Blog Note, With Holiday Snacks!

(Photo Credit: Moose, on her iPhone, with Lolo, her favorite CameraBag trick, 7/4/10)

(Photo Credit: qta, on his iPhone, with Lolo, his favorite CameraBag trick, 7/4/10)

As you can see, good times were had in Roxie's World last night, as a motley crew of loyal citizens and non-citizens gathered to celebrate American independence with an assortment of grilled and patriotic foods, including deviled eggs and red velvet cupcakes with white icing, blueberries, and, yes, sparklers, which, it turns out, are legal in the state of Maryland. Who knew? We trust that you had an enjoyable day as well and that cool beverages and colorful explosions in the evening sky renewed your faith in the benefits of liberty.

In any case, patriots, we interrupt this federal holiday to direct your attention to some changes we've made over in the right sidebar of this here little blog. It's part of our never-ending effort to make your time in Roxie's World both fun and informative. Scroll down and check out the new dynamic list(s) of blogs we read on a regular basis. We kept them in alphabetical order, but you will see the titles of the most recent post and get a rough sense of when it was put up.

We've done some cleaning up of our old blogroll, deleting some blogs we don't follow much these days and adding in others that have caught our eye for one reason or another. We couldn't bring ourselves to delete Jon Swift, even though that marvelous blog's genius author, Al Weisel, died more than four months ago. We kept Anglachel in, because we keep hoping she will start posting regularly again. We've added our good buddy, Gukira, who writes like a dream and blogs on queerness, Kenyan-ness, and other tricky subjects, and a couple of other English profs, including Bardiac and Undine. We created two separate blog lists, one -- called "Dogalicious" -- that is focused on dogs and dog stuff, and another -- called "Blogalicious" -- that is focused on, um, everything else. A third list -- called "Infolicious" -- gives you links to the web sites my typist obsessively monitors when she should be reading or writing scholarly articles in her field.

Anyway, click around, darlings, and show the members of our extended pack some love. You know bloggers' fragile self-esteem rests entirely on the number of page views we get on a daily basis, so give someone a lift today by showing up unannounced in their hit counter. Tell 'em Roxie sent you. By the way, in memory of modest Jon Swift, we are pleased to announce a liberal blogrolling policy here in Roxie's World. If you add us to your blogroll, we will gladly add you to ours. Just send us an e-mail at roxieblog@gmail.com, and we will put you on the list. It's our way of saying how happy we are to have stumbled across you in the vastness of cyberspace.

And we are happy to have stumbled across you, you know. You are the sparklers on top of the red velvet cupcake of life, and we love the light you shine in our little piece of the night sky. Thanks for being there.