I posted yesterday on BlogHer about Hillary Adams, whose father, Judge William Adams (a family court judge in Texas) beat her savagely with a belt when she was sixteen (I'm sure there were other times, but this is the one she caught on tape). This week, she got fed up and uploaded the video to YouTube. The rest of the story is here.

I put a trigger alert on my post because the whole thing is so disturbing. But Hillary is now a 23-year-old woman speaking out against abuse. The comments on the post are uplifting and heartbreaking at the same time. Stay safe today and hug your kids.

I'm trying to get back into the habit of reading before bedtime, as both a means to transport and unwind. I so enjoyed Katherine Center's book recommendations earlier this year so I decided to query on my social channels for literary inspiration. The responses were so fantastic that I wanted to post the recommendations here, both to share the wealth and archive for myself. I left the responses intact instead of simply listing the books because the comments definitely are helping guide my choosing. Print this list out for your library/used book tote or go crazy at your local bookstore or on Amazon (note: I included affiliate links below). Thanks to everyone who commented in, and enjoy! And if you have other books to recommend, feel welcome to add them to the comments.
Via Twitter:

@nancyholtzman: If you haven't read ROOM that gets my pick. Couldn't put it down. author Emma Donoghue.

@Misserikas: Chris bohjlian's new book is what I'm reading so far so good:)

@ummnuseebah: read God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. it's a beautiful read, with gorgeous use of language.

@liasynthis: Let The Great World Spin. Really enjoying it.

@domnicella: Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet or Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. Also, Cleopatra (nonfiction).

@RockcCT: invisible bridge is a big but compelling book - a must read!

@acbranger: fav book ever Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See. Also loved Cutting for Stone

Via Facebook:

Carmen: Read Outlander. It's a bit slow for the first 100 pages or so, but rapidly picks up steam and will hold your interest like no other for the next 7 books. No, really - I promise.

Sarah: I don't generally read novels but when I do it's chick lit by Jane Green, Jennifer Weiner or Sophie Kinsella. Have you read Little Earthquakes?

Mara: Just finished Falling Together by Marissa de Los Santos - highly recommend.

Liz: The Hunger Games (if you haven't already)... Recently finished Minding Frankie (Maeve Binchy) and Nineteen Minutes (Jodi Picoult), and currently working on A Week in December, Sebastian Faulks.

Marie: I second Hunger Games. Or along those lines, The Maze Runner. Or I have a whole other list of teen sci-fi post-apocalyptic novels to choose from :)

Mark: The Art of Fielding has lived up to the hype.

Jennifer: If you go the Outlander route, let me know. Read the first five books and enjoyed them. Also just read S**t My Dad Says which was given to me as a gift. Not really a novel but totally hilarious!

Sharon: Cutting for Stone by Verghese or The Invisible Bridge by Orringer - both GREAT reads!

Sharon: This might sound really lame... I'm re-reading The Thorn Birds!

Marcy: Have you read Middlesex? I think it's actually the best novel I've ever read. So well written. The language is inspiring, and the characters are really well developed. It's insightful and funny. It took the author 9 years to write it, and you can tell. What did you just finish reading?

Liz: Reading Life, the Keith Richards autobio now. Great fun so far.

Candy: The Art of Racing in the Rain. Sweetest story ever and the ending will have you in tears of joy :).

Susan: Still Alice. Finished it today and really liked it.

Sharon: Still Alice is very good as is her next one which I read this summer and also liked, Left Neglected, both by Lisa Genova.

Katherine: Cutting for Stone! Just finished it and really enjoyed it :)

Paige: Just finished The Night Strangers byChris Bohjalian...highly recommend!

Greer: Invisible Bridge, History of Love, Secret Daughter

Cynthia: Have been reading Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie mysteries and enjoying them very much. Novels about a declining Britain with a bit of crime and dry humor thrown in.

Amy: Sarah's Key and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. Both were fantastic stories - both are highly recommended.

Kerry: I have to second Sarah's Key, good read.

Dianne: I keep re-reading Daphne Du Maurier's House on the Strand - absolutely compulsive.

