Shootin’ from the hip…

Ok.

Let’s talk about what I’ve been up to.

The summer literally flew by me. I spent all of it focusing on expanding the scope of what I’m trying to do here. In my first video update, I answered a few questions regarding the directions of my attention. I’m gonna keep the blog going. I’m going for DDPYoga certification, so I want to shift some of my focus toward that, but derryX Dines is a project I’m still interested in.

The elephant in the room that I haven’t really paid much mind to is whether the April Fools take down had anything to do with the seeming change in focus for the blog. The short answer is no, but I want to go a little further into this.

One thing I never wanted to have was a blog dedicated 100% to anything, let alone food. Honestly, I always viewed my blog as a creative outlet. I like to have a space where I can share my thoughts on an experience and interact with others about that. I like writing about music, movies, books, television, vacation, and other forms of entertainment, and, of course, fitness and dining. It just so happened that the dining posts were well received in the community.

I’ve made lots of new friends, and forged new positive relationships through this.

For the most part.

It turns out that some people are very territorial and are quick to try to make you uncomfortable when you enter their turf. There was a good amount of time where I was putting up with passive-aggressive negativity online like mysteriously disappearing from blogrolls (notice I killed the blogroll on this blog very early on because I was not going to contribute to this douchbaggery) to more direct things like outright name-calling, slander, and other verbal abuse.

I have no idea whether the take down had anything to do with this or if it was a disgruntled friend or family member, and I honestly don’t care. What I don’t want is people coming to conclusions over things that I do or do not do based on this.

Case-in-point: a few weeks ago, I posted on social media that I made the decision to not participate as a judge in All Over Albany’s Tournament of Pizza this year. Almost immediately, I was asked whether my decision had anything to do with this. The question keeps coming up, so I want to be clear that the answer is no.

The reason that I chose to not participate this year is simple: time.

Judging the pizza tournament takes a serious time commitment. It takes a solid few hours every week for six weeks. Between working full time, preparing for private DDPYoga training, working on my own fitness, developing ideas and recipes for cooking classes, and working on another writing project that I’m not ready to talk about publicly yet, I really couldn’t make the commitment this year. And I’m not gonna commit if I know I can’t do it.

Notice in there I didn’t even mention things like leisure or writing this blog. Hey, I said on day one that I probably wasn’t going to be posting all of the time. That’s why I’m hoping to get some more videos up soon; those take a lot less time to put together.

One thing I know is that this blog and (dare I say) brand are continuing to grow. The Likes on facebook are coming in from all over, including people I have never met in person. The training newsletter I set up has a decent number of subscribers, which is awesome. I don’t have a long term plan for the blog (I never did), but I am having fun taking it in different directions.