Let's try this again – Jessy Logues v. 2.0

More than a year after I started this pitiful excuse for a blog, I'm going to try this again in a slightly new format, focusing on three content areas (only one of which is stolen from Elizabeth Gilbert):

1. Eat: I love eating, whether it involves me attempting to cook or trying a new restaurant or an old favorite. I have odd rules about what I eat that don't make sense to anyone but me. I'm a recovering ambivalent vegetarian and a social carnivore, but more on that later. In this part of my blog, I want to share recipes as well as restaurant reviews, which also might help me start Yelping more often. This may or may not be inspired by The Pioneer Woman and the Tennessee Home & Farm Recipe Center.

2. Read: I read a lot. I couldn't live without Google Reader (though I'm quite confused about how this is affected by the recently launched Google Buzz), where I read my favorite blogs, newspapers, magazines and RSS feeds. Twitter is probably a close second, since I am constantly clicking links related to everything from new media to farming for my job. As a magazine editor, I obviously have a passion for periodicals, though I'm partially responsible for the downfall of my industry – I subscribe to fewer magazines than I have in recent history – actually, the same number of magazines than I edit. (Our household receives Rolling Stone, Newsweek, National Geographic and ESPN; I work on the Tennessee Farm Bureau magazine, the Illinois Farm Bureau magazine, a Tennessee electric company magazine and the magazine for FFA members.) I know that our industry is moving online, but I just can't help but enjoy holding a product in my hand and flipping the print pages. Even more shocking: I love to read BOOKS. Yes, real books. So I might throw book reviews in here too. (If I don't give myself goals, we'll have a repeat of my 2009 blogging efforts or lack thereof.)

3. Play: The catch-all portion of the blog. Will have some holdover of the travelogues I was planning to write before my job stopped requiring travel. Also encompassed here will be any new adventures, like my recent skydiving experience; concerts and other events around Nashville that I happen to attend; and since I've decided to include restaurant reviews and book reviews, I might as well throw movie reviews in here too. I took Reviewing & Criticism in college, so I might as well use what I learned.

I'm going to try to remember to blog more than once every six months. Goal: Twice a week.

Kudos to Jessica Balances for encouraging me to blog. And to Jessica Mozo for making me realize that if she can blog despite being busy with two young children, I can start a blog despite being busy with an awesome job and a cat.

Oh, that reminds me: I'll probably be blogging about my cat. Because I am that person.

So, I finally started a blog.

I've been meaning to start a blog for a while now. I just always get to that page where it asks you to come up with a name for your blog, and I ponder it for a while, come up with a bunch of great ideas that are already taken (e.g., ihatethewordblog.blogspot.com) and then inevitably give up.

But I've finally gotten past that step, and here I am. I hear that the best blogs need to have a niche, but this one is going to have two:

1. Travelogues: My job involves traveling to communities, most of which I've never visited before.

2. Dialogues on new media: I feel like I graduated a little early and missed out on some of the cool stuff that's happened in the past two and a half years, but in the past month I've become addicted to Twitter, deleted my MySpace account (talk about freeing), joined GoodReads and signed up for a dozen Google blog alerts. I dig Digg and Last.fm, but I plan to explore stuff like Technorati, Mixx, de.licio.us and other sites I haven't really checked out yet.

So, that's me in a nutshell. Sure, I've blogged a little for work, but bear with me. This is definitely a learning experience.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy!