So today is Megnut.com’s 14th birthday. I can’t even wrap my head around keeping (and not keeping up) a site for that long. The good news about this announcement is that I’m back to blogging over at Megnut.com. So you don’t have to follow on Tumblr, and maybe you’ll even get this update via RSS, or carrier pigeon, or whatever works these days.

No promises about tons more updates, but that dream still lives. I’ve been cooking great food, sewing cute clothes, and have many triumphs to share. Really.

Fourteen years ago I never imagined I’d still be running this site, even if it’s only a few updates every blue moon. So happy birthday teenage Megnut.com. Let’s pretend you’ve gotten your braces off and are feeling awesome today!

It really pains me to do this, but for the time-being, I will be updating Megnut-type content over on Tumblr at megnt.tumblr.com (note the missing “u”). I wish there were an easy way to keep updating here, but I find the publishing system I’m using on this site is just too much of a pain (Melody, an open source Movable Type fork, if you care to know…) and it’s keeping me from writing.

I’ve been using Tumblr for my other site, Makeit.do and I love the ease of posting. I find that ease is allowing me to write about making do, but the non-ease here is keeping me from writing about pretty much a lot of other stuff. It’s been this way for ages, so this is an experiment for now. I’m going to post to Tumblr and we’ll see how it goes. I hope you’ll join me over there.

In the spirit of bubbling up old content, how could I not point you to my curmudgeonly What you’re really celebrating with Cinco de Mayo rant from 2006?

I think it’s great that once a year Americans decide to pay attention to their friends south of the border and celebrate a piece of their tumultuous history. Just don’t think you’re celebrating Mexican Independence, because you’re not.

Boy I used to get fired up! And I’m still annoyed by Cinco de Mayo.

Today is Megnut.com’s birthday. In the past I’ve let this day slipped by, but this year I thought I’d count down to it with the best posts from each of the past twelve years. But Ollie was sick last week and didn’t go to school hardly at all, so my limited free time disappeared. And well with all life, etc. I didn’t get a chance to read through twelve years of archives. Also? It’s kind of weird and depressing to do that. So for now, Happy Birthday Megnut.com! It’s hard to imagine twelve more years of this site, but I also can’t picture it going away either. So be sure to check back in 2023. Or maybe just later this week, when I’ll hopefully share some of my favorite posts of all times.

A little over a year ago I moved this site to TypePad and used their templates to give it a redesign. But it was never quite right, and there were always little things that irked me. So another move to a new home and a new platform and here we go again. This time I’m feeling better about the design, and most of the irks are gone. Plus it’s got plaid, which is all the rage in web design these days, or so I’m told. Here’s to a fresh start, and more writing, now that this stupid redesign is done!

I made a new About page. In case somehow you've been reading this blog and have no idea who I am.

I want to avoid any bold proclamations here, in case I totally find that I don’t want to be blogging again after all, but I will go so far as to say: I’m back! I missed relaunching by my blog’s birthday (11 years!) on May 2 but this is pretty close. The site’s been moved to a new host, a new design’s been applied, and I feel like it’s a fresh start. That’s what I’ve needed. At least, that’s what I’ve told myself. We’ll see if that was really the case.

Also there are some new posts below that you won’t have seen because I was kind of secretly blogging there for a while as I got the site fixed up and moved. So yeah. Don’t wanna get too meta so that’s it for now.

A slight little tweak to the design — removing the foodness of the site — and I may just be back to blogging here again. Shortly after Ollie was born in July, 2007, I kind of abruptly abandoned this site. And it took me a while to realize the reason: I wasn't so interested in writing about food. My life had expanded quite beyond food, but the site was limited to that one topic. And so everything here just stopped.

Removing the constraint of 'food', I now hope to find some time to write here again. Not as much as in the past certainly, and probably not as linky as it's been. I don't spend a whole lot of time online anymore, at least compared to the ten-plus hours a day I used to.

So what's that mean? First, don't get your hopes up, this might be one of my (many) projects that I want to do (ahem, like the violin lessons I undertook back in January) but don't really have the time for. Second, there are probably lots of things broken around here.

I really rushed this "redesign" so that I could just get writing. That was supposed to the point all along, wasn't it?

Welcome to the new old megnut.com, now located at meg.hourihan.com. Some day I'll update the design so it looks like the new site that it is. For now I've just lopped the "nut" off the banner and started to remove the cooking posts. More to come eventually.

For those that want it, the feed for this is http://meg.hourihan.com/index.xml

Today megnut.com is seven years old. It's hard to believe, actually impossible almost to believe it's been going for so long. This site has seen me through singledom, coupledom, engageddom and now marrieddom. It's seen me through tech start-up entreprenuer times, unemployed times, working as an independent consultant, more entreprenuer times, more unemployed times, and then a shift to restaurant and kitchen work, and now a more food-focused life. When it started, it was one blog among maybe a hundred. Now it's one in a sea of millions of blogs. Nearly every friend I have, including my husband, can be traced in some way to this site.

For a long time, it was just something this site was just something I had or did. I didn't put too much thought into what it was supposed to be or what it meant to me. But you can't do something for seven years and not realize, "Wait! This is really meaningful to me, and special, and I'd be really sad if it went away." As you may have noticed by the recent volume of postings, it's not going away anytime soon. In fact, I'm feeling a new-found excitement about blogging and this site and its potential. Seven blog years is like twenty dog years, which is like 80 human years, but don't worry, this old blog has a little life in her yet. Happy birthday megnut.com, old girl!