Susan: I read patti smith's memoir just kids - couldn't put it down!

Jenny: Blueprints for Better Girls. Vivid writing and interesting tie-ins across the short story characters.

Erin: Room by Emma Donoghue

Gwen: Cutting for Stone... outstanding!

Lisa: The Help and The Book Thief

Claire: The Hunger Games Trilogy

What a bunch of reading rock stars no? I cannot wait to get my hands on a stack of these recommendations! Thank you everyone!

Sometimes kids come up with the most brilliant ideas. I wanted to make pumpkin bread the other week (our oven finally got fixed so I've been on a bit of a baking bender) and Laurel suggested that we make a cream cheese frosting and call it cake. Brilliant. I doubled/adjusted slightly this pumpkin bread recipe from Michelle and added frosting (via a recipe in Baking Illustrated (really, anyone who likes to bake ought to own this tome). It was a huge hit. Here's the how-to:
Pumpkin Cake
(Michelle's recipe doubled, with some adjustments, as annotated below)

Ingredients

4 cups flour

4 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

2 tsp salt

2 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground nutmeg

4 eggs

1 can pumpkin (Original recipe calls for more pumpkin than one can once doubled, but I didn't want to use partial cans. If you want more pumpkin measure out 2 cups.)

2 cup granulated sugar

1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar

1 cup milk

1/2 cup oil

OPTIONAL: The original pumpkin bread recipe calls for chocolate chips; we omitted given that we were adding cream cheese frosting, but if you want to up the sweet factor, mix in 12 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips.

Cream Cheese Frosting:

8 ounces cream cheese

5 tablespoons butter, softened

1 tablespoon sour cream (or, um, instead add an extra tablespoon of cream cheese or butter)

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1¼ cup (5 ounces) confectioner's sugar

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Mix flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg until well blended. Set aside.

2. Beat eggs, pumpkin, white and brown sugars, milk, and oil in large bowl with wire whisk until well blended. Add dry ingredients; stir just until moistened (do not overmix or batter will toughen). If using, stir in chocolate chips.

3. Pour mixture into a greased 9×13 inch cake pan. Bake 45 minutes to 1 hour or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Remove pan from oven and place on wire rack.

4. While cake is baking, make frosting by mixing above ingredients together until smooth. If you flip your cake out of the pan this recipe yields enough for a thin layer of frosting on the top and four sides. However, Laurel wanted to practice piping (plus I wanted to leave the cake in the pan so it was easier to store in the fridge) -- using a piping tip, the recipe was a bit short in covering the entire top of the cake. This was fine for us, but if you'd like generous frosting coverage, double the recipe.

Enjoy!

+ + + + +

Image credit: Leslie Graff; a cropped portion of the artwork below. Isn't Leslie's work delicious? I met Leslie for the first time at Pivot and fell. in. love. She's an incredibly talented artist and all around cool person. You can purchase her work as greeting cards, prints, or big awesome paintings.

So I just read this article by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic about sexism in TV ads. It seems like his thesis is this:

A certain kind of sexism, however, is still considered pretty funny and not terribly sacred. In most modern ads, there are two kinds of sexism. First there is winking sexism, where women are objectified but something in the ad seems to acknowledge to the audience: "We know we're being sexist, so that makes it okay." Second, there is the boomerang sexism, where we see men fighting back against their domestication and emasculation.

Then he ends with this:

A post-sexist age of advertising might be elusive. But it counts as a small victory, if not cause to throw a parade, that we've reached this moment, just a few decades after it was fashionable to scream at women for making bad coffee and not even pretend to feel wrong about it. 

Derek, you want me to get excited about the victory of a post-sexist age of advertising being elusive? I shouldn't worry because at least it's not okay to blatantly portray women as second-class citizens who should feel bad if they can't make good coffee? 

