Is 40 the new 30?

Remember when "middle aged" meant mom jeans and dickies and station wagons and appliances in god-awful colors like mustard and avocado? When it meant Ogilvie home perms and noodle casseroles and Christmas sweaters and truly enormous glasses with decorative gold rims? It was stirrup pants and cat sweatshirts and Jello salad and the easy listening station and Matlock.

Well, not anymore. I'm 33, and a good handful of my friends are edging into middle age and they are savvy and stylish and switched on and Jesus H. Christ I'm going to be middle aged in not too terribly long and I've done approximately nothing with my life. Fuck.

Which brings me to Nanny Goats in Panties, my reviewee for the day, and a self-professed middle ager. She's a working professional with no kids and a dishy (I suspect -- she doesn't talk about him much, but I like to imagine he's twelve kinds of hot) husband, so she's living my dream at least. She's also bi-cityal. Wait. That can't be right. Bi-citurnal? Bi-citified? Either way, she lives in two cities, which seems both excessive and completely awesome. She says, "I'm a non-conformist. Just like everybody else."

The blog is white, white, white with more white for good measure. Now, I'm a fan of simplicity in general, and white space in particular, but it could stand some jazzing up. It's your standard tweaked Blogger template with random changes in font size and barely passable functionality. The banner, though, is nice. But where are the panties?

Her sidebar is way too cluttered. NGIP, you've obviously got the hang of adding pages to your blog, since you have an "About" page, so why not corral those other bits and bobs into separate pages? Pull all your writing links onto one page, especially. Having your blogroll with links to the most recent post by the blogrolled is overkill. And I don't really get why people want to have recent comments emblazoned on their sidebars. Someone explain? Also, roll up your archives. The MyBlogLog rollover crap is tres annoying, just like randomly using French.

NGIP has been blogging for a while, and I've read all of 2008 thus far -- that's got to be a good sign. She's dry and silly and self-deprecating; I can relate and she makes me laugh. Ms. Kendrick could learn a thing or two. Oh, there's some filler, but it's generally funny filler. This is a humor blog, for the most part, but there's some depth here, too. Most of the time I prefer personal blogs that happen to be funny rather than blogs where getting laughs is their raison d'etre (there goes that annoying French again). I like a little more back story, a little more exposure, a little more grit. I want to be entertained, but I also want to feel like I'm snooping. Is that so wrong?

There is quite a bit of shameless self-promotion going on, an open quest for readership and linkage and numbers and rankings, which makes me uncomfortable. Yes, I know, that's kind of the whole point of a blog -- exposure -- and heaven knows I want all that, too. It just seems... tawdry? This from a woman who blew her fiance in a parking lot the night she met him, but I can't blow my own horn. I should speak to a shrink about that, shouldn't I? That and the oral fixation.

But back to Nanny Goats in Panties (How much do I love that title? Kind of a lot.), I gotta say I dig it. She's talented and she makes me laugh and she writes well with little humorous interjections and asides. I wish I knew more about her, though. I wish I knew if her husband really is dishy, if she likes reruns of CHiPs or Magnum PI, if she wishes Glen Beck would fall off the face of the earth or contract a virulent strain of laryngitis rendering him permanently mute. I just want to know more. Also, sex please. Come on, people. Do I have to ask all the time? I need you all to endeavor to write about sex at least once a week, k?

Nany Goats in Panties (there, I wrote it again) gets three stars from me. I might fucking love her if she'd clean up her blog, get a better design, stop the pimping, and scratch the surface a little more. That may not be what she wants her blog to be, but it's what I want, and for the purposes of this review what I want is all that matters.