Brilliant Posts

Ten great posts that I've read in the last few days

• Darlene (Roses over a Cottage Door) on favourite words - so good it made me want to do a top ten list of my favourite words, but I'm struggling to sort my ten
• Elisabeth Mahony on In Our Time (I loooove R4) h/t marbury
• Sally (Sow and Sew) with a brilliant stopmotion bookshelf reorganisation (I know, I know, sounds stupid, is actually brilliant) - also Sally's posting on 'discomfort' as a weekword was brilliant.
• #UkTownSongs - kicked off a couple of days ago, just brilliant.
• Joanna (Confident Writing) on 'what if' - a nice prompt to reflect on why and how I blog. 
• Claire (Paperback Reader) on her trip to see TV Book Club getting recorded
• A couple of goodies from Book Club Classics - passing on a list of 'best science writing of 2010' (following my recent reading of Henrietta Lacks) and a review of the Invisible Line (I've read a few things recently about race in the US...)
• Litlove (Tales from the reading room) with a thought provoking post on women and how we make things harder for ourselves and each other. 
• HBR on 30 things we need, and 30 things we don't - worky but also work-life-balancy
• OldSpice - there's a load of new ads up on youtube. Brilliant as ever.

Being a better friend?

I'm still very much finding my feet with blogging - still thinking about whether to stick with blogger or switch to wordpress, what my real topics should be about, whether this is the right blogname or whether I should switch to something more anonymous etc. I added the wordpress daily post challenge to my rss reader, without intending to necessarily pick up each of the slightly random topic suggestions but in the hope it'll keep me a bit inspired. 

And so a recent suggestion was 'three things you can do to be a better friend to the people in your life'. Since work got less crazy, I have been making a real effort to be a better friend, and so I think the three things that I will try to do are

- reach out and check in more often - which might mean several times a week for close friends, or maybe a bigger 'getting-back-in-touch' drive with people I like but have let slip away. And I'm going to try to make some progress through my huge stash of cards and postcards too...

- propose things to do rather than waiting for others to have ideas - and try to go beyond 'let's go for a drink', to include late night gallery opening, theatre and (cheap) dinner, and keep on inviting people back to mine.

- keep on being friends with the man. We're really good, great mates in both senses of the word and I want to keep it that way, to keep on enjoying each others' company, thoughts, ideas and brains as well as being lovers, and housemates.