Well excuse me while I put my flannel back on and rip my jeans. Apparently the 90's are back. The New York Times reports Leon Panetta, former Clinton White House chief of staff, will be named CIA director.

The 111th Congress is about to be sworn in and get to work. Their "to do" list is enormous-a mega-financial crisis, the war in Iraq, the bloody conflict in the Middle East. Under the circumstances it's understandable that the top matter on the agenda won't be long-standing legislation to make it easier for women in the workplace to breastfeed their babies. That's all fine and well.

"While the celebration of Christmas once lasted for 12 days, now it seems to start in early October. Too often, the Christmas holidays can whimper to a close in January, and I like the idea of one final, festive night to enjoy the music, the candles and the confections of the most special season of the year." ~ Culinary Types

For someone who likes to be active and reads a lot of fitness-related blogs and articles, I don't have strict fitness goals. When it comes to fitness, my approach is similar to what I talked about in my last post when I suggested taking a break from resolutions. You see, instead of telling myself that I have to do one particular activity at one particular time, I choose what I want to do and when I want to do it. If I was thinking about running today but the last thing I want to do is run?

In the spring of 2001 I went to work for WebMD and one of the message board communities I was responsible for was the diabetes community. At the time, I knew very little about diabetes. I knew the basic definition of the condition. I knew my grandmother had diabetes and managed it by saying "I'm not supposed to have this" as she dug into the macaroni & cheese or the potatoes and gravy for the second helping. I'd seen Steele Magnolias many, many times.

What’s gone wrong with your money and what have you learned from that?I don't think there is enough time and/or word space in the world to fully confess to all of my monetary sins. Each time I relay each misstep I remember something else; something conveniently forgotten like another credit card maxed out because of a dire need for new shoes or underwear because God forbid I do laundry. An emergency shopping trip due to sloth.

Exciting new blogs pour into the BlogHer blogrolls all the time. I'm supposed to keep you up with some of the great new finds in the Web & Technology area. I've been slacking in the show and tell department. I don't slack in the reading department. I read fascinating posts in the technology blogs daily. It's time to share with a little show and tell.

Since I got engaged in October, I've been obsessed with my nails. You have to understand that I've never really been a manicure sort of gal before: my nails were perpetually bitten and crumbly and regularly unpolished up until a few months ago, and they were never, ever, ever the same length. But as soon as I got something sparkly on my finger, everyone and their mom (and their mom's yoga teacher and their mom's yoga teacher's best friend) would gather round my left hand, eyes wide. "Oh, let's seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee," they'd coo.

Do you know that on midnight Feb 18th television as we know it will cease to exist?  Now don't panic. For most of you that won't be a problem because you have cable TV, satellite TV or a TV set that receives digital TV signals.  However for the rest of you---several million households---you're going to have to take action to make sure your weekly fix of "Lost," "Grey's Anatomy," or "CSI" isn't interrupted. That's because the government has mandated that as of midnight February 18th all television stations must stop broadcasting analog signals and broadcast digital signals only.  

With a lack of releases from the likes of J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer you might think that there's not a lot for bibliophiles to get excited about this year. You'd be wrong. For the past few weeks I've been watching anticipation build on the blogosphere as book bloggers discuss, like and work themselves into a frenzy over the books they are looking forward to in 2009. It's shaping up to be a fantastic year as old favourites and debut authors merge onto bookshelves near you.

"'No man is an island,' the poet John Donne said. But we're becoming islands," my mother told my friend Parker and me on a lazy afternoon lounging on Waikiki Beach. "As we search for people in our respective niche, we cut off others," she went on. "The internet has made it so easy to find people like us that we no longer know how to deal with anyone who isn't like us."

Earlier this week I spent two nights at two different hotels that had exactly the same features. Both rooms were suites, both rooms had the fancy jetted tub, a balcony with a nice view, yadda, yadda, yadda. You get the picture. If you were to compare them, one to one, on a checklist, you'd have exactly the same features. But one of these hotels was so much nicer than the other as to make comparison a little ridiculous. What was it, I wondered, that made the difference? It wasn't the service, because at both places, the staff were great. It was a bunch of little - and not so little things.