Worth Reading

I have been meaning to do a post for a while now pointing out the blogs of two of my friends. So here are two worth checking out:

Daylle Deanne Schwartz is a writer buddy of mine from New York City. She writes a regular blog at www.lessonsfromarecoveringdoormat.com. Daylle’s been involved in the music industry for years, starting out as a music teacher in NY and then starting her own music label. Her music books include Start & Run Your Own Record Label, The Real Deal: How to Get Signed to a Record Label and I Don’t Need a Record Deal! Survival Guide for the Indie Music Revolution. She also writes self-empowerment books, such as All Men Are Jerks until Proven Otherwise, How to Please a Woman In & Out of Bed and Straight Talk with Gay Guys. She is currently writing her next book, Nice Girls on Top—a book about women succeeding while remaining true to their good and kind values.

Daylle’s blog focuses on positive messages about life... how to be strong, how to live positively, and on success. Her post yesterday marries her interest in personal success with her interest in music as part of her SUCCESS series: she interviews Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora Radio and the Music Genome Project (www.pandora.com).

Tim is interesting, and Pandora is great: You enter the name of a band or musician you like, and Pandora generates personal playlists, or radio stations, for you based on that input. I just plugged in Neil Young, and listened to Neil, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Band, James Taylor, and others. All musicians that I love! Next, (because I realize some of my readers might not like this kind of music) I tried some other names (Glenn Campbell, Neil Diamond, and Mozart for older readers; Ryan Adams, Coldplay, Kayne West, and the White Stripes for younger listerners), and in each case Pandora starts playing comparable types of music that work with each other. Music is one of the marvelous things in life—it does positive things for our mental health, and helps us make cultural connections. So Pandora is very cool... and good. Thanks for the head’s up on this one, Daylle!

Though I've never met Sharon Guynup in person, she's become a virtual friend. We both participate in some professional writers' listserves online, so I recognized Sharon’s name from the lists when she emailed me not long after I started blogging here. I'd mentioned a post I’d just done on the listserve for the Society of Environmental Journalists , and Sharon a science writer from Hoboken, NJ, whose bylines have appeared in such publications as National Geographic News, New Scientist, The New York Times, Sierra, Wildlife Conservation, Audubon, and Popular Science, emailed me to tell me that my blog was inspiring for her. She told me that at 41 she had fought her own battle with breast cancer, and so she was glad to see the topics I was covering. She also told me she was just getting into blogging, and picked my brain a bit on what I’d learned in getting my blog started. We’ve stayed in touch since.

Sharon blogs at outinthewideworld.blogspot.com. The blog covers her life, and her travels to cover stories out in the wide world. Last week she headed to India. Her posts are truly fascinating, and she gets great photos on her site to accompany her writings.

A Tribute to Tamara

We buried Tamara last week. A grey-tabby cat, she came into our lives in mid-February, 1988. The litter was purported to be six weeks, by our friend Ace, but I think he might have been pushing time a bit, because they were really tiny. In spite of that she thrived, in human years making it almost to 100.

“That one’s crazy,” Ace said when I stooped to look at the kittens he had brought in a box to our town’s little cafe. He was right about that anyway. Tami, as we called her for short, always did have a bit of a wild streak. But she was sweet, too, and I miss her terribly.

Though she definitely showed her age in recent years, she remained pretty spry and happy until just the last week before we made the hard decision. She would go outside and still catch mice. Ken and I would laugh that those mice must be pretty dumb, and just run into her mouth. She purred madly whenever she was getting pets until the last two days of her life. There was no sign of cancer, and or anything like that. What took her down at last was an abscessed tooth. The infection moved into her eyes and her sinuses, and she couldn’t eat anything solid. Were she a younger animal we would have taken her to the vet, had it extracted and put her on antibiotics. But at her age, she couldn’t have handled that. So Ken dug a hole. I carried her outside. He shot her. She was dead before she knew what hit her. Ken placed her gently in the hole, covering her gently with the rich dirt in a small corner of perennial bed adjacent to the house. We both cried. I carried rocks to protect her resting place. Our friend Tami was gone.


The reason I decided to write about Tami is because she was, in a way, a canary-in-the-coal-mine for our personal environment. She has lived with us so long, breathing the same air, drinking the same water, sleeping on the same furniture and linens. We try to feed our animals as naturally as possible, and with the highest quality food we can, too. So, I think our coal mine must be pretty clean for her to have lasted so long and in such generally good health. We quit using most household chemicals, avoided any use of pesticides or herbicides (no Weed-Be-Gone here), and have eaten mainly organic for the last couple decades. We didn’t start for our health, but because we wanted to help protect the environment. Yet based on our animals’ longevity (we run an old-age home now, with all our animals getting on in life) and generally good health, I hope it bodes well for our own health. And the science supports that it does! More and more research shows that what we have done will indeed reduce our risks. You too can make these decisions. Although our food budget may be higher than some peoples, cutting out all those other chemicals and reducing the amount of other stuff we buy has more than offset it. For example, my trusty gallon jug of white vinegar—the main cleaning product in our house—costs less than $2.00 and lasts a couple months. So start eating as much organic as you can. Avoid those perfumed, synthetic cleaning products. Quit using pesticides. And think of Tami as your inspiration for living to 100.