Life - A New Normal

I haven't baked cookies in over a month!  Whoa...hard to imagine.  I've fixed a few meals where I thought, yum, I should have blogged and photographed this.  I just ate it instead.  I go through slumps of time where I am so busy with every day life that I forget about the blog !!!  Yes, it's true. Despite empty nesting, I find myself quite busy.

My original intention for this blog was to fill my time and to fill a need I saw where I lived;  restaurant reviews, local activities, dishes I cooked in my past or discovered and wanted to share, creating recipes and meals and desserts. .My husband was traveling, my youngest was in high school, I worked from home, and I felt the need to write.  I wasn't in to intricate cookie decorating at the time... but that was the next evolution of "me", and by extension, my blog.

My husband now works locally, works day shift for the first time in our entire married life, my youngest is off living in a dorm in another town, and I'm finding myself living a more "normal" life than I have for the past 6 years (maybe in the last 37 years of child rearing).  Less crisis going on, more free time is available, I'm enjoying going for walks again...more of my version of a comforting normal. (jinx - I probably just cursed that and something crazy will show up on my radar)

I won't stop blogging, but like the past 18 months of my blog where my life was strongly evolving, my blog will evolve as well.  I'm trying to learn new things in the cookie decorating world - so spending time at YouTube University as well as sketching designs I might want to incorporate.  Every wall, every door, every card, every piece of fabric, and every flower I look at, I often wonder "how would I cookie that"?

Eventually, I'd like to just have a cookie blog...but I really like the eclecticism of being The South Padre Island Flip Flop Foodie.  When the mood takes me, I can still share about what's going on in my little corner of South Texas.  People ask why I don't have more current restaurant reviews and I have to say I tend, when I go out, to go to places I know I like and that I've already blogged about (sometimes many times).  There are a few new places I need to cover, so I'll be making an effort to fit some of them in.  I may also invite a few guest bloggers to write about places they go.  We'll see how all of that shakes out.

For now, I'll just continue riding the softer, more gentle waves, of life as an "empty nester" and think about where the next wave will take me (and please, Life, no rip currents.... I've been through enough!).

I've got a new technique I'm dying to try, so I bet the next post you see is that new way of decorating a cookie (new for me anyway).  We'll see how it goes.  Until then...

Bon Appetit, Y'all!