In some cases, the institutional sexism in today's TV ads is more disturbing than the old your-coffee-sucks-take-away-your-woman-card sexism of the fifties. It's underground. It's done the same thing, in my opinion, that institutional racism has done -- removed itself from blatant public exposure but still ingrained enough in our society that we don't question it at all when we do it: talk about Hillary Clinton's outfit instead of her politics, assume an angry woman just has PMS, question an attractive woman's intelligence before she opens her mouth. And television is a huge influencer on society -- I don't care how much you wink, if you're showing women fighting over beer in a fountain more often than you're showing them designing bridges or running companies, you're not making progress. Last SuperBowl I almost threw up my seven-layer dip at the sexism I saw in the commercials.

Am I wrong in my read of Derek's article? It feels -- to me -- like he's acknowledging the sexism still exists but saying it may never go away, oh well. He may not have actually added "don't worry your pretty little head about it," but the fact he's not demanding change or spitting mad pretty much says it all.

Listen, most men are taller and physically stronger than most women. We have different reproductive organs, different body fat percentages. It is not okay for one gender to make assumptions about the other, and that goes both ways. Women represent over half of America and more than half of higher-educated America. It's high time Madison Avenue stops pandering to the lowest common denominator to sell their beer. 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxnGMdXZkc0] 

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Editor's Note: I was paid by BlogHer to write this post and conduct discussions on Chime.in. But the discussions were about blogs to books, so, you know, they didn't have to twist my arm very hard. Also, there's a really, really good giveaway at the end of this post.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by social media? I mean, here you are, reading this blog, so it's not like you don't know anything about it, and it's not like I don't, either, but I'll admit ever since there was more than blogging, I've felt like it's too much. I can't keep up with Facebook at all. I talk on Twitter, and I usually talk back to anyone who talks to me, but I don't try to keep up with everything everyone says. It's too much. As my good friend Average Jane put it back when the world Twitter was young, Twitter is a stream that you step in and out of at will, and you don't worry about what happened when you weren't there.

So now I've joined Tumblr and Pinterest and Google+ and most recently, Chime.in.

I heard about Chime.in at BlogHer Writers '11 because it was a sponsor, and I just joined because I am going to be leading a discussion about blogs and books for the next week. If you're interested in those topics, please do come join me.

I'm going to keep Chime.in about blogs and books, just as I've kept Tumblr straight about publishing and Pinterest completely random. Facebook, hell, I don't know what I'm doing at Facebook, but I'm 100% sure I'm not using it correctly. Twitter is just where I talk to online friends -- most of my real-life friends look at me cross-eyed when I talk about tweeting. That's how I'm managing all of this new social media, and I've found once I hit my stride at how I personally am categorizing things, it's something I look forward to using. I'm not trying to become a design queen on Pinterest -- I'm just pinning some things that are either pretty or really random. With Chime.in, I hope to be mentoring. I really enjoyed mentoring the anthology group at BlogHer Writers '11, and as I have done something of a blog to book, or at least anthologized blogs to books, I hope to pass along a little advice and encouragement this month at Chime.in.

Things I like about Chime.in so far:

• Really easy to join. Sign in with Twitter or Facebook. Sort of like robbing from Peter to pay Paul, except all of them are free. Or something. I'm not actually sure where this analogy is going.
• You can search on your interests and it just hands you groups to follow. I followed the bookish groups, since I've already decided how I'm going to specialize on Chime.in.
• Social media multi-tasking: Whatever you chime you can also send to Facebook and Twitter. I really appreciate this feature, because I have different friends on different platforms, and I like it that way. Let the randoms who for some crazy reason are following me on Google+ see my broadcast links there, and I'll stick to blogging and books on Chime.in. But you know, sometimes I might want to tweet it just to be absolutely crazy. I like having the option, regardless.

Those who have questions about blogs to books here in the past or those who are just curious? Join my thread on Chime.in. I'm hoping I'll get some questions over there, but if not, you know, I'll just talk about what happened to me.

And, as is awesome, after giving away two nooks on my review blog, I now get to give away a Kindle Fire. Yes, yes, yes. Comment here or participate in my blog-to-books discussions on Chime.in to enter. Official rules are here. My part of the contest ends on Monday, November 7 at midnight CT. Comments or discussions on Chime.in timestamped after midnight CT on November 7 won't be eligible for my part of the contest. But get ready -- I'm not the only blogger participating. My friends and colleagues Stephanie O'Dea, Karen Ballum of Sassymonkey Reads and Diane Lang of Momo Fali have Kindle Fires to give away, too!

