Hello, old friend.

A couple of weeks ago, I briefly thought I had lost all of my old blog photos from 2010 and 2011. It’s been years since I posted on the blog, and frankly it’s not something I think much about day-to-day. But one day I was making guacamole, and I googled this post as I’ve done dozens of times before, and was stunned to find the photo of the stained post-it note with my guacamole recipe was no longer on the site. There was just a tiny little box where the photo used to be, but the photo itself had vanished. Not just from that particular webpage but from my website entirely. What followed was about 3 hours of panic and frantic customer service messaging, a deeeeeeeep nostalgia dive into my old posts, and a quick decision to axe my old hosting service (bye bye Bluehost, thanks for the heart palpitations).

Reflecting back on this from the safety of having my site and cherished guacamole post-it photo restored, I’m not surprised that the thought of losing all those grainy oh-so-poorly focused photos was so upsetting. The blog was such a major part of my life for over SIX years–maybe the MOST major part of my life? But somewhere in graduate school, I lost that connection. This was partly due to moving to a new city and partly due to graduate school trying to end me. But also because it felt like food blogging had changed, like it had become mostly about achieving influencer status, and that is just not my scene. I just want my own little space on the internet to share the things that I’m excited about and have it be totally OK if me and my mom are the only ones who ever read them. I’m not sure what this means at the moment, but I hope it means I’ll find some inspiration to tap back into the creative parts of my brain (the ramblings posts were always my favorites). Feel the excitement of pounding out a blog post when an idea strikes. Maybe even dust of the old DSLR.