http://www.kitchenista.org is live! I’ve moved all my food posts over and in the future will be posting my recipes and reviews there, reserving life@justthere for more …well, life related things. Feel free to update your bookmarks accordingly as really, the food is the interesting part.

If you’ll excuse me, I have to go wrangle my screaming toddler now.

Pregnancy, thy name is brain-dead.

I think she might be on to something there.

So, my name is Alicia and this is my kingdom. I’ve owned this domain now for…a long time. A decade, give or take a few service interruptions. It has been through many redesigns and served many purposes, but I always come back to writing about my life somehow.

As it says in my “About” page, I live in Utah with my husband, Warren, our son, Greyson, and our completely neurotic golden retriever, Faye. I am originally from southern Indiana, and I moved here in 2002 to live with Warren after an internet friendship to courtship thing. It works for us. Our son was born in September 2006 and a few months shy of his first birthday was diagnosed with developmental delay. If you want to get really technical, it’s officially undiagnosed cerebral palsy, but we opted not to saddle him with that label unless it proves necessary to get him any treatment he may need. Anyway, as a result of cerebral palsy he receives therapy twice monthly to try to strengthen his speech and gross motor abilities. Utah has a great system in place through the school district and he has made incredible progress through it. He’s a healthy, happy and active toddler now and I am constantly amazed at the way he works.

Warren and I made everything official with a wedding ceremony in June of 2008, an intimate affair with our close friends and families. A couple of months later, we decided to try for a brother or sister for Grey, since his motor skills are at a point where he can handle me having divided attention. Considering I’m now 23 weeks pregnant, you could say we met with success, and Grey will have a little brother sometime in May.

The birth of my son and his subsequent problems made going back to work next to impossible, and we are lucky enough to be in a position where I am able to stay at home with him and provide the daily physical therapy he needs. Unfortunately for all of us, being a housewife is not something I seem to have any natural aptitude for whatsoever and I have been a cranky mess ever since. Every now and then I’ll slip into a groove with the cooking and the cleaning and the laundry and the blessed never-ending tedium of every day being so similar to the last and think, you know, this gig isn’t so bad. And then I wake up from that dream and it’s back to being bad at time management, dinner being way too late, Grey not getting a bath, and no one having clean pajamas.

Something happened, though, with this new pregnancy. I suddenly want to cook and bake, ALL THE TIME. It’s a compulsion, I absolutely need to do it, and I’m not just talking about nuking a hot dog and throwing fries in the oven. I pour over cookbooks and food blogs, collecting recipes for my Bi-Monthly Grocery List of Doom, I’ve stopped buying bread and started making my own, and possibly the strangest thing, I opted to buy a KitchenAid mixer for Christmas instead of photography equipment (the only –and most expensive- hobby that has never waned as so many frequently do). Would you like to see it? Here it is:

Man, I love that thing. Without it, it’s possible I never would have made a loaf of bread. Kneading is intimidating. Actually, a lot of things I cook and bake now I would not have tried had it not been for my KitchenAid – not that I used it to make short ribs or Carbonnade a la Flamande, but I guess my success with that first loaf of bread gave me a confidence in the kitchen that I did not previously have. See, internet, I am a timid creature at heart, and new things are very intimidating. New things make me not want to try them because I am genetically programmed towards failure, and that is not a pleasant thing to be reminded of. For instance, you’ll note that I’ve talked about enjoying baking now, but as a result laundry and cleaning have definitely fallen to the wayside. I even fail at hausfrauery.

So, long story short, this blog belongs to a woman who has a newfound love of her kitchen (oh man, the chauvinist jokes that could be inserted here….) and will contain posts about food, posts about life in general and other tales of housewifely woes. It will be a pleasure to share my misadventures with you.

I’m going to start working hard at being a portrait photographer instead of just a useless dilettante. I’m going to get more work in my portfolio and start whoring myself out (as a photographer!) on craigslist and all of the other sites, and then I’m going to upgrade to a Macbook and a 5D and L-series lenses. Yeah. That’s my plan.

At least this plan feels at least moderately achievable. I’ve had so many other grand plans in the past that I feel a little dumb announcing this one publicly. I have a history of failure. Epic failure. Failure of grand proportion. But, I really think I can do it this time. God knows, I can’t just sit here thinking about it all the time.

This past weekend I went to a nerdfest in Anaheim and was lucky enough to get to take some photos of my pal Steph. Would you like to see them? Here they are. Not particularly inspired and my background is completely blown out, but for my first non-Greyson portraits I’m pretty pleased with the turnout. As I get more familiar with my camera and particularly my flash, I should see some real improvement and I’m very excited about that. Anyway.

I’ll try to keep a bit more updated.

Truly, my lack of discipline is embarrassing and I promise you I am appropriately ashamed of myself.

I’m curious about the scorn people seem to have for ‘bloggers’ right now. Oh, I’m sure it’s always been there, but it seems to be the soup du jour. Not all people who blog are pompous pricks, though I will admit that I almost said ‘I find myself curious’ which is like a guaranteed ticket to douchebaggery. Anyway, I want to blame it on Myspace because Rupert Murdoch owns it and because I’m harboring blanket hate for teenagers today, but I can’t even do that because I genuinely don’t understand what’s wrong with people writing. Good, bad, about Sarah Jessica Parker’s missing mole or Barack Obama getting rid of nukes, it’s still an intellectual pursuit at heart and I can’t help but think that can’t be anything but a positive thing. Especially for those Myspace teenagers.

As parents – as a nation – we are so focused on the physical health and fitness of the upcoming generations that I am a little nervous we aren’t focusing enough on their tiny little developing brains. Being athletic and eating your veggies is important and all, but to me it seems like being a little overweight would be preferable to being an idiot. I’m not talking about just uneducated, because you can be plenty smart without a degree or diploma, I’m talking dumb as a stack of bricks because no one could be bothered to instill the importance of knowledge in between playdates and soccer practice.

I’m overreacting and I know it, and I know that when I was 15 I had stupid conversations and did stupid things, but I was pursuing experience because I knew experience begets knowledge and knowledge is the secret to world domination. That’s definitely one secret I’ll share with my kid.