• Tuesday, November 1 - Monday November 7 -- win here -- GIVEAWAY CLOSED: Congratulations, Linda Sherwood!
• Tuesday, November 8 - Monday November 14 -- win with Stephanie O'Dea Enter here -- GIVEAWAY CLOSED: Congratulations, Cheryl Moore!
• Tuesday, November 15 - Monday November 21 -- win with Momo Fali here and Matt Logelin here!
• Tuesday, November 22 - Monday November 28 -- win with Sassymonkey

See you there!

Just yesterday I suggested rotating your kids' wardrobes. Today, Jennifer offers inspiration to rotate yours as well:

If you're like me, you are just now swapping out the summer clothes for fall, and my fall stuff definitely needed a few fun updates. When Nordstrom Rack opened recently in Burlington (dangerously close to my 'hood; there also are locations in Danvers and Framingham), I was intrigued. I should say that prior to my recent trip, I had never been to a Nordstrom Rack and I rarely go to Nordstrom's or the mall, because I'm a frugal shopper and tend to camp out at T.J. Maxx and Marshalls. I like to say it's because I am committed to supporting local businesses (their HQ is in Framingham) but it's also because they are just. simply. awesome. stores. I can maximize 10 minutes wedged between a meeting and school pick-up and come out with a great Calvin Klein dress for $49.
But back to Nordstrom's. Here's my take on it -- it's a broader selection of prices than I would normally go for. I just won't pay over $100 for jeans (I think I can trace this back to the 6th grade when my pre-puberty husky-ish physique would not support the holy grail of expensive denim, Jordache). But at Nordstrom Rack I quickly found some good racks of $50'ish and under jeans and cords, some super flirty fun tops for $30'ish, and a small but decent dress section. And some good workout wear too. The shoe department was oh so delectable. No super savings, but a great value for some seriously fabulous shoes.

In my opinion, the accessories section was just so-so...a bit too trendy for me, but the sunglasses "wall" was quite inviting. Rows and rows of sunglasses, and they even offer tips to help you find the right shape for your face. That's a step above and beyond the usual department store.

I found the checkout staff highly efficient and the layout was open and airy...easy to spot stuff across the whole store. I did spot a kid's section, but when I head to Nordstrom's, it's frankly all about me, so I don't have input on the kiddo side of the store!

Overall Nordstrom Rack will serve as a good compliment to my shopping circuit (this particular trip yielded me awesome wine-colored cords for $29). And FYI, if you're up in the Burlington area and have time, you could spend a solid day shopping if you count the Burlington Mall (I do dig Anthropologie and the Lands' End Canvas stuff at Sears -- think frugal J. Crew) and there's also nearby Wayside Commons (helloooo Ann Taylor Loft).

Happy shopping!

Editor's Note: You can also shop the Rack online. While prepping this post, I purchased this red dress (possibility for my sister's wedding in December) and I'm regretting that I didn't add the adorable crusher hat (pictured above) to my order.

I woke up this morning and it was November. I laid in bed for several minutes, trying to remember October. It seemed to be one big pumpkin.

Last night while Beloved walked the little angel around the neighborhood with the Chiefs game thrumming in one ear, I stayed back to finish some work. After wrapping it up, the kids were still coming every few minutes, so I pulled up Ebay and started looking for fake American Girl stuff for Christmas presents. I thought about Christmas, which suddenly seemed to loom. Beloved mentioned Thanksgiving last weekend, and I realized it was only a few weeks away. The little angel looked suddenly taller as she drug herself up the hill at nine, lit by glow sticks, feet filthy and aching from those damn ballet flats.

As she slid into bed, she complained, again, about her feet. Without thinking, I said something about prom. Then as Beloved read books to her, I wandered back down to the couch and picked up my book and started reading, and it occurred to me that prom could come as quickly as November had, if I wasn't careful. 

