It’s a crazy time of the year in our household, and the CSA boxes are most definitely part of the insanity. Seeing as how I’m getting ready to attend my first BlogHer conference in a few weeks, I’ve had to practice my elevator speech when faced with the inevitable question: “What is your blog about?” Really, my blog is about four things:

• CSA and learning about eating local
• Cooking, heavily focused on crock pot and recipes featuring CSA box items
• Fitness – which will get louder as my marathon walk approaches, and…
• Balance (which also includes my random musings about parenthood, things that bug me, etc.)

As we looked over this week’s CSA box contents, both DH and I were meh about the whole thing. Dear Lord, do there have to be still more cucumbers that I don’t want to deal with?! (The cosmic punchline being that my sister handed me a bag with four ginormous cukes today, insisting that I should “do whatever [I] want as long as they don’t come back home with [her]”. Her garden is overrun by cucumbers of considerable size.) So, we didn’t order the box. And then, when dh went to the farm stand today with the kids, he returned with some more blueberries, some raspberries and a half-pint of their SO DELICIOUS cherry tomatoes (which were gobbled up over the course of dinner). I queried him about whether we were going back tomorrow to do a MYO box, and he responded that the selection was only so-so. There wasn’t much that he was excited about, and the selection “wasn’t that good”.

Well, hmm.

This is an interesting turn of events. We’re not required to work from a box, because we didn’t purchase one, and there’s not much that’s exciting at the local farm. Sure, I could hit up the grocery store, but they’ve already telegraphed what they have that’s local, and the list is short and undistinguished. I could go to Whole Foods and hope they have more to offer, but I’m just not feeling it this week. I think it comes down to three problems:

• The opt-in weekly program doesn’t require us to participate
• The selection isn’t inspiring a MYO
• My head’s so far into BlogHer that it’s, ironically, not into the CSA game

And this is where I laugh a bit. While it’s going to be a bone of contention with some PR folks at the conference, I’m sure, that I haven’t selected only ONE core competency to make the focus of my blog, the blog really represents who I am. I’m trying to figure out what it means to eat more local foods – what the cost is to our budget versus the cost to the greater good (health, the environment, the local economy, etc.). I’m a food-lover, and I grew up in a culture that places very high importance on good-tasting food. So, of course, if I’m going to talk about what will become ingredients for recipes, why not talk about the recipes, too? Thus, the cooking.

What about the fitness? Well, I’m sorry if it seems a bit silly, but I think it’s a big deal to walk 26.2 miles, and it’s not something I think anyone should attempt lightly. I learned quite a bit from web sites and friends about what I need to do to prepare, and I’m trying to pay back some of that goodwill by posting about my experiences training and walking, so some other n00b doesn’t go into their first marathon completely unprepared.

And “balance”? “Blather”? Yeah, yeah. My head is filled with all kinds of knowledge, both potentially classifiable as useless (such as how the Washington Redskins came to be known by that name) and useful (such as the critical differences between the European Union and the United States that will make it easier for the US to weather continued global recession). Sometimes I just feel the need to get stuff off my chest. If it bugs you, don’t worry. Just go look at the Chocolate Chip Muffins recipe or something, and all will be right with your world.

In other words there will be no CSA post this week…but I’m still very busy lining things up for BlogHer such that I should (hopefully) very soon have even more interesting things that will help bolster what I’m already doing. So, stay tuned…