Hello. Hello!

If my brain was fitted with a Bluetooth device that could send all my thoughts to my blog without me having to type them, there would have been a new post every single day for the last 3½ 5 months that I’ve been MIA, because while there may have been zero typing around here, there’s been a LOT of thinking going on.  If Mr. McHenry or Daisy would just buckle up and learn to type I could have dictated more blog posts than you could’ve read in a year, there’s been that much contemplation afoot.

Since the end of January there has also been countless hours of reading, a substantial amount of napping, 5000 10,500-odd miles of road-tripping, some 6 million daffodils, a profusion of experiments to hide the taste of ascorbic acid in Liposomal Vitamin C (yes! I’ve been back in the kitchen!), an amazingly badass mentor, a rain-forest, a few Big Breakfast Adventures, the installation of a sauna in my garage, more water than I think I’ve drunk in the the previous 10 years of my life, days surfing The Internet reading articles, blog posts, and papers on nutrition, a significant quantity of really good chocolate, a house-guest from Europe, migration to an iPhone (!!!), a somewhat scary load of Trader Joe’s Pork Belly, several conversations with England, movie nights with my BFF, an outrageous volume of sautéed leeks, daily Comedy Hours hosted by Mr. McHenry – often with Florence as special guest, an abundance of magnesium flake baths, a trip to the Landscape and Garden Show which *almost* resulted in the purchase of one of these for my yard and did result in the purchase of some Haitian oil drum art: because awesome.  There’ve been far, *far* too many extra hours at the day job, the odd spot of gardening, an abundance of lamb chops, pork chops, duck thighs, and bison burgers, a blissful quota of saunas, all the usual laundry, car maintenance (yep, broke my brakes in Colorado and wore out my tire treads in Utah), lawn-mowing, dish-washing, vacuuming, grocery-shopping, sheet-changing, toilet-cleaning, pruning, mopping and other assorted home-dwellers requirements, and, after 25 years of not drinking – a few bottles of vino (I did not slurp it all at once).  Did I mention far too many hours at the day job?

Holy smokes.  Makes me wonder how I even found time for thinking, let alone writing.  And now, here I am, finally back at the keyboard attempting to become a human Bluetooth while simultaneously rebooting my typing abilities less than 2 weeks 1 week before I head out on another road-trip when I still haven’t shared the adventures of the last one two three four six.  And boy, what grand adventures they were!  Sigh.

Now you might think that the reason I haven’t been writing is obvious.  That it was simply because I’ve been far too busy doing all of the above, plus, you know, gallivanting around the western United States shooting pretty things and generally scratching my explorer itch; but that wouldn’t be true because I could have chosen to write instead of doing much of what I did spend my time on.  And since one of the things I like most about myself (and also the thing that bites me in the a** most) is that I tell it how it is, I don’t feel good about letting you think I was just busy being busy with life.

If I boil it all down I would say there’s 3 things that have kept me from being here like I used to be.  WARNING: this could very well get rambly and maybe even a little ranty.  I am just letting my thoughts go where they will.  Feel free to tell me how you feel about it in the comments.  Here’s a very lovely daffodil to soften the blow.

First, and most important: the hugely underrated R ‘n’ R.  When you’re going through the fundamental healing processes that I have been since last September things can go much faster if you rest.  When you’re detoxing like it’s your job, napping is right up there at the top of the most important things to do.  I’m not a good napper.  I’m not a good sitter-on-the-couch-er.  I’m just not good at not doing.  So while my body is reveling in this newly-learned skill, my brain has been quietly going mad with the frustration of not being productive.  However, I am acutely aware that my insistence on scoffing at rest and relaxation aided and abetted my health downfall, so I’ve forced myself to just stop with all the activity.

