What have you been doing lately?

Not 'blogging, not me anyways - not sure what happened, but I haven't written in a week. It was relief to read my bro's post that 'blogging is sooo over, in which he quotes Hemingway, pointing out that 'blogging, like letter-writing for Hemingway, is a great way to feel like you're doing creative work, without really doing any. The problem for me is that I feel just as guilty about not-'blogging as I do about not-working.

In the last week, (or two, but who's counting) I've done a lot of cooking that I neither photographed nor wrote about. I've also NOT learned how to take great food pix with the teeny tiny camera. I cooked a big dinner last night, and all I have to show for it are some pictures of the blueberry pie that boiled over all over the oven. I sweated it out Friday a.m. to make 3 pies: peach-raspberry, blueberry tart, and regular blueberry. Turns out I was vindicated by the number of people who showed up - two pies would not have been enough - but they were not my best pies, and now they are depressingly melting in the 86-degree heat. Although the oven is clean - in a fit of more kitchen foolishness, I ran the self-cleaner in the 86-degree heat.



This is all not to mention all the other stuff that's been going on alongside cooking and photography and eating; the realm that I struggle to write about through the lens of food, and usually fail miserably. Work stuff, like the dread faculty retreat that was last Monday, where the topic of discussion was the future of distance ed; my job title is "Instructional program manager" - "program" standing here for distance ed. Community stuff, like how myself and the two other incumbents who stood for re-election to the food co-op board were not re-elected, no doubt because we are the bad board who lost money on a failed expansion. And I could even be writing as amateur music/social critic - since we went to see the Foo Fighters play Friday night as part of Harley-Davidson fest in Milwaukee, ample fodder for all manner of observation and commentary.

Actually, I do have one observation to share from the Foo Fighters experience - the show was in War Memorial Park, on the lakefront, so we had to walk a good ways through the park to get back uptown to where we had parked the car, and I have never seen so many guys taking advantage of the slightly rural setting to piss in the bushes as I saw in Milwaukee. Mark said it's a tradition, since the old baseball stadium never had enough bathrooms, all the guys pissed in the way out. And we both think it's another reminder that Milwaukee is not really a big city like New York or even Chicago; it's just the biggest city on Wisconsin, a state of small towns.

Hmm, and quick Google search reveals that plenty of other bloggers are doing the Harley-Davidson fest social commentary, so I guess I might as well stop feeling guilty about that one.