In November 2017, I wrote on The Moderate Mom that it had been nearly a year since I posted because I had focused on The Wise Fathers site. Between then and June 2018, I published another half dozen posts. Since then, only one. It was an introduction to myself for this new site that combines all the content from those two older sites.

Cooking

Labor Day 2018, I accidentally triggered a massive immune response to food allergens. Short version: I’m can’t eat uncooked fruits and veggies and I’m really allergic to garlic. I react to tiny traces of it. That makes it incredibly hard for me to eat out or to buy pre-packaged foods. Garlic is everywhere, and it isn’t the only spice I can’t eat. As a result, I’m now cooking a lot. And I’ve never been a particularly good cook, in part because I never cooked much. I’ve been amazed to learn how easy a lot of things are to make!

While I’ve been making these things, I wanted to share my experiences but it took me a while to figure out how. I’m going to include that here. Cooking has always intimidated me but the truth is, you can make good meals without much skill. You just need to pay attention to what you are doing. (Don’t let it burn.)

Style

I really want to talk about my personal style and style. I don’t care about what is in style right now. I care about looking good, and that’s totally different. I recently read a book about the “dress doctors” of the early- to mid-twentieth century. They advocated for women to buy less clothing but of higher quality, and that really suited their life and style.

Sewing is fun for me and it lets me truly show my personality and style. I’ll be writing about that as well. I have one pattern I love so much I’ve made five different versions of it. At some point, I’ll write about them and how different one dress pattern can look if you use different fabric and accessories.

Parenting

A lot has been written about parenting, but the reason we started Wise Fathers is because there isn’t a lot of good, general content for dads. There are some great niche sites, but nothing with a variety of writers. Even though I’m not a dad and I won’t be working on that site, I will continue creating parenting content that is good for dad’s too.

Politics

I won’t shy away from politics but I do try to find places where we all agree. It’s important to understand how much agreement there really is for all of us.

Emergency Preparedness

I feel strongly about this. People of all ages need to be prepared and able to handle emergencies. Emergency preparedness isn’t some kind of fringe belief. Government agencies – federal, state, county, local – all encourage us to be prepared for an emergency. There are lots of things we can do to be prepared, and lots of things we can learn. As a life-long Scout, I love to help people learn to be more prepared.

So, nearly a year after I last did anything meaningful for either blog, I have come back. I imported all the posts from both blogs and edited the photos to make sure they are all the same size, for the posts that have images. I’m finishing three books that have been almost done for several years. My house is in better shape. I think I’m finally ready to focus on this, my chrome plated life.