What I Have Been Doing Instead of Writing a Blog Post Tonight

• Browsing pianos and piano movers on Craigslist. I really want a cute little spinet piano. Isn't this one cute? I want to get Tess started learning to play, and I have my keyboard from work that I lug around everywhere, but I just want to be able to sit down at the real thing. Josh is very anti- because they are so heavy and whenever we move it will be awful. Move, schmove, I say. Who cares about then? Live in the now! Someone else convince him I need one. And then come move it for me. ;)
• Making a pumpkin pie for Tessa's Thanksgiving party tomorrow at school. I only had one frozen crust and I'm a little bummed I won't get to sample the fruits of my labor. I only like cooking as much as I do because I LOVE eating what I cook. 
• Writing a third of a post about Tess (a positive, complaint-free one)
• Reading this article about Taylor Swift. 

"Still, is Taylor Swift really a “feminist’s nightmare”? You could argue the ­opposite. Her straight-laced fashion sense and dance moves—the fact that she’s never writhed across a concert stage wearing a negligee, or less—may make her more square than some other singers. But she’s also less beholden to that old feminist bugbear, the Male Gaze. In fact, seeing Swift live is revelatory: It’s in a setting like Bridgestone that her uniqueness, the weirdness of her conventionality—and, yes, her feminism—snaps into focus. I’ve been going to arena shows for three decades; I’ve never experienced a louder, more rabid crowd than at Swift’s concert. Nor, for that matter, a more female crowd, music critics from New York and creepy dudes from Oklahoma to the contrary. Even at a Justin Bieber show—even at a women’s-studies seminar—you won’t find as pronounced a female-to-male ratio, nor such a wide age range: toddlers and teens and tweens and their moms, for sure, but also college co-eds, and grandmothers, and rowdy thirtysomething office workers, like the gals who sat in the row behind me, passing a flask of booze. To push through the turnstiles of a Taylor Swift concert is to enter, as the saying goes, a women’s space. Swift has the power to turn a hockey arena into a room of one’s own."

          Team T-Swift!

• Reading about Mormon Women Bare, an art project by photographer Katrina Barker Anderson featuring nude portraits of Mormon women. I just told you what it was, so if nudity really bothers you, don't click through, but I am really impressed with this project. What brave women! I also read another article, supportive, but still critical, here. I love the "Sistaz" but have to disagree with them on this one. I don't find the nudity uncomfortable at all, and far from being unnecessary I think it feels needed. It feels like truth. Yes, there is already too much gratuitous nudity in western culture and media, mostly highly sexualized, but that to me seems an argument for the importance of seeing real bodies, not airbrushed or sucked into spanx - real bodies with real imperfections in nonsexual circumstances. These are what normal women's bodies look like, with rolls and droop and stretch marks, all beautiful but diverse in size and shape. Nudity does not equal porn and it makes me sad when people have been conditioned to think so. 
• Watching an episode of Parenthood - loving this season so far! - and pretending to fold laundry. 
• Cutting out leaves from construction paper for a "gratitude tree" I wanted to make tonight but realized we don't have any brown construction paper for a gratitude tree trunk. Will have to improvise a trunk out of something tomorrow.