Priorities...

I've only been in school for 4 days, and I've been absolutely drained. Homework has started to pile up, and I've been getting more and more tired. Last year, I could make it to midnight before I started getting grumpy and frustrated at the textbooks and worksheets. Now? By ten at night, I'm already yawning and dozing off. I don't even get grumpy anymore - I just skip that stage. My eyelids start to droop, and I'm ready to snuggle under blankets and rest my head on my pillow - any pillow, really. But there's still homework to be done, so I push on. I'll go eat something sugary for energy. Perhaps a fruit cup, or a piece of chocolate. Hopefully, this is just the transition from summer to school.I really don't want this to be a whole year thing.

I didn't think that the transition would be so hard. The last week of summer, I woke up at 5 and went to bed at 8 or 9. I thought I would be prepared. Prepared to wake up early. Prepared to have energy for the morning classes. After the second morning, I could barely get out of bed.

I used to cook every Friday, after school and Red Cross Club was over. This past Friday, I ate a snack and pulled the covers over my head and dozed away. This year is different. It's tiring. Even more tiring than last year.

Osmanthus and white peach macarons I made this summer

 (Pretty picture but no recipe...)

Before summer ended, I planned ahead and prepared some posts ahead of time. I reasoned that if I was overly tired, I could press the "Publish" button and still manage to post on a regular basis. Last Thursday, I was looking at my back up selection and found faults with every single on of the posts. Either the tone I was writing in and/or the photographs were just... not right. They didn't meet my standards. Either there was too much glare on the photos, or the food styling looked queer. The ones with good photographs were oh-so-coincidentally the ones with recipes I made up and didn't record. My tone was either too hyper or too normal. I understand that I'm still growing as a food blogger. I knew I was trying to find my voice, but I had no idea that my tone was so varied.

 Lemon Curd 

recipe: yes 

photograph: a little too gloppy and too much glare

In August, I submitted a few photos to tastespotting, and my page views soared. In July, I had around 300. In August, I had more than 2000! That's more than double, triple, or even quadruple of my previous month's page views. It excited me. On my statistics page, I saw this huge spike on my page views graph. I used to have about 10 page views a day (if I was lucky. sometimes, it was 0). Now, I have around 50 a day. (I started this blog in Jan.) I know I have to work hard to get and keep an audience. In the summer, I had the time and energy to go outside, set up a backdrop and take numerous photos of food. Now? I barely even want to cut up my own watermelon! It's too heavy, too time consuming...I have to wash things afterward... I could spend the time doing this worksheet or that worksheet... I want to spend as much time on school work and music as possible! I don't want my grades to suffer because I spent too much time on taking the perfect food photo, or perfecting that potato chip recipe. However, I do want to keep this website up. I've spent tons of time on it, and I'm no quitter. So, I'm prioritizing on school work and putting this blog on the back burner. I've decided to post less frequently, but keep the quality up. After all, that is what they teach you at school - Quantity doesn't matter, Quality does.