I have been rather a busy bee of late.

Family birthday season is upon us. There have been cakes to make, more cakes to bake, and cups to cake.  There was a party of 15 pre-tween boys to organize, supervise and recover from with copious amounts of wine.  There are visitors coming, so the spare room where we chuck all the ‘stuff-we don’t-know-what-to-do-with’ needs to be organized.  The apartment needs to be cleaned.  The endless food shopping needs to be done again.  And again.  And then 8 more times after that.  Then there are the KID ACTIVITIES, which frankly, are killing me not-so-softly.  Finally there’s the SCARF.  Actually, there are now three as I was getting bored with just the one.  So, as you can see, there’s been a lot going on.  I haven’t had time to sit down and write.  My wit is running low, and I am in danger of appearing witless.

Ah, excuses.

The truth is, I’ve painted myself into a bit of a corner here.  When I first decided to blog, I thought a lot about what kind of blog to write.  The most obvious choice was the ‘mom’ blog, as 23.25 hours of my day are generally taken up by kid related ‘stuff”.  Navigating the front line of parenting is a pretty rich source of material.  But alas, there are so many mom blogs out there, and a lot of really good mom blogs out there, that it seemed silly to add another one to the mix.  (Plus I had a very good friend tell me that as much as she liked me, ‘please-don’t-be-offended-if-I-don’t-read-it-I-can’t-possibly-handle-another-mom-blog.”).  Moving on, then.

The next obvious choice was blogging about life as an ex-pat.  Another topic easily mined for good material.  I even had a title picked out for that one:  A broad Abroad.  But the title, let alone the idea, was taken.  (Foiled again!)

Then I thought about creating a blog that tracked my creative endeavors.  Originally I wanted to have a year of monthly ‘challenges’ for myself.  (It’s a bit like a cross between the reality shows Survivor and Big Brother in my head).  Because I am a Virgo, I am slightly anal.  Because I am a New Yorker, I am slightly neurotic.  Because I have a few odd OCD tendencies, I like things to be neat and even and packaged.  So a monthly thing was right up my Control Freak street.  For some reason I can’t even remember now, I abandoned that one.  You see where I am going with this (really, even I don’t want to be in my head a lot of the time).  So through trial and error, somehow I stumbled upon the idea of keeping track of all the things that I can do, learn how to do, etc. etc. to keep my free time full of learning and erudition and (god help me) crafting.

But I’ve hit a bump.  Because while I am learning how to do something new (hello…scarf), there’s not a lot to say about it.  I mean, how boring would a weekly scarf update be?  I feel like the blooming thing is already about 72 feet long and it’s not even half way done yet.  Surely no one needs to be updated on a row by row basis.

So it’s been a while since my last blog update because I’ve been struggling with the original concept.

Intellectually, I know that it is all part of the journey, that change is a good thing, that it is better to focus on the whole rather than the parts. Perhaps my original idea will segue into something different, more jumble sale than boutique.  But I cringe at the idea of category-less things.  The majority of things in my life have labels (in fact, I’m surprised no one has ever bought me a label maker as a gift).  They are bagged, tagged and neatly put away.  It bothers me that I started out doing ONE thing and now it is morphing into ANOTHER.  I know it is part of the process.  But the anal, neurotic, control freak me doesn’t like it.

So the dog didn’t really eat my homework.  We don’t’ even have a dog.  If we did though, he’d probably chew on my scarf.

And that would be a whole different kettle of fish.