The Menu Board

In the last few months, I've found that it is increasingly dangerous to have a laptop on the kitchen counter in the presence of food preparations and a toddler.  I've also found myself being sucked in by the shiny screen and going off on recipe chases and toddler activity scavenger hunts and losing large amounts of time.   It is also the information center for many of my day-to-day activities: recipes, weather, calendar, communications.

As I try to balance a home, toddler, work and life in general, I'm finding that sometime this wonderful tool is more of a hindrance than a help.  As I work on finding balance, and in an effort to save it from getting a bath in strawberry jam,  my cute little netbook is getting grounded.  I'm trying really hard to only fire it up when either a) GBaby's asleep or b) it is a designated working time.  (Read: I'm hiding somewhere and HandyMan, or some other gracious soul, has eyes on the tot).

When I tried implementing this type of limit on myself in the past, it worked great for about 3 hours until I was setting out to prep a meal and needed a recipe online.  Then I'd jump on the computer really fast to pull it up.   Then since I was already on, I needed to check the weather and the news and blogs and, oh yeah, the calendar too to see if HandyMan is home for dinner tonight... You get the idea.

So, as a solution to this problem, as well as to encourage myself to more reading and less surfing, I recently got a new toy, er, I mean organizational tool. It has basic web capabilities which is great for pulling up those recipes.   So, I've added a new page to my little corner of the internet here: The Menu Board.  See the tab up at the top?  If you click, you'll find all the recipes that are on my menu for the week with links, and a few other categories of recipes that I like to have at my fingertips.  Think of it as a notepad you might find on my kitchen counter - because there's not much glamour or organization to the page [yet].  I've bookmarked the page on my new toy and have my recipes for the week one click away.

Someday I may take the time to actually organize it into one of those nifty Monday Menu posts, but for now, I'm keeping it simple!  So if you're in need of some menu inspiration, check it out and click around.  There's some yummy stuff there!