If I had a blog, this would be a really big day for me.

I realized recently that I've completely fallen off the blog-reading wagon.  It turns out that, as far as my own reading habits go, enthusiasm for the blogs of total strangers corresponds directly to having a job I'm trying to avoid; in a sense, I guess it's a good thing that I'm out of touch with these corners of the internet. Theoretically, I am so busy doing work I like and/or trying to get work I like that I have completely forgotten to snoop through the lives of people I've never met. (I speak the truth! Productivity is my middle name! These are not the droids you're looking for!)*

With this in mind, I've trimmed my blogroll—I got rid of the site about the hipster stay-at-home dad with the super-cute kids, the celebrity fashion site that exemplifies all that is great and good about the internet but that I somehow never actually read, and Mindy Kaling's sadly defunct shopping site (I guess this is what happens when you are hilarious: you sign a seven-figure development deal with NBC and stop needing to write for free about ridiculous Things You've Bought That You Love). I kept a couple of knitting blogs—as one does—but mostly I refined my collection of food blogs. Because that is something I never get tired of: the urge to make ridiculous, complicated, and/or expensive dishes because somebody has a really nice camera.

First, I added Smitten Kitchen, because leaving SK off the blogroll any longer would be like telling my (theoretical) really awesome boyfriend of five years that I'd really prefer to keep our relationship "just between us." Consider this my very own food-blog Jumbotron proposal: I cook from Deb's blog all the time. To wit: for dinner tonight, my family ate mushroom marsala pasta with artichokes; before dinner I'll have a bit of the Guinness chocolate cake I whipped up this afternoon—for the second time in two weeks. SK is my first line of defense against lack of recipe and/or inspiration, and also now includes frequent but not content-diminishing pictures of the cutest baby of all time, and I'm so pleased to have made an honest blog of it. Our love is pure and true!

I also added Thursday Night Smackdown, with which I have been acquainted approximately an hour and a half, and which I can already tell is good people. We're talking the Invisible But Obvious Membership in the International Siblinghood of Poached Egg Obsessives kind of good people, which is, I think, akin to finding a whole spate of long-lost cousins on the internet—cousins who like their eggs runny and plopped on top of all manner of non-breakfast foods, even, which is even better.

So I guess this is a step in a positive direction: finally, somebody's found something useful to do with that new Information Superhighway, if by "useful" you mean "including leafy greens, lots of champagne vinaigrettes, and recipes that requires ice cream makers I don't own."

Not that, you know, non-food blogs aren't worth reading. Despite my own lull in making the rounds, there's lots of good writing to be found that has nothing to do with what to make for dinner. And everybody likes a good sporadically-updated, non-subject-oriented yet cat-heavy life chronicle, right?

....Right?





* Note that this does not include the many and varied (yet also somehow redundant) social networks out there: Facebook and Twitter and Blip.fm and Goodreads and that horrendous hipster time-suck Tumblr, which I don't even USE but cannot stay off of, regardless. What if something awesome happens on the internet and I miss it?

12 of 12: March

What has two thumbs, speaks limited French, and didn't forget 12 of 12?

All credit/blame for the twelve-photo obsession goes to Chad Darnell. He started it.

8:15 - Up; not quite at 'em.

8:41 - Nothing like starting the day off with a ten-minute Lady Gaga/Beyonce lesbian prison-movie music video, right? Yet Sherlock appears unimpressed.

9:22 - Packing for a weekend in LA. Jewelry bag: check. Makeup bag: check. Knitting bag: check. Round brush: check. Laptop cord: check. Well-intentioned but unnecessary running shoes: check check.

10:38 - Heading over the Altamont Pass and into the valley.

11:05 - Green hills, orange wildflowers. Say what you will about I-5; it's a total showoff in the spring.
















11:30 - Somewhere between nowhere and nowhere (or rather, Santa Nella and Harris Ranch), central California.

1:28 - Bringing fries along after lunch at In-N-Out (#2, protein-style, with grilled onions); oddly, they weren't good, and I didn't finish them.

2:17 - Post-Kettleman City, pre-Grapevine. More wildflowers.



3:00 - At last, the Grapevine. It's like a reward.



4:15 - Waiting on a light in Van Nuys on the way to visit recent California transplant Sharon.




8:08 - Mango and blackberry sorbets at Sharon's; I like how sorbet offers the dual illusions of ice cream and virtue.


11:42 - My final destination: hanging with Kendra and roomies for the weekend. Worth the drive!