Sweeter Lemon

Last night, I sent myself an e-mail with bullet points about the shows I’ve watched on TV this week. I knew I’d forget to post today without them.

Here’s what I’ve watched, and my mini-opinions on each:

Gossip Girl: I’m still absolutely fabulously enjoying the repeat episodes of Gossip Girl, and am anxiously awaiting the new episodes starting on April 21st. Each week I fall more and more in love with Blair, who can manipulate and bully while at the same time be completely insecure and fragile. All props go to Leighton Meester, who can switch it up from good-girl to queen bee bitch in the blink of an eye. Fabulous.

Biggest Loser: We’re getting toward the end of the season on The Biggest Loser, and the contestants have lost a LOT of weight. Which, hey, great for them, but am I the only one who thinks that a couple of them may have lost enough? I guess I figure that the camera adds a little roundness, so when I see the folks starting to look too angular and sunken, I get worried. For real – after the finale, someone give Ali and Mark a sandwich already, OK?

Top Chef: Note to Richard: OK, so last week you and your team of Andrew and Dale served salmon with faux-caviar a swoosh of sauce. And you won, which was great. But I couldn’t help but notice that this week, you and your team of Andrew (again) and Mark served salmon with faux-caviar and a swoosh of sauce (again). Come on! Sure, you may have prepared it differently, and even though I couldn’t taste it I could see through my TV screen that the fish did look a little… mushy. Next week – ditch the fancy smoker, ditch the salmon, ditch the faux-humble routine, and get back to some good cooking, OK?

I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting my “things I like” site, but it’s been crazy at work this week. I’ve been subbing for a co-worker, and we all know that can get a little nuts.

One of the things that has kept me sane last week is something so simple, I had to share it here. My personalized iGoogle homepage.

It may seem kind of cheap to rave about a Google product via another Google product (Blogger), and I think that Google is seriously trying to take over the world, and I may be helping them a little bit. But I don’t even really care, which shows just how much I love my Google hompage.

I don’t put a lot of gadgets on the homepage, although there are probably hundreds to choose from. I just keep 4 gadgets that save me keeping 4 separage windows/tabs open at any given time: Google Reader, Gmail, Weather and my newest and most favorite: BeTwittered. I could probably ditch the weather gadget, and still find this page incredibly useful, but I like the balance the weather gadget brings. I’m the girl who needs to eat her M&Ms 2 at a time, so needless to say, balance is important to me.

From this one page, I can read all of the blogs I like (that have full-content feeds). I can see if I have new e-mail, and even get a quick preview of what they say. My favorite item is BeTwittered, which allows me to read and post to Twitter without opening another tab.

Having my favorite web activies all on one page made life SO much easier when I was super-busy while my co-worker was vacationing. But it also just keeps things tidy and in one spot no matter how busy I am.

All of this, plus I can choose a pretty, relaxing theme.

I’ve used other customizable homepages before, but this one is the cleanest and most useful I’ve ever found. Love it, love it, love it.