Bad Blogger! 

Umm, you may have noticed my sudden disappearance of late, and instead of hoping that you haven't, I figured I'd come clean and tell you what's been keeping me from blogging: the 2008 edition of the 7 Nights Guide to Restaurants and Bars, and exercise.

How is our dining guide preventing me from blogging? Well, it's not, really. It's just that part of my job is to make sure we have correct information for the 680+ restaurants that are listed in the guide, and right now, this means making an awful lot of phone calls. (We did send a mailing to each restaurant trying to get them to take the DIY approach, but 426 of 'em didn't send it back!)

Exercise. Getting paid to eat for a living is awesome, until you step on a scale, that is. Since I work all the time and don't have extra cash kicking around for funtastic classes or gym memberships, I finally realized that I had to get my butt in gear without spending any money or leaving my house. How? By using the resources I already have, which in this case consist of a steep staircase. So far I'm doing my new "running up and down the stairs routine" three mornings a week, and it's a doozy. When that part gets easier, I'm going to start carrying partially filled gallon jugs, too. (Got any clever home workout tips? Please let me know!) The bonus is that my cat  thinks this is a really cool game.

Problem is, I do my a.m. workout during the same stretch of time that I used to spend reading the news, checking my email and generally coming up with cool stuff to blog about.

Once the dining guide project starts winding down in a few weeks, I'm convinced I'll be able to manage both exercising and blogging. Until then, I'll probably be kind of inconsistent.