Sabbatical.

Soon after the last entry was posted, I was offered not one, but two jobs, both part time.  Because of this, my life is so very different now! I am watching a friend's child three days a week, and on the weekend I am the interim choir director at my church.  Because of this, my daily schedule is completely different from what I'm used to! My head is still spinning. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I'm doing both things, but it's an adjustment.  Because of this, I've not kept up on my promise to blog more often. My apologies. Most weeks I am cooking more often, but it's usually simple things like baked chicken, or things I've already blogged about, like my lovely quiche. In any case, while I do have a few things I've lined up to share with you, it may be a bit before I get to photo editing and blogging again. Please be patient with me as I adjust! I will be back, I promise...

Until then, arrivederci, au revoir, and all that jazz. See you soon!

Julie and Julia.

I loved this movie. Here's the preview. I vaguely recall Julia Child's cooking show, having only seen it a few times, and not straight through. She was quoted often in my musical training, as a reference for using a nasal head voice, (C'mon, music geeks out there? Send up a cheer!) but unfortunately the underclassmen didn't even know who she was. (Blasphemy, I know.) Anyway, the movie is based on both her life, up to when she became famous, and the life of a blogger, Julie Powell, who cooked her way through Julia Child's first cookbook and blogged about it along the way. 

This movie inspired me to do two things. First of all, to cook regularly again, and second of all, to blog about said cooking. I've been lax, and saying I'd get back to it, continued to put it off.  While I can't predict the future, I can say this: I do so love to cook. This movie reminded me why. Why shouldn't I continue to share that with you?

There are a couple brief sex scenes (that reveal as little as is possible) and mild swearing, but otherwise, this movie is good 'clean' fun. Take a date night, go out with friends, or go by yourself, but GO. You'll love this movie.

10,000 Steps.

Recently, I purchased a pedometer, as my old promotional gift one finally broke. It's a rather nice one, an Omron something or other, which fits in your pocket with a little safety clip, rather than clipping on the hip, which my old one did.  I really do like it, but I've come to realize something. I don't walk very much. I move around our apartment quite a bit, (I'm a stay-at-home mom and piano/voice teacher out of my home...) but I don't get out much for walks. This makes the old '10,000 step' workout rather difficult, as I struggle to reach 5,000 on a busy shopping day out! I realize the point is to add in walks into your routine, but an extra 5,000 seems a lot to pull out of nowhere! Maybe it's just me...anyone else have any success doing the 10,000 step workout?

Radio Silence and Authorship.

I haven't fallen off the face of the earth. My computer isn't smashed into sparkly bits. I am not horribly incapacitated. I simply have not kept up with blogging.

It's my fault, really. (Well, of course it is. That's silly. This is my blog, I am the only one who posts here, of course it was my fault for not blogging. Anyway...) I made blogging into a chore in my mind, and therefore avoided it. I miss the days where I posted random things for the fun of it. So I will bring those days back now. I think.

I've been working on a children's book lately, mainly just for fun. I recently purchased three fairy tale books with the intent to read them to my son in the future (the stories are a bit long for his almost-one-year-old attention span at the moment,) and have been reading through them on my own first.  One thing I noticed that bothered me a bit was that everyone was pretty. Now, I have nothing against beautiful people, but the people in these stories were the heroes and heroines simply because they were beautiful, not always because they were virtuous and heroic, as one would expect. (I'm generalizing here... some stories had legitimately heroic people, with good lessons. I'm simply citing the ones that didn't.) Because of this, I began to contemplate a world in which the heroine of the story was a particularly ugly bookish girl, who kept to herself with her nose in a book. (A fate I have often confined myself to happily, as I do so love a good book...) My plan at the moment is to have her fall in love with 'a perfectly ordinary man'. No transformation into a beauty in the end, no magic prince behind the mask, a simple romance among books. I'll let you all know how it turns out.

Queries.

I love that the number one search query used to get to my site is 'Blueberry Muffin'.  Such a happy search term.

That is all. :)