E for Excellent

A Little Red Hen has placed Xtreme English on her list of blogs awarded the Big E for Excellent! (This must be one of those Random Acts of Kindness you read about.) LRH's blog is in a class by itself for world class knitting news, occasional patterns and events, true feminist activism, and general evidence of her menschhood.

Part of the responsibilities of a new awardee is to nominate 10 other blogs as Excellent, and each of them must then select 10 others.

So here goes...most of these are on my blogroll. I'm dividing these into categories for you readers' sake:

Hearth & Home:

Day to Day Life of a Very Lazy Gardener - Peggy from Scotland's blog...Peggy posts about all the work involved in keeping house, garden, greenhouse, and chicken coop in a country home in Scotland--BESIDES working full time. She's anything but lazy, and her photos are a window into a very appealing world. I have to say she produces an EXCELLENT blog (even if I am her mother).

Rook's Nest - posted by our friendly neighbor to the north, Ex-Shammickite, who writes swell posts about life in Canada (which Don's old cousin Tom used to pronounce "CuhNAYdia." Tom was very fond of geography, often holding forth also on Latvia and Lithuania, which he pronounced "LuhTAYvia" and "LuhTOONia"). Ex-Shammy has a broth of a new grandson with a great Scottish name. O Callum! O Canada!! Ex-Shammy was born, she says, with bright orange hair.

Special Hearth/Special Home

Private Blog - My niece Lu has a special private blog that she fills with stories about their future pets for the people who will adopt her rescue dogs. She rescues dogs, brings them into her big house, cares for them, trains them to do good doggy stuff--like "go to the rug," when someone rings the doorbell instead of going ape (dog?) and jumping all over the visitor. After her wonderful husband, Joe, died young of Crohn's disease, she felt lost. She has beautiful kids and worked at a great profession, but with the kids away at school, she needed more than the job to fill the huge void when Joe died. Thus the dogs. She has a fabulous blog.

Hearing Loss - Ronniecat's blog, which originates from Canada, also. She is a cochlear implant recipient, though younger than any of my children, and a fine writer. She also has a blogging CAT, who has a big following. What is it up there that inspires such creative blogging? The, erm, weather??

Books:

Major Reader - Another niece, a major librarian, talks about lots of good books in this one. She knows her stuff, all right. She's working down (up?) a list of every book published about Abraham Lincoln from his day to the present.

Birchbark Books - Posts written by various workers at Minneapolis's Birchbark Books, founded and owned by one of my very favorite writers ever, Louise Erdrich. When my third story was published by a literary magazine many years ago, one of the co-contributors was a young Native American poet & writer named...Louise Erdrich. She has gone on to well-deserved fame. I think she should win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Superb Political Writing by Women

Echidne of the Snakes - This is a great blog, and you can find a whole curriculum/syllabus/primer (I'm way out of my depth here) about STATISTICS on Echidne's blog. Echidne takes her name from a Greek Goddess, and she writes like you would imagine a goddess would write if she had the time. It's what I turn to now that Molly Ivins is gone and the NYTimes, et al., have gone apeshit.

Shakesville - Shakespeare's Sister used to work for John Edwards's nomination as president, which is 'nuff said for me. She also is VERY funny and VERY bright and a good solid feminist with a mouth on her!!! (Oh, how I love people with artfully bad mouths). Kohlberg says most American are STALLED on the 6th stage of moral development: Nice Boy/Nice Girl. Not her (though I'm sure she's very nice, but that's not what Kohlberg means), and I hope, not me.

Token Males

Mad Cabbie - Uncle Mad is another one with a mouth. I've never met him, but he writes about the life of a DC taxi driver, which he is, and he's at once totally irreverent and wholly kind to his clientele, which includes plenty of DC hookers and other servants of the republic. I love the taxis in DC. They take you where you want to go, and then they go away. You don't have to park them or fill them with gas or fix them when they crap out. Mad's blog teaches me things I would never imagine.


Mom's Cancer - When writer Brian Fies's mother came down with cancer in 2004, he kept a sort of journal--in cartoons. It was published in 2006 and has won a whole hatful of awards. Most people wince when they see the title, but I am still thinking of all the ways in which this is a wonderful book. His blog recounts many other things, including his love of cartooning and his knowledge of science, but it was his reminiscence of Christmas at his grandparents' log cabin (like ours in Bismarck, a full-sized house) near Rapid City, SD, that really caught my attention.