The real dilemma here is how I do all the things that I want to do while also embracing rest and relaxation.  I have a day job that heralds on average a 53-hour work week (sans commute).  This blog, recipe development, and my cookbooks are another more-than-fulltime pursuit, and while I managed to do both for several years, it’s not healthily sustainable.  Sustainable – yes.  Healthily sustainable – clearly not.  Since I have never earned one bean from any of the things I did with The Bailornator, and the revenue from my cookbooks only partly covers the production costs of this blog, recipes, and cookbooks themselves,  quitting the day job to spend my time here is not an option (at this point, anyway).  So given that what pays my bills is my day job, I have had to take the R ‘n’ R part out of all this goodness.  Sad but true.

Secondly, and in all honesty, I  became rather burned out with it all.  The eye-rolling, never-ending arguments about which diet is The One, snake oil sales people bombarding every possible means of social media and communication with their silver bullet infomercials, snazzy videos, sneaky (and often not so sneaky) sales emails, and so many various detox / weight-loss / healthy gut / fat-loss summits that in reality tell you nothing new but always require a bunch of $$ at the end, and the unbelievable amount of misinformation bandied about by ‘experts’ and manufacturers, {many} doctors and ‘gurus’, {many} dieticians and anyone else who is just trying to make a buck off folks desperate to feel great and finally be able to lose a few pounds.

I swear I am going to smack my screen if I see one more recipe with ‘healthy’ in the title followed by a list of nutritional insanity that will make you fatter faster than a rabbit at the races.  And then just when you think you’ve got it all straight about what is right and what is wrong you come across something else or someone else (with credentials up the ying-yang and sometimes a body like Ted Naiman) saying the opposite.  Wait. What??  If you follow all the health shenanigans seriously, it’s exhausting.  How in the world anyone is supposed to successfully navigate all this stuff without losing their mind and / or their will to live is beyond me.

Not to mention the social requirements of it all became so tedious and overwhelming if you wanted to do it right. You mustn’t post on your blog unless you’ve written it in such a way as to maximize every search engine to get the highest ranking possible – which means you need to manipulate the title, the subtitle, the paragraphs, the links, the number of times you mention the title, tags, categories, images, blah, blah, di blah, blah, blah!  It is all so contrived.  Lordy it takes longer to do all that than it does to write the darn content.  Exhausting.  I didn’t even want to log into my dashboard anymore.

The ridiculousness of having to comment on other bloggers posts in order to get them to comment on yours.  Following someone on social media just to get another like for yourself in return.  Buying followers to bump up your figures.  And over the years I’ve watched all this going on and thought, “Where’s the honesty? Why isn’t great content enough for someone to get heard and applauded?” And I just didn’t want to be a part of it, because I have never cared about the numbers.  I am not trying to make a fortune, become famous, get a book deal, have the most followers on any social media platform, or win awards.  I would much rather have low numbers than fake numbers.  My ego doesn’t need to see large numbers in order to know I am of worth.  I am not in competition with anyone and I don’t care what anyone thinks of me.  You certainly don’t tell the world you have Bi-Polar II Disorder if you care what people think.  Nope.  I am just here sharing my life in the hopes that it will help or inspire someone else that in turn leads them to a better life.

I got to the point where I was just wanted to throw my hands up in the air and run away.  So I did.  To Death Valley, where I regained some sense of peace and sanity.  It was entirely my intention to return home from my time down south and throw myself back into blogosphere to add what value I could to others lives, but I quickly discovered after I kicked off my well-traveled Converses and plonked myself down at my desk to type that I had not come back any more excited to rejoin the fray of bickering and one-upping and deliberate misinformation and downright ugliness that is increasingly casting it’s cloud over the wellness landscape.

And thirdly – in large part because of #2 above – I once again find myself questioning the value I provide to you with what I create in this space.  While it is very true that I don’t do this for $$$, it has to have a worthy purpose beyond my own love of doing it for it to be a worthwhile endeavor.  I am just not wired to do stuff purely for my own enjoyment. OK, taking myself off to my Happy Place for breakfast once in a while – yes, but spending 3 days a week creating stuff and not share with others what they might find useful, uplifting, or inspiring – no.  So I became torn about my place in the world (again).

