Young @ Heart

I've been a fan of John Green's work ever since I was in my early teens. Outside of my circle of friends, not many people knew of his work. It was disheartening at the time, because his work always struck a chord with me and I wanted everyone to hear that chord. I wanted people to understand what I was talking about. And then The Fault in Our Stars came out, and he rose to worldwide fame overnight. I became a crotchety old hipster. I was mad that people had jumped on the bandwagon that I had tried to get them on from the get go. I felt like people were just focusing on this one success and not on the ones he had had before. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the book and saw the movie when it was released (and bawled my eyes out). Then I slowly stopped reading for fun, life got in the way, and I had broken away from the Nerdfighter community (more on how I got back to it here ). And then for my birthday, my boyfriend had pre-ordered John's newest book Turtles All The Way Down. I w...

I've always been fascinated with recipes and cooking. However, I get irrationally irritated by recipe blog posts. I don't like scrolling through a novel, complete with step by step pictures, on how you came to a recipe. All I really care about is the recipe. The story is a great part of it, but that's not ultimately why I'm there. As a result, I've decided to pilot this on my blog. I'll write up the recipe in one blog post and, in another, I'll go into the story behind the recipe. My methodology behind cooking is KISS: keep it simple stupid. I invest in ingredients that are as close to their natural state as I can get. I do still enjoy my unhealthy, processed stuff and get my cravings but I'm trying to be more cognizant of what I put in my body. I'm far from perfect, but I try to keep it balanced and keep it simple.

This past Christmas marked the second that my boyfriend and I had been together. While we have spent the holiday itself with family, we usually carve out time to have a little Christmas of our own. He told me that he had wanted to buy something for me but, for reasons he couldn't get into, he needed my email because there was a survey that each person had to do before this thing could be bought. I thought nothing of it because I wanted to be surprised. Then, when the moment finally came, he asked, as a Christmas present, if I would want to go to Nerd Con: Nerdfighteria.  Needless to say, I was surprised. At the time, I wasn't sure if I wanted to go to Nerd Con. In recent years, there was a part of me that thought I was getting "too old" and "too cool" to be a Nerdfighter. I had started to focus on other things and while I still watched the vlogbrothers  it was an occasional video. I instead turned to the Dear Hank and John  podcast. But after a coup...