fresh start

Bonjour, all. So once again, I have a blog! It’s been a while since I’ve attempted this, as most of the time, blogs don’t pan out for me. I tend to post a bunch for a couple of weeks and then completely forget about them. Sort of a hit-and-run approach to online journaling. I posted on livejournal quite a bit back in the day, but have since gotten royally sick of the drama it cultivates… let’s leave that crap in high school where it belongs. That said, I’m trying something new here – instead of angsting all over the internet like I have in the past, I’m going to document the crafty stuff I do in my free time, especially my recently discovered love of baking.

If you’ve known me for a while, you know I suck at cooking. Maybe not as bad as some people (ask Oscar about the grilled cheese incident sometime), but you still shouldn’t leave me at home by myself for more than a few hours… I end up eating slices of cheese and stale cookies, anything to avoid making actual dinner. It’s not really terrible, I just tend to turn the heat up too high, or not add enough water, or not pay enough attention to what I’m doing because I’m easily distracted, and things burn and stick to pans and end up tasting none too great. Microwaves are my friend generally… I lived out of the frozen dinner section at Trader Joe’s when Stace used to work closing shifts at B&N.

But baking! It’s all the fun of cooking with none of the frustration. None of this endless chopping of vegetables, or standing around stirring for 10 minutes, or making sure the heat is low enough not to set the pan on fire (which I have managed before) but still high enough to cook things sometime in the next year. Baking is scientific. Measure each ingredient, mix until it’s the right consistency, set a timer, put it in the oven and walk away. I’m oversimplifying, but you get the idea. Make tasty things and surf the internet (is it 1996?) at the same time? Sign me up.

So that is that. In addition to writing about my baking misadventures, I will also babble about my various knitting and painting projects. And dying my hair crazy colors. And… obsessively taking photos of my cat.