Pickle pontifications.

So I've been pontificating for a while now. About stuff. This space. This past week, I'd actually been planning to call it quits, but after some encouragement (thanks Matt and Birgit), I'm rethinking things. Here's where my head's been...

I started writing this three and half years ago to document my cooking - what I was learning, what I was creating, what I was experimenting with. My discoveries with organic food and farmer's markets and local ingredients. I really wanted to share my excitement and hopefully excite some folks about what I was learning/doing. As time went by, it evolved to my desire to be world's best sort-of homemaker. Cleaning, decorating, taking care of my little family.

But here's the thing(s):

I love food. I like to eat. I like to read about food. I like to have dinner parties. I like to watch cooking shows. I like to go to restaurants. I adore kitchen items and I collect antique bakeware. But do I LOVE to cook? No, I don't think I really do. I like to experiment and giggle when something sciency happens in the kitchen. I go through spurts where I want to bake every day. But do I cook every day? Not even close. Do I want to cook every day? Absolutely not. I like simple recipes, I take shortcuts, and I make a LOT of pasta dishes (where I am most creative, I think).

I'm a neat freak at heart. I hate germs, I hate messes, and the dog hair tumbleweeds floating around my house are bound to give me an aneurysm one of these days. I don't think I'm alone in my hatred of cleaning, but I really hate it. Hate hate hate it. I'm home all day, every day, and you'd think it would just work itself into my regular schedule. There are things I have to do every day, like vacuum, but bathrooms? Laundry (or rather, putting away clean laundry)? These tasks pile up and up and up until I can't take it anymore and go on a cleaning rampage. I am, however, proud of our new house. Proud of all the work we've done on it. And proud of myself for making a lot of the decorating choices I really love. But there's always more to be done, and I find myself constantly dreading it rather than eager to get to work.

So I've been feeling like a fraud for a while. Who am I to act like some sort of domestic expert? Does anyone even care? And it's been stressing me out. To the point, and this is weird, that I think it's actually been stunting my desire to do much of anything. Why cook if I can't be the best? What will people say if they know how terrible something turned out? And, honestly, why write if I don't have 100s of followers and oodles of comments every day (call it blog envy, I suppose)? I know, dumb, right? So that's why I thought I would stop doing this.

But I really like to write. Maybe that means I really just like to listen to myself talk, maybe not (I hope not!). And I really hate to quit something that I've worked pretty hard on for nearly four years. So I think I will just make this my space. My anything space. About food, about my pups, my family, my house, my life as I continue to adjust to my new surroundings.

If you read this, you may have thought that's what this was all along. And in actuality, you're mostly right. But in my head, it was trying to be something else. You might not notice anything different, but I think my brain will be a little freer. Unconstrained to any self-defined boundaries. Just me being me. And if you're still reading this, after all these years, I suppose that's why you've stuck around. You must like me at least a little bit, right? :)