A New Beginning

Welcome to my latest (and hopefully greatest) foray into the blogosphere. Some of you (OK, two of you) may remember my baseball and poker-themed one from a few years ago called The Queen of Diamonds (thequeenofdiamonds.blogspot.com) that went the way of the dodo after a mere five months in existence. My very first posting on QOD spelled out my biggest fears in starting a blog: 1) that no one would read it, 2) that people would read it and think it was lame and 3) that I wouldn’t have enough time to keep it up. It was that third fear that ultimately killed The Queen of Diamonds: my very last post happened the day before I started massage school. It was really too bad, because at the time my NL team had been floundering and I ended up winning the league that year. And because I was too lazy and/or too busy to write, I didn’t even get to publicly gloat about it.

For awhile now, various friends have suggested that I write an East Bay food blog. It makes perfect sense because eating good food is by far my favorite activity these days, something I do much more often than check baseball stats (well, it IS the off-season) or play poker (which I haven’t done since RC’s last Super Bowl tournament). And I do spend an awful lot of time following street food vendors on Twitter and taking notes on new restaurant openings from the Chronicle’s Inside Scoop column, so it would be great to have an outlet to share that information. But what of those old fears?

I am not really worried about whether or not other people read this or what they think. I’m doing it mostly for myself, because I really need something more creative to do with my spare time than play Bejeweled Blitz all night. The time and commitment fear...well, that’s to be seen. I figure the only way to find out is to just do it and see if it sticks.

This time around, I am not going to limit myself in scope. I think that was a contributing factor to the death of my old blog. Once I stopped writing, it was hard to start again because I felt the need to ‘catch up’ from where I had left off and it was just too overwhelming. I’m hoping that if I’m just writing about whatever’s going at the moment, there would be no such pressure.

I’m calling this blog The Omnivore’s Delights for several reasons. Obviously, it’s a play on Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which is a book about food. Of course, food will be one of the main topics. Mark and I eat at too many fabulous places and cook too many enjoyable dishes to not share about those. But I’m a consumer of many things in addition to food: music, film, art, books, reality television, plays, fashion, etc. and I want to be open to talking about all these things and whatever else comes to mind.

So welcome to my blog, version 2.0. I look forward to a long, happy, inspiring, entertaining and fun experience with it and you, dear reader. (Assuming you are, in fact, out there.)