I was originally going to cross-post a new blog post here, but instead I've decided to just talk briefly about this new blog I've started up and point to it. My God, who needs more than one blog to keep track of? Well I started up A Nomad's Kitchen because I really want it to focus solely on food and leave rocktreesky as a place to ramble about whatever (which is mostly navel-gazing or geek things). I could definitely mix in a lot of food posts here, but I like the idea of a site that narrows in on a particular subject that I love and is stripped down to just what I need for that. (Also, let's face it, I'm a geek and setting up a new Drupal site that I can tinker with just sounds like fun.) That subject, by the way, is food. Food is yummy, food is necessary and it means a lot more than nutrition to many people and cultures. I'm going to explore that a lot more this year. I'll just be doing it over in TOB, ANK (That Other Blog, A Nomad's Kitchen). read more »

My year of a picture a day is drawing to a close soon. It has been a very hard year for me personally and looking back at my year in photos is fascinating. I'm so glad that I did this project. I didn't get one every single day (you can see the missed days in my 2009 archive) but I accomplished my main goal of documenting more of the events and people in my life, as well as just capturing what daily existence has been. I'm fine with the days that I missed and happy with the days I have captured. I have also marginally improved my photography, but more than anything I have discovered the joy of the snapshot, regardless of quality. As this horrid year winds down and the days grow shorter and darker, I've decided to finish the project, inspired by another Flickr group, by making December a month of gratitude. Every day will be a photo and reflection on something I am grateful for. read more »

Yesterday Colleen and I went to a holiday party amongst old friends. We always do a white elephant gift exchange game as well as trivia question door prizes. This year we made out pretty well in the gift exchange department (got a stove top espresso maker and a nice tea pot) but the best gift was what I got for correctly answering (guessing) a trivia question. read more »

My mom and I did a short weekend tour of Northern Virginia wine country this past weekend as our belated Mother's Day get-away. I just want to make a few notes now so I don't forget everything from it. We stopped at a total of 8 wineries, 4 on the way out to Front Royal and 4 on the way back. We both ended up buying wine even though we hadn't planned on it. So the biggest "note to self" for future wine trips is to plan on buying. We were both surprised at how open we were to the sweeter wines since generally we turn our noses up at them. read more »