For the last few months, much of my brain space has been dedicated to the launch of this blog. Much, much brain space. Byte space on my computer – not so much.

Oh sure, I’ve been writing. But I haven’t been writing enough and I haven’t organized myself enough for this writing life. You know, the one I actually want to live. Not the one in my head. And so, three weeks into it, I find myself behind and I don’t like it.

It was with glee that I figured out how to schedule posts for the future. But not just schedule them – I could backdate them, too. So, in a sense, my quiet resolution (now, written – oy!) to start by posting twice a week can be fudged. That post for September 26? Just posted today – on October 1.

But really, that’s not the way I want to roll. A better plan would be to have posts WRITTEN and READY to go – not WISHY-WASHY and UNFINISHED. Because you know what? Life (and another four-letter word) happens.

Last weekend I fulfilled a commitment to cook for 50+ teenagers and the adults that were supervising them for a weekend youth retreat. It was something I had done before, so it wasn’t anything new on the learning curve. But even though I basically kept the menu the same as last year and made really good notes, the last week was all about shopping, prepping, and packing – not to mention an unexpected 6-hour round trip to Costco.

I packed my laptop for the weekend. I had a room to myself. But I was starting to feel a tickle in my throat and knew that in order to get through the weekend, more than writing, I would need to sleep when I could.

And then that’s when life (or insert other four-letter word here) started to happen. We arrived to a cold, beeping lodge. The beeping was actual, not a euphemism for an expletive. No one had arrived 24 hours earlier to turn on the boiler for heat – so we were cold – for the next 24 hours. And no one knew how to replace the battery for a dying smoke detector, the source of the intermittent beeping. Luckily (really?) I couldn’t hear the beeping downstairs in my room, cold as it was. Instead, I was graced with the constant rushing sound of a dripping toilet directly above me, which was supernaturally amplified by the myriad of pipes in my room. So let’s just say, sleep did not come easy that night, sore throat, stuffy head and all.

But I get ahead of myself. While I did not worry about the furnace, it did concern me that repeated checks on the industrial oven I needed to use to heat up some chicken fingers for late night snack was also not producing any heat. Further investigations yielded this information: the gas was out of commission and for the rest of the weekend, I would have no oven and no stove. To cook. For 70 people.

Cue the hotdogs and the bonfire. Except that I didn’t have hotdogs and the budget was already blown on ingredients for soup and biscuits and Bagel Bites. Which needed stove-tops and very large ovens.

Now given that it was a church camp, I know that besides mine, there were plenty of prayers (and other words) being raised up for me but mostly for their hungry tummies. And God, who is the Original MacGyver, came through. He reminded me that plans could change (taco-in-a-bag could happen for Saturday lunch not as-it-had-always-been-and-don’t-mess-with-it on Sunday), people were mostly just happy to be fed (no one even missed the biscuits – well, except Chris who did go into town and buy buns instead) and a lot of things could happen with electricity and a couple turkey roasters. And with excellent helpers, of which I had two. (Thank you Sheri and Sarah, even though I probably chose the wrong spellings of your names.)

Suffice to say, my weekend was encompassed with the cooking, which pretty much happened non-stop from 6:00 in the morning when I plugged in the crock pots (thank God I brought the crock pots) till midnight on Saturday when the mayhem of the teenage girls washing dishes finally subsided. And I usually have trouble staying up past 9:30. That second night, I was blissfully unaware of dripping and beeping for at least a few hours of solid sleep. But by the time I got through Sunday (yes, you can make chicken noodle soup in a turkey roaster), I knew that when I got home, I was gonna be sick. Like final-exams-are-over sick.

And so my laptop and my blog got ignored for at least another day as I took Monday to recover from the worst of it. But it got me thinking: what do I need to do to post to this blog twice a week like I would like to do?

And then it hit me. I gotta feed my blog. No matter what it takes, no matter what cooking/writing challenges come up, I have to figure out how to keep the crowd – and the blog – happy and fed.

When my boys were still at home, I always made sure they were fed or, at the very least, that there were some mini-pizzas in the freezer and ramen noodles in the cupboard. Somehow, at least the five people in this family always ate, usually three meals, sometimes continuous snacks. And that involved shopping and prepping and a helluvalot of cooking. And time.

My blog needs to become my hungry child. Sometimes it’s gonna get the Kraft Dinner treatment, sometimes it will be a Thanksgiving dinner extravaganza. The proper care and feeding of this blog is the only thing that will make it grow. It’s October 1 and I’m posting this today.