(Note: weekly menu’s at the bottom, even though this Saturday’s post isn’t about food.)

I envy scrapbookers. I envy their shelves of creative memory markers, the hours they spend enjoying their creative process as they clip, crop and embellish. I have a scrapbook or two, and every now and again I’ll sit down and create a few pages. Truth is, I suck at scrapbooking. I get bored. I lack commitment. I get tired of cute. It’s just not ever going to be my thing.

Knowing this about me, you might guess that starting a blog was my answer to having scrapbook longings. For about five minutes I considered writing that story, pretending on the one year anniversary of starting jenny’s lark that it was part of some big creative plan.

My mama had no patience for lying, though. (“Jennifer, you and I both know those are not Elizabeth Early’s cigarettes that I found in your purse.”) Even though a physicist didn’t speak at her funeral, I know there are enough remnants of Betty Larkey nearby to reach through the karmasphere and knock me on my rear end for telling a big whopper of a lie. So here’s the real story:

A year ago I was filling out my online yearbook page for my 25th Princeton reunion. I decided to leave the section labeled “Personal Website” blank, partly because I hadn’t used or updated jenniferbalink.com in several years and mostly because I hover near the bottom of the achievement scale among my fellow class of ’87 Tigers.

But what if some enterprising and curious classmate looked at my email address (@jenniferbalink.com), had nothing better to do, and wandered into my years-out-of-date old site? The site was built for my consulting business, which I left behind when one of my clients hired me. I didn’t need that kind of site anymore, so what the hell was I going to do?

“Hey,” I said to myself, “you could whip up a WordPress site and put some photos on it and write about the last 25 ordinary years.”

And so I have a blog.

Happy week.

jennyslark weekly menu 6313