You can click on the picture and get a bigger view.

The shoes are a brand that I normally can’t afford, but they’re on sale (over 60% off!), and I am tempted.

But I’m going back and forth…one minute I think about how cute they would be with a knee-length summer skirt, and the next minute I think that people would point at me and laugh if I wore them.

As always, I’m bringing the deeply important issues to the forefront for impassioned political debate.

Somebody has to tackle the tough topics, people.

So one of the neat things about having a blog is that people send me products to try in the hopes that I will like whatever they send and then tell the interweb all about it.

Typically this process works really well if I, you know, follow through and actually review the product.

But unfortunately what tends to happen is that I get a product and I like it okay, but I don’t love it or think other people will necessarily need it, and the review gets pushed way down my to-do list and before you know it I’ve forgotten about the whole thing.

Which is why I’ve never discussed the fancy baby monitor that never really worked very well because the portable receiver unit wouldn’t hold a charge. And if you’ve ever had a child, you know that the receiver is really the most critical part of the baby monitor operation what with it enabling you to hear the baby and all.

Some nice people also sent me a Swiffer Carpet Flicker cleaning device thing-y. And it worked fine, but not really as well as I needed it to since I have a preschooler running around, so I felt guilty that I didn’t like it (especially since I am a HUGE fan of the original Swiffer) and gave it to my mama. As it turns out, the Carpet Flicker works quite well for a couple of retired empty nesters with a low-pile Berber, so all’s well that ends well.

And then there was the British mama-lit book that I wanted to love and adore and recommend to everyone…but the protagonist got on my nerves with her non-existent backbone and misguided paranoia (a little harsh, perhaps, but that’s how I felt). And while I did relate to her postpartum lack-o-fitness, I could not get on board with her superficiality and her belief that wearing the right clothes would make all of her emotional baggage disappear. Of course she came to her senses by the end of the novel, but by that point I was still ticked off at her for falling for her yoga instructor because how could she not see the game he was playing from a mile away, especially when she had a perfectly wonderful man at home?

HAVE MERCY.

So needless to say, I think I’m going to have to be very clear with marketers from now on that I won’t mention the product they’re promoting unless I really, really like it. Because the fact of the matter is that the Southern girl in me does not like to say negative things about specific products unless it is something that I’ve paid for (like, for instance, OUR CABLE SERVICE).

However, recently I received a product that I have really enjoyed: the Dove SkinVitalizer.

I have tried just about every exfoliating / cleansing product that you can buy on the Walmart health and beauty aisle, and this one is the best, hands-down.

Using this product is so easy. The cleansing pillows are disposable, so you don’t even have to clean up afterwards…just toss the little pillow in the trash, and you’re all done (please don’t lecture me, environmentalists – I am just a girl who wants pretty skin, and occasionally the pursuit of pretty skin requires that you use a two inch by two inch piece of cotton that cannot be recycled, for which I am deeply sorry).

This product is also great for traveling because you don’t have to worry about bottles of cleanser leaking into your make-up bag or luggage. The absolute best thing about it is that the cleanser is so gentle and mild that it won’t irritate your skin at all (trust me, as I am the girl with skin so sensitive that it breaks out if I use cinnamon-flavored toothpaste), and the cleansing pillow also exfoliates as it cleans.

In short, I’m a fan. And if you’d like to try this product for yourself, you can get a coupon for $3 off here.

And tomorrow I’ve got an extra-special surprise for y’all…because somebody sent me extra free stuff to share with some of you!

Oh it’s all terribly exciting.

See y’all tomorrow.

So now that we’ve officially established that it’s not at all necessary to ask someone’s permission before linking to her blog, I’m going to LINK WITH ABANDON, oh yes ma’am I am.

And I believe I’ll start with some teacher-people. Just because.

First, check out two of my new favorite college professors, even though I’ve never, you know, actually been in their classrooms: Mental Tesserae and Bub and Pie.

Both of these women are eloquent, intelligent and thought-provoking. Sometimes they use adjectives with which I’m not entirely familiar, but that’s okay because I have a dictionary widget on my desktop and I LOVE TO LEARN, PEOPLE. Be sure to check out their blogrolls, too – you’ll find some great blogs that you might not have known about before.

And then there’s my friend Lori over at Rattling Around. Lori is a former chemistry teacher (now homeschooling her three children) who writes beautifully and always manages to challenge the thinking side of my personality. She is thoughtful in every sense of the word, and I absolutely love her heart. You will, too.

Enjoy, y’all.

It is a list! And it is practical!

1. I am getting slammed by spam, and I’m not talking about the lunchmeat-type product you find on aisle five. Since I switched to WordPress I’ve gotten almost 40,000 pieces of comment / trackback spam, and while I do have a plug-in that catches most of it, the comments that are seeping through the filter are increasingly vile. Today I got a spam comment with a subject line so horrible that I wanted to take a shower after I saw it, and I decided that I HAVE HAD ENOUGH.

So I’m going to go back through every. single. post. and close comments and trackbacks. It’s going to take me a sweet forever, and I have no idea if those posts will re-publish in Bloglines (or other feedreaders) or not. If they do, I apologize in advance, because I know it won’t be much fun for y’all to see hundreds of old posts popping up again. But I have to do something…I’m sick of being bombarded by the nastiness.

Once I get all the old posts taken care of, I’ll leave comments on newer posts open for about a week, and then I’ll shut them down, too. And yes, it makes me angry that the filth parade is dictating a course of action on my part. But that’s another rant for another day.

2. My beloved Mississippi State Bulldogs take on West Virginia tonight in the NIT Semifinals. The game is at 6 central time on ESPN2, and WHO KNEW that a run in the NIT would actually be more fun than being, say, one and done in the NCAA tourney?

So all together now: “COME ON, NOW, SON!”

3. The pollen is so bad here that I can’t help but anticipate the moment when I will sneeze and my sinuses will actually fly out of my nose.

4. I mentioned something the other day about emailing people for permission to link to them in a post, and as a result of that comment I received several emails from people apologizing that they had linked to me without asking. Which was oh-so-sweet but totally unnecessary. So maybe I should elaborate.

• I don’t mind anyone linking to me ever as long as you’re not the evil spam people.
• I typically try to ask people before I link to them in a post because I thought there might be some people who would rather not have an unexpected surge of traffic.
• I typically don’t ask people before I add them to my blogroll, mainly because adding someone to my blogroll doesn’t impact traffic like a link in a post might.
• However, I am realizing, thanks to your emails, that most people require no advance linkage notification under any circumstances. They just WANT THE LINK-LOVE, BABY. :-)
• Which makes me wonder: is there actually anyone who would prefer to be asked before someone with a good bit of traffic links to them? Or is this some elaborate blogiquette procedure that I’ve invented on my own? And that’s entirely unnecessary?

Enlighten me, oh interweb, in the comments.