born from frustration

Lately I have been spending a lot of my free time perusing the blogosphere. My google reader serves as the jump-off point, but with the hand-selected list of food, design, craft & environmental posts that pop up each day, there are plenty of links to click me off into oblivion.

I often make a mental connection between the posts & what I am doing (or more often, what I would like to be doing)... I star recipes to try or etsy shops to keep an eye on, but have not given myself the outlet of my own blog to follow my own goings-on.

The blog I kept during the bulk of graduate school and the first year of "real-life work" had a very sad death when the friend whose server hosted my site (somehow I thought myself too private for blogger) died a horrible death itself. I had not backed up any of my posts and basically lost 10 months of my daily(or sometimes weekly, occasionally only monthly) musings on life. My blog then was to keep loved ones in other states informed of "what was up with me," but had also served as a journal of sorts that I myself liked to flip back through every once in awhile. I was just a bit more than crushed to lose what I lost even though the close to 2 initial years of blogging prior to the missing 10 months had been preserved.

After all this - I wanted to start back up with a clean slate and potentially start more of a blogger's blog. You know - like where people who don't know you read about your life, or something particular that you do. At first it was obvious: a food blog. I have to start a food blog because I'm obsessed with food: the making, eating, buying and even growing of food. It should be easy to do. I've been photographing my vegetables (we're part of a CSA) for over a year now, and have been known to take pics of fun meals out or a recipe in progress for many more years still (my camera is on me at all times).

But then I think about the fact that I still want to tell people about the fun thing that I did last weekend; or list my spring cleaning goals for all to see (so come summer I would be more likely to have finished said goals!)... and although I see it all the time I feel like for some reason it's not allowed if you have a food blog. All things must relate to food!

Another part of me is wary about opening myself up to "the outside." My old blog had it's own site since I didn't want it randomly popping up when someone clicked "next blog" on blogger (does anyone really do that? I tried it once and the results were rather strange, to be polite). I shared it widely with existing friends and family, but wasn't looking for a larger audience. Will I be limited myself if I assume everyone in the world is reading my blog? (don't worry - my head is not that big... I just like to make sure anything I write is suitable for both my boss and my husband's grandmother as not to find myself without a job or happy in-laws!)

On the other hand, if all I talk about is food, I might loose some of the friends (as readers)who just want to hear what I'm up to and might get bored by weekly CSA vegetable updates.

In the end I think I'm just going to proceed with a "life" blog, which will be heavy on food content but also include notes on apartment organization updates or recent accomplishments in running (etc, etc). Among other things, I was rather inspired by the blog of an old friend of mine which I happily stumbled upon its creation this past year following her amazing wedding. While we appeared to be quite the pair of opposites in high school, we seem to share so much more in common now that we've found husbands and started our respective "grown-up" lives on opposite coasts. So a shout-out of thanks to Amy, whose recent increased frequency in posts has motivated me to get this thing up & running!

Whomever stumbles upon this and decides to stay awhile is welcome (I love comments!); I will try my best not to ramble & I also have an absolute minimum goal of weekly postings. After almost a year hiatus, I am back to blogging... and I'm thrilled to be here!