Houses and bloggers

I viewed a house today, and I liked it. I think I consider it a runner. It has the requisite number of bedrooms, the kitchen and family room are connected and on the level, it has a fenced-in yard and a nice deck, it has office space so that we wouldn't have to keep the filing cabinet in our bedroom any more, and it's in the right place, though a bit further up the hill than my absolute ideal house would be. It needs some work but nothing too major: floors refinished, walls painted (wallpaper removed), some windows replaced, closet doors attached. The kitchen is a bit dated but has plenty of space for improvement. We could have an island!

We shall see what happens with that. No chickens are being counted.

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What I wanted to do was expand on my blogroll, because all the people I've linked to down there on the right are really great and you should check them all out. Admittedly, there's a bit of a bias towards bloggers who were pregnant or new mothers when I was also pregnant, because I had a lot of time on my hands at that particular job, and was busy researching my upcoming job i.e. motherhood. But these ones stuck and became the people I read every day because of more than that: they're great, funny, engaging writers (and their kids are cute).

A Girl and a Boy: Leah (not her real name) lives with Simon and their baby, Wombat, in the San Francisco Bay Area. She's tall, blonde, and a book editor; he's dark, handsome, and musical, and Wombat is adorable and just a little younger than Miss.

All and Sundry: Linda provides me with a periodic look ahead thanks to her elder son, who is about six months older than Monkey. She writes with piercing honesty and raucous hilarity, and takes beautiful pictures of life on the other coast.

Amalah: I started reading Amy's blog when her son Noah was tiny and I was pregnant. We got pregnant with our second kids a month apart. She even lives near here. I stalk her sometimes, but she's way too cool for me: she wears skinny jeans and knows a lot more than I do about beauty products, and writes heart-wrenchingly of Noah's particular amazingness as a fabulous kid who just happens to have sensory processing disorder and dyspraxia and some other things going on.

Ask Moxie: This one isn't so much a blog as a vital parenting resource: I recommend it to anyone I know who gets pregnant. Moxie will assure you that nobody knows your kid as well as you, and that nobody can parent them better than you either, and that whatever gets the most people the most sleep most of the time is probably the right thing to be doing. If you're tearing your hair out about that baby of yours, look no further for support and information from Moxie and her great posse of commenters.

Balancing Everything: Jessica is a crazy, crafty, home-schooling, cloth-diapering, flour-grinding Mormon with four beautiful kids in Idaho, and I love her. She'll sew you a custom camera strap, thrill you with her amazing birth stories, inspire you with her love for her children, and have you laughing at her candour about their chaos.

Better Now: Kristen lives in Vancouver with her four-year-old son and her boyfriend's abs. (And the rest of him, but his abs are, um, memorable.) I've been reading since she was debaucherous and dishevilled in Calgary and unexpectedly pregnant. Her life and her blog have imploded and exploded since then, and she writes lyrically about it all.

Dooce: The grand-dame of them all, Mommyblogger extraordinaire, Heather is irreverant and hilarious and has two daughters with the most astonishing eyes you've ever seen. She swears like a sailor, takes amazing photos, and is going to be the new Oprah, I believe.

Finslippy: Alice is a little too good a writer: I can't read her too often or I'll just stop trying. I just re-read her son's birth story and nearly woke the baby laughing: I'll just say that it has Dan Rather and Jerry Orbach, and leave it at that.

Here be Hippogriffs: I have to admit that Julia is probably my favourite. She battled infertility and multiple miscarriages with unbelievable fortitude, and is now mother of three beautiful and precocious children. If she wrote a treatise on the political state of Outer Mongolia in 1436, I would read it because it would be highly entertaining. I want to be her stalker, but she lives in Minnesota, which is a little off my radar.

Secret Agent Josephine: Brenda is a graphic designer who lives near the beach in southern California with her photographer husband and their 4-year-old daughter, Bug. Brenda takes gorgeous pictures, makes free illustrations for you to download, gets crafty with cardboard boxes and her nieces, and made lemon scones the other day.

Tomato Nation: Sars knows a lot about baseball, New York City, movies, and answering random questions about love lives, cats, ethics and books you read a long time ago. Way back when the Internet began I used to read her recaps on Dawson's Wrap, and now I read her opinions on everything else (except the baseball, because I'm just not interested in that).

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Am currently sitting on my hands, metaphorically speaking, trying to let B. mull over the concept of this potential house in peace. It's really hard.