A little paint, a few flowers, coupla throw pillows...

It’s no secret that I am a huge procrastinator. If my ability to procrastinate were a physical feature, like a goiter or a isthmus, you could see it from space. It’s not just that I put things off, it’s that I find clever little rationales for avoiding things I should be doing. Even when I find a few precious moments that I could spend on a post, I tend to fritter it away reading blogs or commenting on blogs, which I've deluded myself into believing is a pretty good substitute for actual blogging.

Then, just when I think I’m getting a handle on it—I’ve culled the number of blogs I read every day down to a very manageable 15 or so—two of my favorite wastes of time*, Todd and Fish, sent around a list of unsung and under-appreciated blogs. That’s how I discovered [added to my collection of drug paraphernalia] Hee Haw Marketing, Freelance Genius and Circle Jerk at the Square Dance, which lead me to How I Learned to Love the Bomb.

About this same time, I noticed I was getting visits via a link on The Wrong End of the Telescope, a lovely little cyber salon presided over by a woman whose eclecticism is right in my aesthetic wheelhouse. TWEOTT also makes the third or fourth blog I link to with Francophile tendencies. Zut alors! Light my Gitanes and pass the brie, mes amis!

Returning visitors will note that I finally caved and took up the Blogger folks on their offer of switching to the new format. It's nice, right? Still not as cool or sophisticated as the TypePad blogs, but an improvement over the previous edition. It also seemed like a good time to update and reorganize the blog roll. Along with the above mentioned newcomers, I'm adding Ross and Lizzy, whose blogs I've been reading/lurking on for a while but never got around to linking.

For some reason, I've avoided linking ad industry sites and blogs. There are exceptions to this aversion, though, namely the aforementioned Todd and the lovely and enchanting Irene Done, proprietrix of NotBillable. I include them because they're basically great blogs done by people who happen to work in advertising. Sometimes they blog about the biz, but they're not ad blogs, strictly speaking.

I've also added metacool to the links. It's a blog by design guru Diego Rodriguez. It overlaps with a lot of advertising/branding theory that interests me. Mostly though, I go there for a recurring feature called Unabashed Gearhead Gnarliness. If you're any kind of car guy**, DIYer or mechanics geek, it's pretty much guaranteed to give you a full-on robot chubby.



*and I say that with all due Sheryl Crow-esque affection.

** Non-gender-specific use. Anyone who appreciates cars, motorcycles, airplanes, and the things that make them cool will experience a general tingling in his/her bikini area.