It's Halloween. And this year, we're handing out Pixie Sticks. It's a small thing, really. It's not that we can't afford chocolate candy, it's that we've chosen in every area of our lives to think hard about whether that purchase is a want or a need, how it fits in with all the other purchases, how much happiness it will actually bring us. Halloween candy just isn't that important.

I made my daughter's costume this year, where "made" equals "assembled." I based it around the purple Mardi Gras mask I got free at a blogging conference last year. She's got two tutus, a belly dancing skirt, beads, a tiara, some gaudy plastic rings, sparkly leggings and shiny shoes. We already had it all. Because spending $30 on a crappily made Halloween costume doesn't make sense, either. Not ever, really, but especially not this year.

We've been fortunate in that we haven't gone without unemployment since the load hit the fan, but we've worried about it, hard. We've talked about The Plan if one of us was to lose our job. We've switched our Internet around, dropped long distance on the home phone we keep for 911, limited eating out to once a week and started extreme couponing. We buy most of the little angel's and my clothes at our kickass local Goodwill or the gently used kid's store. We still have a rusted 1998 Ford Explorer with more miles than I thought possible for that vehicle.

We've pulled the little angel out of after-school care so we can save that extra money a month for emergency babysitting.  My husband is traveling weekly for his new job that he started three weeks ago, and our babysitter is $15 an hour and we have no family in town. I tried to line up a neighbor for parent-teacher conferences so we could both go, but then the neighbor girl got sick. People are always asking me why I can't come to this or that, but the tough reality for me is that I don't have free childcare, so -- as with purchases -- I have to carefully weigh everything I'm going to attend if my husband is traveling. And if it's across town and I have to add an extra hour of driving time, I'm probably not going anymore.

I'm picking up extra odd blogging jobs, and some of them are coming through here. I'm putting that money toward the credit cards. Too many business trips run through personal cards have messed up my grandiose payment plans. It feels like the balances never go down, despite all our best efforts. Beloved and I had a very frank talk about the cost of utilities, groceries. They are far outpacing our salaries. I thought we'd be rich once we stopped paying our mortgage in toddler childcare, but nothing has really changed. And it's because life -- healthcare, utilities, gas, groceries -- got way more expensive while we weren't looking. But we are very lucky: We still have jobs. We can keep it from getting worse as long as that job pipeline stays open.

My teacher friends have had their hours cut when school bonds didn't pass or states cut their funding. I'm on the board at The Writers Place, where I volunteer more hours a week than I should. We lost state funding this year for the arts. Beloved and I qualified for a refinance a few years ago because our house has lost so much value. It's not just us -- it's tough all around, Ponyboy, and probably worst for small business owners. I don't view Surrender, Dorothy as a main income stream, but I do still have a small S corp for my book royalties and freelancing and blog ad network revenue. I am thankful I have a day job. I am thankful I don't have to fret over a dip in traffic or a late invoice. 

A lot of people do.

I've thought and thought about it, and I've complained here about capitalism at times. It seems nearly impossible for private industry to do good when it is measured on quarterly profits by a hungry Wall Street. How can it possibly make bottom-line sense to give money away? And that's why I don't like to see a lot of things privatized, no matter what the argument. The main argument, to me, is will they use their power for good or profit?

So I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Starbucks is donating five million dollars to seed a fund at the Opportunity Finance Network, which in turn will provide capital grants to select Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs). The CDFIs will provide loans to underserved community businesses, including: small business loans, community center financing, housing project financing and microfinance. 

Beginning November 1st, you may donate to this fund through the createjobsforusa.org website, or at Starbucks, and 100% of your donation will go directly to the fund. The really cool thing about this is that every $5 donation will result in $35 in financing to support community businesses, because the CDFI lenders will issue $30 in financing, on average, for each $5 donation. 

I know, right? Starbucks. Generally speaking, I try to buy my coffee locally. I know Starbucks put a lot of small businesses out of business -- that's capitalism -- it's like Darwinism. I actually don't know what prompted Starbucks to do this, but when huge corporations do the right thing, it's important to holler MORE. Maybe if other huge companies see people support this effort, they'll put their money back into the economy instead of into their bank accounts, too. This is probably one of the hardest times to get a small business loan of my lifetime. I'll support anything that will help the little guy, especially now. Maybe I'm so impressed I might mix in some Starbucks beans the next time I buy coffee at the grocery store. Way to go, Starbucks. Way to go.

