My younger daughter is going to spend the next week with her aunt and uncle and cousins, and it took a family “kid transfer system” to get her there. We drove her from Collierville, Tennessee, to Oxford, Mississippi, and handed her over with hugs and kisses to another uncle. He drove her to Jackson, Mississippi (patiently enduring a couple of “Are we there yet?” hours) where her grandfather and cousin met her for a big lunch at Red Lobster before taking her the rest of the way to the small town of McHenry, Mississippi. I’m sure she felt like a sack of mail after 5-6 hours of car riding by early afternoon, but she *did* get to go the circus and was still bubbling over about the trapeze artists and the elephants when she called tonight.

Me, I got to have an hour and a half in the car with my two girls when we seldom stopped talking about everything from men/boy jokes to oppression of women in some Muslim countries. My 9-year-old was appalled at the idea that women don’t have rights everywhere. (Her: “That is just so STUPID!”) Such smart girls, and I enjoy their company. This morning was another reminder of just how lucky I am.

My oldest and I spent the morning bumming around Oxford, where we lived in 1987-2001, touring the highlights of those years of family history (”Aw, there’s where Caitlyn threw her first fit,” and “Remember how we had so many gophers in our back yard?”). We drove around the university where I went to college, passed the magazine publishing company where I worked and admired their new sign, and landed at one of my favorite bookstores in the whole world.

You know how it is with the very best independent bookstores — there are shabby chairs and well-worn benches and quiet niches where you can sit and flip through books. You breathe in the scent of coffee and cookies and paper and ink. Hand-lettered notes peek out between the pages of stacked books, pointing out which have signatures. And best of all, there are books you haven’t seen anywhere else — like, um, “Native American Place Names in Mississippi” and an enticing hardcover first edition of a new biography, “Mississippi Sissy.” (I’m just sayin’.)

I should just walk up to the counter and sigh. “Here’s my credit card. Please don’t hurt me.”

Doesn’t this look inviting? All it needs is a fat kitty purring nearby …

I capped the day by having a three-hour lunch with a dear old friend who recently went back to school and is finishing up a degree in elementary ed. I can’t imagine why I let so much time go by without visiting. We talked so much about our children and other people we love — and how we’d run the world if only everyone else would just put us in charge — that I pretty much talked myself out and spent the ride home in silence, followed by a long nap under cool sheets when I got home.

A pretty much perfect day, actually.

Technorati Tags: daughters, friends, bookstores, Square Books, Oxford Mississippi, independent bookstores

It’s been a hectic week at work with little time for me to post here, but there’s been a skip in my step ever since I got word that I won a giveaway at author Lynn Viehl’s Paperback Writer blog. Her creative method of interacting with readers was called “Win What PBW Is Reading This Week,” and I’m lucky to discover that this woman must be a speed reader or an inveterate skimmer. The list includes 20+ books and a tall stack of magazines.

Squee!

As a current FedEx employee, I probably should wince at saying this, but I can’t wait for the UPS guy to get here. Thanks again, Lynn!

Technorati Tags: Lynn Viehl, Paperback Writer, book giveaway

I was tagged Sunday for a blogging honor and now have the opportunity to pass it on to five bloggers who make me think. The only difficulty is picking just that few. So many bloggers enrich my life with the writing they provide for free online — from their concise commentary on news to writing tips, knitting how-tos, and humor about how they survive their daily lives. I wanted to toss a special hurrah today to a few of my favorites who consistently make me laugh and think. Apparently, I love good storytellers who can mingle laughter and pain in a “you gotta hear this” tale:

• The irrepressible blog of Crazy Aunt Purl, a Southerner transplanted to the Left Coast. She makes me feel like I KNOW her and care about her painful moments and her wacky sense of humor, her love of fried okra, and her glasses of wine on the porch with friends. Self-described as “the true-life diary of a thirty-something, newly divorced, displaced Southern obsessive-compulsive knitter who has four cats. (Because nothing is sexier than a divorced woman with four cats.)”
• She Just Walks Around With It is a funny, touching blog. It chronicles the life of a woman who manages a complicated life of full-time blogging, breezy elegance, dating a newly divorced comedian, navigating grief, taming her bootylicious size, and the occasional bout of knitting.
• Simple words can’t readily define the world of Milkmoney or Not, Here I Come. I love the poetry and the stream-of-consciousness humor, quirky turn of phrase (her body, aka the “meat suit”), observations (”I had so much religion by the time I was fifteen that I was pretty much cured of it”), and the unabashedly honest descriptions of her psychiatric travails and upcoming hysterectomy.
• Dooce is the always surprising, funny, and tender world of Heather Armstrong. I love the monthly letters she writes to her toddler, photos of her amazingly patient and talented dog, and her quirky comments, like “when I die I will be disappointed if one of my cousins doesn’t secretly slip his dirty socks into my open casket” and “So when we decided to put Leta into pre school we were all, maybe she’ll immediately love it, right? And then I handed Jon the bong so I could go stick my face in a jar of goldfish crackers. We had to have been high to have even considered that line of reasoning, because when has anything with Leta ever been easy?”
• The author’s travails with a noxious neighborhood and hoped-for home sale have kept me riveted to Suburban Bliss: Birth Control Via the Written Word. Even her tale of a bad day is a must-read about how her husband cancels their lunch date, her trip to the coffee shop gets shot by a woman’s ill-behaved child, and she’s rear-ended on the way to Chuck E. Cheese’s; she puts her bad day into perspective when she sees the joint’s main character at the door. “There he was, crouched down to greet all the kids, all the wired, hyper children coated in pizza grease. It must be hot in that full fur outfit, I thought, because it’s kind of warm not in a full fur suit what with all the manic energy in this room. And I watched him crouched down with kids lurching themselves at him and he almost fell over. Then I watched my friend’s little girl trying to shove her tickets in Chuck E Cheese’s mouth, thinking he was a ride? And the arms on his costume were too short so he couldn’t block the tickets from being rammed into his mouth. I watched him struggle and I thought, with a sinister laugh, ‘That guy hates his life way more than I will ever hate mine.’ “

Ladies, I mean every honor to you when I pass along the Thinking Blogger Award. Details are below.

Congratulations, you won a !

Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging. I thought it would be appropriate to include them with the meme.

The participation rules are simple:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

And thanks to Terry Thornton, who enjoyed my post on “5 Reasons the Best Writers Come from Mississippi” enough to tap me for this.

Technorati Tags: bloggers, Thinking Blogger Award, kudos