think of it, I didn’t check for any labels saying they were tested, so maybe they were.)

Before I got to the pink shovel department and after passing through the scrapbooking/crafts department (conveniently located near the meat counter, because there’s nothing better than plopping a thick juicy steak down into the cart next to a package of cute vacation-themed die-cut stickers) I saw the Hannah Montana toys.

I was wistful. There would be no purchasing of Hannah Montana stuff on that trip. Not because I’m boycotting. It’s because to my daughter, Hannah Montana is not what she used to be. The luster has worn off. I didn’t even know that my daughter knew about the recent fiasco, and I didn’t mention it because how do you explain to a 7-year old what’s wrong with that picture? But my first clue was when she didn’t want to wear her Hannah Montana pajamas to pajama day at school. She said it was because she didn’t want them to get dirty. My second clue was when I came out and asked her. She told me the other kids had been talking. And then my third clue was when her brand new Hannah Montana backpack was replaced one day by the old battered Barbie backpack.

Sigh. Just seeing Miley’s smiling face on that familiar purple packaging, and feeling a bit sorry for all the teenagers whose lives (and mistakes) are on display for the rest of the world to see, prompted me to stop right there in the store and jot down a letter in the little notebook I carry:

Dear Hannah Montana,

It’s not you. It’s us. I won’t harsh on you – you’ve had enough criticism. I feel bad for you, really. I wondered when it was going to happen, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and now it has.

We memorized the lyrics of “Best of Both Worlds” and sang along, hopping and dancing around the living room with our hairbrushes and later, I would use it as a teachable moment: “Honey,” I would say. “You don’t really want to be a pop star. They have very hard lives. They get as much criticism as they get praise, and I just don’t want that for you. To Daddy and to me, you ARE a star.”

She now sees the lesson unfolding before her. I’m not making a big deal of it. You provided us with several good years of nearly mindless gift shopping: if it had your face on it, drop it in the cart; she’ll like it. But now, it seems, we’re moving on.

Who knows if or when the tide will turn? But until it does, my daughter is embarassed to be seen with you in public. I’m so sorry.

A former devoted fan.

So that was my break up letter to Hannah Montana. And since I was writing anyway (amazingly, no one seemed to notice or care), I thought again of the pink shovels that I also wasn’t buying. The irony of possibly purchasing a product that might contain brain-damaging lead but would help fund the early detection of cancer prompted me to stop right there and jot down another letter.

Dear China,

It’s not me. It’s you. I would gladly buy your low-priced products if I knew for sure you weren’t putting lead-based paint on them, because I am a notorious tightwad and I love a bargain. So please, China, if you’re listening, quit it.

Sincerely,

A former devoted bargain shopper

So no pink shovels, no purple packaged toys… what’s the world coming to?

But at least the pine nuts seem relatively safe and controversy-free. On the other hand, they’re aren’t labelled organic.

Somehow, even with all the things I didn’t buy, I still managed to spend $187 on groceries. And bottled water? I admit it. I caved. I kinda sorta looked to see if the plastic bottles contained bad chemicals, but couldn’t find anything on the packaging (which is probably a bad sign). But I had a coupon. And frankly, I was tired. So I hoisted them into the cart.

I’ll pray over the water and vow next time to buy the ones in vegetable-based, eco-friendly gallon containers. A person can only handle so much “responsible” shopping in one day.