Starting this month I am going to be a contributing lifestyle columnist over on the Alpha Mom website where I will get to write about music and movies and my obsession with television shows that cause intolerable conversations among otherwise sensible adults, shows hosted by supermodels.

For my first column I set my iPod to shuffle to see if I recognized any of the first ten songs and the result was not as humiliating as I thought it would be. But that's only because the music I have on my iPod is that which I have bought online in the last two years and not any from my CD collection which includes classics from Lionel Ritchie and Ann Murray.

And Jon Secada.

I'm really excited about this opportunity because it's going to let me step outside of the cardboard box I've managed to cobble together here and write about some different things several times a month. Many thanks to Isabel Kallman of Alpha Mom for her support and to you, my readers, who have made all of this possible. Many, many thanks.