Picking the Blogging Back Up Again

As you can tell, I've let the blogging go by the wayside a bit over the last year... but rather than make excuses or provide explanations (aren't they always the same anyway? Work, life, friends, new seasons of Netflix series), I'll just start picking it up again!

What you can find here in the coming weeks:

• Culture byte of the day: a great article or link to explore that I've been enjoying
• Cooking posts, primarily from what's in my CSA bag (a challenge that I always look forward to every year)
• Micro-reviews of NYC and DC-based cultural and culinary destinations
• Content? Isn't that enough to hope for?

Today's Culture Byte:  An excerpt from Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, with this key phrase to lure you in:

It is still the first week in January, and I’ve got great plans. I’ve been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kid paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.

 Read the rest here..