(Before I start with the whinging and excuse-making, dear friends, I will make happy noises first, for today is a happy day. Today is the birthday of my favorite woman in the whole world, the magnificent and gorgeous Momerina. Today is also the day on which the beautiful Shauna and the magnificent Chef said yes to each other. As I type this, they have been married for exactly 4 1/2 hours. I would weep with happiness if I weren’t so busy smiling instead.)
Before our cable modem threw a tantrum, took its marbles and went offline for a week, I remember making some twittery noise about why this is not a food blog, even though I write a lot about food, I subscribe to a lot of food and baking email newsgroups, I count foodbloggers among my friends and I will attend pretty much any meetup that will have me. 
I had planned to mention that as soon as I lit upon this topic, I was flooded with the desire to abandon it like a baby alligator in a sewer. This, I think, is the reason that I shy away from wearing the foodblogger mantle: The writers I admire most, the best of the bunch, have a sense of discipline that, frankly, I just don’t have. They make a plan, they stick to it, they don’t give it up because they’ve had a crunchy week or month or year, they manage to say, in the words of a foodblogger interviewed last year by Pete Wells, on message. I, meanwhile, can’t stay on message to save my own life. Even at my most disciplined, my work ethic is pretty shaggy-dog, low-intensity and feckless. Lately I have not been at my most disciplined.
I had planned to say all of this and more, thousands and thousands of tedious words’ worth. Fortunately, for me and for you, dear friends, I decided to turn on the oven instead.
Dear friends, I would love to promise that things will get more interesting around here sometime soon, but of course I can make no promises. I’m still feeling clumsy and tentative, plus I’m gearing up for another bash at the LSAT (to be taken in New York at the end of September, hopefully without the stomach flu that accompanied me to Boston in December) and another visit to the archives at the University of Connecticut in August, to coax a little life into the slumbering egg book. In short, I probably won’t be interesting, but I will try to be present, even if I can’t stay on message to save my own life.