When this all started 4 years ago there was pretty much nowhere else you could get truly healthy recipes from (and certainly nothing that aligned with the SANE approach) and my whole reason for existing was to provide those for you.  Then, over the last 2 years while I’ve been working on fixing my pesky health issues a plethora of blogs showed up where you can get recipes to follow any diet out there, so you no longer need me for that; and yet every time I resolve to walk away from here and reinvent myself to find another cause where I can use my skills to cheerlead and help I find you {virtually} standing in my path letting me know that you miss me.  I for the life of me do not know or understand what it is that you miss, but I cannot help but accept that you do.  I think about all the emails and comments I receive letting me know that your life is better because I am in it – even if it is just in the form of words and images on a screen.  Or I’ll read something online and think, “This is bullshit.  I need to do what I can to help people figure out the truth from the peddler’s nonsense”. And goodness knows there’s an avalanche of people peddling nonsense out there.  I’ve experienced so much, I’ve learned so much, and I have so much worth sharing.

But I don’t want to add to the confusion.  And I don’t want to be lumped in with all the other snake oils salesmen.  And I don’t want to follow some contrived formula for getting the most likes or followers.  My voice is so quiet in amongst the cacophony of people trying to make a quick buck from the whole wellness circus.  My reach is so small given my budget for marketing and other assorted manipulations is zero.  Is it even worth trying to be heard?

So then another few weeks went by without feeling any clarity about what I needed to do and before I knew it another road trip rolled along.  So off I jollied to Colorado where I left my brake pads, rotors and the best part of the treads on my tires (and as a result $1209.11).  But what I came back with was a sense that I just needed to be me in this space.  Share when I can rather than on a if-you-don’t-post-3-times-a-week-you’re-a-failure schedule, write about anything that I felt had the potential to make others lives better, feel free change the format to make it easier to write more often, and stop feeling bound by having to continue what I’d done before.  I’m going with the flow.  And giving you another daffodil. Because daffodils make me happy.

You can take what you love, what is helpful, what inspires you, and move along when it’s not something that resonates.  You can follow or not follow, subscribe or unsubscribe, like or not like.  You can love the recipes and hate the road trips, or vice versa.  If you stop getting anything meaningful here I encourage you to seek wisdom elsewhere.    It is impossible for me to please everyone.  I simply cannot spend any more energy thinking about whether I am doing it right when I could be using that time to create something of value.  So I am just going to create and see what happens.

So what’s new?  What’s different?  And what’s coming?

This is still a work in progress, but I was determined to get this post out tonight COME WHAT MAY so here is what I have so far:

Thanks to my newly acquired jumping-of-the-ship to an iPhone I have recently fully embraced Instagram and Flickr.  You can take a peek and then hang out with any or all of the pages that appeal to you:

@biggirlcamera : road trips, landscapes, flowers, fences, barns, trees, and whatever else grabs my attention captured with my Big Girl Camera (Nikon D750)

@therealcarriebrown : food, recipes, and sane living captured with both iPhone and Big Girl Camera

@mistermchenry : yes, I really did. Because if you can’t have fun, what’s the point?!  The world according to Mr. McHenry.

 

Flickr: CarrieBrownBlog : road trips, landscapes, flowers, fences, barns, trees, and whatever else grabs my attention captured with my Big Girl Camera (Nikon D750)

 

Recipes

There will be recipes, but the focus is going to be on very much simpler recipes and meal ideas that require minimal time to make.  Recipes that work in the real everyday working world where no one has time to spend an hour every night making almond flour pizza dough and baking grain-free, sugar-free cakes and cookies, but no one wants to down 3 whey protein shakes a day in the interests of maximum nutrition in the least time.

Newsletters

There is some fantastic information out there that I want you to have but don’t have time to write blog posts on, so I am going to be using a more newsletter-style format regularly to give you the links you need to get the info directly.  I’ll also be introducing you to amazing people who have great stuff to share.

 

That’s all I got right now.  I’ve missed you too.

 

 

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