Sunday, December 03, 2006

NaBloPoMo


Some of you may have noticed that I posted every day in November.
I was kinda sorta participating (without officially signing up for it) in a blogosphere challenge.

The experience of a daily post was much like:

Feeding a brandied fruit starter (which I did in the 1970's).
which was similar to:

Feeding a Never-Ending quick-rise bread sponge (also popular about the same time).
Can't find a link to this, but it's much like the brandied fruit starter. The starter sponge wasn't a small bit of bubbling live culture for (yummy) sourdough bread that could be tucked away in a warm, dark corner of the kitchen to 'do its thing'.

This sponge, with each weekly addition of flour, sugar and water - begat another full-sized recipe of soft batter. There was enough in each batch for baking into one or more loaves of sweet white bread (tasty, but no big whoop). At the time, no one in our family could eat as much bread (not even with it being fresh-baked and slathered with soft creamery butter!) as this stuff yielded.

The major difference between the two 'feeders' is that the fruit concoction was contained in one large glass jar and feeding the bread resulted in an increasing number of bowls of fermenting bread dough all over the kitchen. The quantity of dough grew to such proportions that it threatened to take over the fridge/ kitchen/ adjoining rooms/ house.

Many a Domestic Diva in the 70's & 80's happily accepted a small baggy of this innocent-looking starter from like-minded bread baking friends without foreseeing the inevitable consequence, which was becoming slave to the mixture. Towards the end of its run in my kitchen, friends would turn tail when I offered them yet another little batch of this 'lovely bread starter'...

I finally rid myself of bread starter the same way I got out of the brandied fruit cycle: I quit feeding 'em and kill the damned things off. Sans guilt.

Back to the NaBloPoMo challenge.
I took it on as a personal goal, met it - and am now very happy indeed to see the back of it. Posting every dang day was too much like feeding brandied fruit and bread sponge. The commitment ended up being more of a drag than not.

Having successfully completed NaBloPoMo (arrrrgh, it's such an awkward acronym, isn't it?), I'm returning to the day (or two or more) breather between posts.

To be sure, I will once again enjoy writing the posts the way I did before NaBloPoMo.

BTW: HD suggested I 'refresh' my blogger create-a-post page, and doing that brought back the toolbar I thought was lost forever. Huzzah! for techno input from the otherwise very-low-tech HD!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

So Didja win?
Didja Win!!!
You won in my book, girl!

I loved the fruit cuz you could get high...my mom loved it, too!