October is Breast Cancer Awareness month; you can work to reduce your risk by eating right, exercising regularly, and having a mammogram.  You can also help fund a cure by shopping for products that support breast cancer research.  Here are five picks; some portion of the sale price of each goes to the Susan G. Komen foundation and other parner organizations working to end breast cancer.

So Fair Trade Month coincides with Halloween -- but chocolate's not the only yummy fall fair trade goody! Lots of new tasty fair trade teas came on the market this year -- and here are a few to try this season:

Are you a GRITS Girl, you know, a Girl Raised in the South? If so, you need no primer on how to cook grits. It's in your DNA and there's no changing your mind, it's fixed and fabulous. But for the rest of us, read on ...

Caspian seals, Tasmanian devils, fishing cats, Indri lemurs, black-footed ferrets, Iberian lynxes: endangered mammals all. Mammals like us. Creatures at the top of the food chain. Think of the food chain as a pyramid, with predators at the top; then imagine the widening base of that pyramid that includes smaller creatures, vegetation, water, living space and other natural systems that support the web of life. For something at the top to be endangered, supporting tiers in the base must be malfunctioning, destroyed, or damaged.

Leaves crunching underfoot sound delightful in the day time and sinister at night. The harvest moon seems utterly otherworldly. Shadows are longer and the night falls earlier. There is simply something about this time of year that invites one to be scared and thrilled to the tips of their toes. There is no end of books to scare one as much one desires this time of year.

I'm going to do a very New Agey thing. I don't do a lot of them.

Short version: Still lame, still not fair, but at least they finally actually went from four to three...Sheesh!

I don't usually like to post about corporate campaigns, but I liked the idea of this one, so I'll bend the rules. Quaker Snack Bars has created Birthday Party with a Purpose Kits in partnership with Kids Care Clubs. Kids Care Clubs are a program of the HandsOn Network whose mission is to, "develop compassion and to inspire a spirit of volunteering in elementary and middle school age youth."

What does it say when "Peter Peter pumpkin eater" is the only thing that comes to mind when I think about pumpkin poetry? I mean please, can a nursery rhyme be any more offensive than that one? Pumpkin shell indeed. Luckily, there are other pumpkin rhymes and I'm hoping one of them will get stuck in my head soon and rid me of Peter and his patriarchal ways.

Since I’ve spent the past week watching the stock market plummet and looking for a place for me and the boyfriend to move into, I have money on the brain. And it occurred to me that just because we were all worried the banks might fail (what do you think?), that didn’t mean people were going to stop going out, dating, or meeting strangers for coffee—it just meant that there was a greater need for things to do that wouldn’t cost as much money.

The Dow is down, the S&P is tanking and we're all tightening our budgets to cope, right? Well yeah, except when it comes to entertainment. A recent poll by Movietickets.com via Pop Watch Blog asked people "how the economy had changed their movie going habits," 31 percent said it had done so "noticeably," 33 percent said, "drastically," and 36 percent said, "No change."

I wrote at BlogHer a couple of weeks ago about how parents can deal with the issue of teens and tweens who are desiring expensive, designer clothes. A healthy, common-sense discussion ensued, with many parents chiming in with their hopes of teaching their kids about contentment, frugality and reasonable expectations.