Life would be so delightful if I were organized.  My blog would always be up to date with new posts and pics and recipes and good advice or awesome web sites for you to get coupons and free stuff.  Then I would be Freshly Pressed!  I need to be freshly pressed… every day.

Instead my little personality gets up and looks around at its rumpled little self, deciding to just wear what it already has on because, well, the chaos makes actually “getting it together” overwhelming.  How on earth does one become Freshly Pressed/freshly pressed?

I gave birth to “my baby” back in January of 2011.  My little blog has crawled along, sometimes actually getting up and walking really fast, but never quite getting to the point of where I imagined it would be at the end of the year.  And that is all my fault.  My appetite was tremendously starving for what life and I had cooked up for me, and I heaped way too many projects on my plate (hey, I am a Gemini) this past year, 2011, as usual.  BUT… I actually reached those goals!! And I documented them through my darling, little blog as I went along.

The tenth anniversary of my husband’s death was the impetus for this upheaval, this craving for living, this hodgepodge menu in my blog posting.  For a decade I had been stagnant, too full of grief over the losses and tragedies and heartaches I had endured.  What better way to break back into life than cooking and sharing that food with friends and then sharing the whole experience through a blog?

Though my goal changed from filling bellies with the magazine recipes I had been saving for years to feeding my readers with thoughts on various subjects, it has been a sharing together of not just my appetite for life, but some of yours as well.

Some of the goal dates came and went — contractors do that all the time — and were reached a little later than planned.  And, well, those recipes and awesome meals for all my old and new friends didn’t quite pan out (pun intended) although I did cook a couple of good meals and make some mighty fine mice for Christmas in December of 2010, the year I started my “revamp Brenda” recipe.  That recipe is still in the perfecting stage.  The important outcome of this past year, though, is my accomplishments!  In spite of needing a freshly pressed, got-it-all-together overhaul, I managed to do all this:

apronsandappetites

stained the fence and other outdoor wood.

new windows

began kitchen remodel.

There were other little projects that were completed in 2011 that were on my list of to-do things.

That’s a good, good feeling that I hope to continue into 2012!