Old Friends, New Friends What's cooking? Lentil Soup with Roasted Garlic and Bacon

I spent the day yesterday at a workshop for bloggers. For a person born before... to be kind, let’s say 1960 – and I will not be mentioning here how much before 1960 – there’s nothing like a bracing encounter with the world of technology to make you feel old and slow. Vimeos, hangouts on YouTube, search engine optimization, analytics, keywords,... You can feel out of touch in less time than it takes to say, “Tweet this.”

When I started this blog, it was not much more than a way to keep myself in the wordsmithing game. Leaving New Jersey, I’d left behind a writing group that had been as closely knit as any I’d ever heard of. I didn’t expect to be able to duplicate that experience in any way. And I haven’t. But it turns out that if you leave the door open for new experiences, life can surprise you.

Bloggers – at least food bloggers, and maybe it’s just the ones here in Austin – are a remarkably welcoming group. The ones at yesterday’s workshop and those I’ve met in other venues here have been happy to share what they know about the technology, about food styling, about photography – even to show me how to use Twitter, which still strikes me as being a tiny bit insane.