The CEO of BlogHer, Lisa Stone (my friend and, oh, my CEO, who helped create the once-small-business that now has me on full-time payroll and provides me healthcare and puts food on the Arens table) is actually going to ask Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz just those sorts of questions on a 15-minute conference call tomorrow, Tuesday, November 1 at 11 am PT/1 pm CT/2 pm ET. If you want to listen in, here are the details: 

Participant Number: 877-698-0629 

Conference Code: 23564006

I'm planning to listen in. If you want to submit a question, you can use this link.  

Tonight, I'm going to walk my little Mardi Gras girl around the neighborhood and enjoy the small stuff -- candy, lit pumpkins, the last remnants of people's mums, my favorite fall leaves (maples). I know there are folks out there who have gone months or years between jobs after a lay-off. I know I'm one of the lucky ones to have my Pixie Sticks all ready to go. I hope you all have a safe and happy Halloween and that life is good at your house. Thanks for reading and supporting me here, of being tolerant of the occasional sponsored whatever. It's tough all around, Ponyboy, but we're going to get through this. 

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Per my previous post, welcome to this new series, in which I'll share everything from events to bargain alerts to other ideas and tips that spring to mind as useful and/or fun for the week. After considerable mulling, I decided to call the series Weekly Blueprint, because I think the name conveys a creative presentation of ideas and plans that are, ultimately, posed for your consideration (vs. including the term "to do," which suggests that I think you must do whatever it is I'm suggesting!). Enjoy, and please do drop me a line if you have suggestions for a future Weekly Blueprint!
October 31: Figure out how to sneak extra layers under your kids' Halloween costumes (long underwear! leggings!). Also, buy candy or other Halloween favors if you have procrastinated as I have.

November 1: Call someone you love and wish them a Happy November. Snap a photo of your kid(s).

By November 1: If this weekend's weather didn't already inspire you to action: procure winter gear. I ordered Laurel's snow bib, jacket, and boots from Lands' End last week and called in to get a priced adjustment when everything went on sale a couple of days ago. They're currently running a 30-50% off outerwear sale. Sweet!

November 1-6: Spread the Halloween wealth. Send candy to the troops (we've done this the past couple of years) or head to Magic Beans for their candy buy back (bring 1 pound+ of candy in exchange for 20% off one toy that day only...I highly recommend the Perplexus if they have it in stock!).

By November 3: Pick up easily lost items (I ordered gloves and hats yesterday) from Old Navy. They are running a 30% off sale until November 3 for cardholders.

November 4-6: Yowza, Christmas is on the horizon. The Christmas Festival at the Seaport World Trade Center runs Friday to Sunday and admittedly, mostly I want to see the gingerbread house creations!

November 4-6: Pottery Barn fans will swoon: the PBTeen pop up store arrives at the Natick Mall on Friday. Head over between November 4-6 for giveaways, design exploration, games, and a photo station.

By November 6: Buy one of these killer raffle tickets. Two dollars (or some multiple thereof) will do good + enter you to win a tote valued at $350.

By November 6: Remember that we fall back an hour on Sunday. Oh, darkness.

At your leisure: Browse the Mayor's Holiday Special website for discounted theatre tickets. I'm a big fan of experience-based, usable gifts at the holidays.

At your leisure: Score some off-season deals for yourself. I got some amazing deals at Anthropologie's sale section this weekend; not great for Boston right now, but perfect for my trip to Palm Springs next week.

At your leisure: If you haven't already, it's time to rotate your fast-growing children's clothing. If you have excess, swap with friends, or donate items to local charities such as Room to Grow or Cradles to Crayons. And/or list boxes online with thredUP (and score used gems for your kid).

At your leisure: If you're planning on getting flu shots for your family, book them now. (This reminder comes courtesy of the mom who forgot to take Violet to her flu shot appointment last week.)

Image credit: Lands' End