Poco-Cocoa

I am in a dream world today… partially because I got home from the midnight screening of New Moon at 2:30 a.m., and I’m exhausted. But also because my mind is full of lovely New Moon images!

It was much, much better than Twilight. There were cheesy parts (Bella and Edward running through the forest in very cheesy costumes), of course, but isn’t that true of all romances? I had been worried about the film, because honestly, of the series, New Moon and Eclipse are my least favorite books. New Moon because Edward leaves, and hello? I’m totally Team Edward. And Eclipse because nothing really happens except emotional turmoil. But the film captured Bella’s depression and worry and defeat so well. And of course, who doesn’t love Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black? I mean, come on.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll be back at the movies this weekend to watch it again (hopefully sans screaming fans), and I’ll be listening to the soundtrack on repeat for a while. And waiting, waiting for Eclipse to be released next year. It’s so much fun… I haven’t been this excited about films since the Lord of the Rings series. (Yes, it’s official, I’m a dweeb.) 🙂

Happy Friday, everyone!

Today was the epitome of a Monday. If you looked “Monday” up in the dictionary, there would be a photo of today.

It didn’t help that I was cranky from the start. I didn’t get a great night’s sleep last night, so I was tired today. I was hustling through work, just trying to keep up, and didn’t have time for lunch. I survived on a banana and complimentary meeting cookies. I got home and Justin was still at work, toiling away on a new freelance project. The kitty cats were starving, and all I wanted was for someone to hand-feed me a slice of pizza. While I sat on the couch. Curled up in my grandma’s quilt.

But Justin did come home, and he took me to Vivo for puffy tacos and a frozen margarita. And we talked and laughed and even went grocery shopping afterward (where I bought a bag full of chocolate covered raisins, because they help make life easier). And everything seems manageable now.

At about 5:00 this evening, I had decided that my latest vegetarian stint was OVER. I wanted pepperoni pizza, and chicken tortilla soup, and braised pork belly. I realized that not eating animals is much harder when you’ve been eating animals nonstop for months. Especially when you’re cranky and stressed out and in search of comfort food.

I didn’t eat meat tonight, because Vivo has great vegetarian enchiladas and puffy tacos stuffed with beans and cabbage. But what about tomorrow night? What about next week, when we go to New Orleans with our foodie friends, and everyone is eating cracklins and oysters and heritage turkey? I just don’t know, friends. It seems that I’m destined to always fret over what I eat and don’t eat. Vegetarian? Omnivorous? Local? Organic? Humanely raised? Seasonal? Nutritious?

Of all the things I worry about, food is probably the biggest. Of course I worry about money, and health, and peace on earth and good will toward men. But my daily struggle is with food. Sometimes I regret getting a degree in nutrition, because it has given me the knowledge that makes simple decisions (like “what’s for lunch”) into difficult ones… especially for someone as perfectionistic and worrisome as myself. But I know that I’m healthier than most, that I eat well most of the time, and that in the end, I’ll be okay. I just have to remind myself of that in those moments when I’m freaking out about food.

Internets, do you fret about food, too? Is it just me? I read a book recently about how women are trained to want to be “effortlessly perfect”… to dress well, be thin and fit, eat well, hold a full-time job, have a clean house and a great marriage, and do it all with a smile. It’s annoying to me that women are expected to be this way… but it annoys me even more that I expect it of myself.

I don’t really have a point here, just putting my thoughts out there. Until tomorrow, internets… sweet dreams.

Hello internets! So, yeah, we changed my blog. I’ve had the exact same blog design for 4 1/2 years, and we decided it was time for a change! Justin has been sweet enough to do all the design and technical stuff for me, so I just get to do the fun part.

This new template has its quirks, though… some of my photos bled out of the edges of the frames on the front page, so I’ve had to go in and manually change those. I haven’t gone back very far to change them (I’ve posted a LOT in 4 1/2 years), so if you see something funky in an archived post, please just ignore it for now. I’ll get to it eventually. 🙂

I had actually considered taking a blog break. Lately, it’s been harder and harder for me to get excited about posting here. This weekend, I went back through my archives and read posts from a year ago, two years ago… and I seemed so much happier then. I realized that I’ve been editing myself a whole lot more lately on this little blog. Recently the people I work with (and I work with a LOT of people) learned about my blog, and so I’ve felt the need to keep it surface-level and polite and embarrassment-free. There have also been several public relations companies who have found my blog, and I’ve also been writing with them in mind. But all that has basically made me disconnected from MY blog… the space I’ve worked hard over so many years to create. And it’s made writing for this blog quite boring.

So I decided to reclaim poco-cocoa. I’m writing this blog for me, and for my mama, and for my friends and for readers who have been with me forever. I’m writing for people who like to read about life in Austin, and cooking at home, and great books and films and crafts. And if other people happen to read it, and form an opinion about me from it, so be it.

Another thing that recently happened that spurred on this change is that I’ve stopped eating meat. When I say recently, I mean, like, a few days ago. I was a vegetarian a few years back, then slowly started adding meat back into my diet, and lately I’ve been eating a heckuva lot of meat. I still rarely cook it at home, but when we eat out (and you all know we eat out fairly often), I usually choose meat.

Last week I read Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. It brought all the reasons I originally became a vegetarian back up to the surface. It made me question why I eat meat, and how comfortable I am with the situation. I don’t know if I’ll be a vegetarian forever. I don’t know if I’d eat animals if they were locally and humanely raised. I don’t know where I’ll officially draw my line (leather? wool? cheese? eggs?), but I know that at the moment, I feel better not eating meat. So that’s where I am today.

So, lots of changes around here. Hopefully for the better. I hope you all enjoy the new design (I think it’s so fun), and I hope you stick around for 4 1/2 more years, at least. I know I’m going to try to. 🙂

Apologies if you are receiving 2,000 RSS updates… Justin and I are redesigning poco-cocoa today, and are having to manually update a LOT of posts. More to come soon!