Greetings from my hole in the ground

So I've had some inquiries from, like, two of my three readers, lol. I figure I owe you all an explanation after such a long absence. Looking at my last post, it's actually been almost a year. Yes, that's some serious slacking.

Here's what happened. As you know, I got a job--which means time I used to spend blogging I'm now spending writing for actual, real money. Which, I'm not complaining. It's a great job. And if I was disciplined, I should still be able to fit one blog post in a week. But here's the thing.

Actually it's all lies. I've been living in a hole with no internet access.

In my last post I talked about my friend Liz who died pretty suddenly last spring. At her celebration of life in August, we met up with some friends who used to live a couple of houses down from us, and we were marveling at how much their kids had grown in the fairly short space of time since we'd last seen them. In particular, their 16-year-old son had maybe doubled in height, from boy to football player. That was the last time we saw him. A couple of weeks after that, he died. He was in a horrible car accident and after a few days in the hospital they lost him.

So my family was really bowled over by this, and at that time my mindset was just not on discipline and getting my blog done. I stopped researching recipes and I stopped cooking them and I just didn't look at the blog.

So then January rolled around and I was still thinking about mortality, and how shitty my health was overall and how I really wouldn't be surprised if I was next on the dead list (OK that's melodramatic, but you never know). So I decided one of my New Year's resolutions was going to be to change my diet and my overall health. Which, of course, is not exactly compatible with Travel by Stove.

Now, I do believe that I could find traditional recipes that are not mostly very, very bad for you and I also believe that a healthy person could stand to occasionally eat a very, very bad for you meal without undoing everything she's done in the name of actually getting healthy in the first place. But 20 pounds later I'm on a roll, and I don't want to slow down even if it's just a once-a-week indulgence. So until I'm at my goal (I'm about 40% of the way there) I probably will not be cooking any blog meals. I'm really hoping to spend some time researching and planning, though. And I will say that because this has never really been a "healthy food" blog I don't plan to turn it into one. But I probably will lean more towards the less-than-bad for you stuff at least half the time, and that means more time researching. If I start working on that now I figure I should be able to map out a few months worth of meals by the time I'm at my goal.

I'm certainly not abandoning this project. I've come way too far and it would be a huge black mark on my RoL (resume of life) if I gave up now. So yes, Travel by Stove will return. But no, it won't be right away. When will it be? I hope to start up again in the fall, provided I don't hit any major plateaus.

Anyway, that's where I am. I do love doing this blog and I do think it's worth continuing, just not right now. And I don't want to be one of those people who shows up on their neglected blog promising to do better and then never returns, so that's probably as close to a promise as I can get.