Seven years ago I wrote my first post.  I don’t have any idea what drove me to write it.  I remember struggling through setting up a blog on the Blogger (Google) platform and wondering why it was hard and if I was out of my league.  I didn’t ask Z (computer genius) for help with it.  We were living in an apartment and I had a really old desktop computer and zero experience.  Looking back I think that it was for myself.   At some point I realized I had a terrible memory and hate to journal.  Blogging would help me to remember and typing is easier than pen to paper.  I never thought of myself as a writer or anything else.  In our pre-marital counseling  they suggested that we might find a hobby together-so we decided one of those could be cooking. A blog is a great way to recount that and our other adventures.   At some point Z was developing a massive WordPress multisite installation and switched me over.  I was mad because I thought it was a lot harder and I’d have to learn again.  It’s worked out though and I’ve used that experience on other projects for work.  I find that I am usually up to it if I put enough common sense into it and use Google when I can’t figure things out on my own.

A lot was on the line in November of 2008.  Z was really sick and had in the previous month been listed for transplant (liver) and we didn’t know what to expect.  I took to cleaning everything to try to be ready for whatever was going to happen, to keep him healthy.  I didn’t know (really know) that his liver was rotting away inside him because how can you know that? It’s so foreign.  In February we would see the old junk liver in a Tupperware container in the pathology department in the basement of Shands hospital in Gainesville and be thankful for a new one.  I thought that was the end of eating out and going to movies and certainly overseas or out of country travel.  It wasn’t.  It’s funny how we only live in the day that we can see right in front of us.

That brings us up today.  Since the last post I wrote, written in South Africa about an Amsterdam vacation we have had a lot of churn and burn.  We took a cruise to the Bahamas, my sister and her family came for their summer visit, Z’s office disintegrated under major turmoil and he was moved to a new department after more than 10 years, bought a new piece of dirt (that’s our dirt in the photo) that will become a house, put our current house on the market and sold it in ONE day.  Then, the week we went to WordCamp in Philadelphia and moved into an apartment, we found out the house wasn’t closing and could they have an extension please and had Christmas.  Meanwhile, I’m working.  A lot.  It feels like there would have been things to blog about during this season but I just couldn’t/didn’t/wouldn’t.  It wasn’t like we didn’t eat or cook anything.  It isn’t like there was nothing to say.  I just don’t think there was margin.  Until today.  After 7 years of blogging I took an 8 month break.  Will this post turn into two, three, seven, seventy-seven?  Hard to say.  But, I think I’m back to writing for myself again and not that worried about the numbers, or the lack of comments.  Finding my voice.  Remembering.  Chasing new adventures and the best dinner I can get.  We’re not so comfortably ensconced in a one bedroom apartment with most of our kitchen supplies in storage and an undetermined wait for the build out of our new house.  The kitchen in the new house is everything I could ask for and I’m looking forward to unpacking and inviting people for dinners, baby showers and potlucks.  Meanwhile, we wait and try to enjoy this time with a handful of plates, a couple of pans and a teeny tiny refrigerator that has a drawer that won’t open because there is just no space.  A carefully curated pile of cookbooks with five (!) new ones for Christmas.  I have cooked a few meals here but lean towards assembly only-salads, sandwiches.  And eating out seems to have picked up a little too much and which I’d like to get back to a reasonable level.  So, I’m sitting here back in an apartment, remembering how to upload photos to my blog, writing a post and a grocery list and thinking about the week.  A new hope.