Looking back at 2007

... is near. What happened this year? I know that nearly nothing happened in the last 5 days when I was sick; typical to get sick on your vacation isn't? That is just the worst of luck.

But back to 2007. Some highlights:
We started this blog on April 28. Nearly 10 000 visits since we started counting, probably a thousand photos and images, 600+ posts about everything from stamps, travels, Tour de France, steam locomotives, crapshots, music, to Bionicle and horses. Swedish design versus made in China, funny youTube videos, and ponderings about the meaning of it all - it is all here...

I turned 40 (= it makes no difference it feels the same) and PP got a birthday train in August. This is also the year where I think I officially transformed from being a person interested in food to a real food-crazy person (PP had some influence in this, thanks!). Now I really think about what we buy and cook and eat. As much as possible is local, organic, small-scale tasty, and good. I read books on the ethics of food production (never another Tyson chicken in this house!), food travels in China, road food travels in the US, biographies of food writers, food in Paris, and the ethnobotany of spices and herbs. What used to be a chore ("Mom, what's for dinner?"), has transformed into something important and fun.

We grew plants in our garden in the wet summer, and we grew pests in our garden too (molds, rusts, smuts, moles, rabbits, deers, groundhogs, caterpillars - you name it and we had it). It was the year of garden warfare and we lost all peas and beans and most of the cucumbers to non-human digestion. The moles are still at it, eating our lawn right now. PP and I did build one bird house that was immediately occupied by some wrens. Oh, we did a mouse house too.

We cooked, among other things lobsters, tomato sauce, pickles and tomatillo salsa, Thanksgiving dinner, Roasted Chicken and Squash, oysters (ok, raw! not cooked), the best tomato-mozzarella tart, and fried chicken a la Whistle Stop Cafe. Tonight we are having raw oysters and fried flounder.

Meals out I remember well: Curtis BBQ (Vermont), Via Ponte (New Jersey), Fore Street (Maine), and T J Buckley's (Vermont, which I really need to blog about!).

We traveled to many places, like Chicago, Yellowstone, New Hampshire (and drove up on top of Mt. Washington to see Canada), Vermont, Maine, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and St. Louis.

We stayed in New Jersey too and hiked the mountains, saw Cape May, Swedesboro, the postoffice of Buttzville, found a Whistle bottle in the forest, visited the translucent American Glass Museum, and the little known New Sweden.

And this is my favorite blogphoto this year (thanks, O.K.!).