wow. it’s been a while.

I’ve become one of those bloggers I love to hate—the ones who swoop in every few months with the “I’m so busy” excuse. So…here I am, and yes, I’ve been extremely busy!

We hosted the family meal for the first time on Mother’s Day. This was quite an occasion, fitting everyone into our tiny condo. I think it turned out great, and I had fun trying several new dishes. The menu included bacon cheddar deviled eggs, buttermilk biscuits with honey butter and some homemade strawberry jam that some sweet friends gave us, asparagus with parmesan-basil butter, rosemary mashed potatoes, and a ham with bourbon-maple-pecan glaze. Dessert was a very rich chocolate cake with dark chocolate cream cheese frosting and homemade vanilla ice cream.

Yum.

It was really nice having RH’s family and my mom all together in our place for the first time. It was definitely worth it, and I’m looking forward to the next time we get to host!

In other big news, I got a new camera! And it’s not just any camera. I’ve finally made the leap to a full-frame sensor dSLR. And since I’m a very loyal Canon user, I got the camera I’ve been dreaming of for many moons now…the 5D Mark II. Because my walkabout lens for the 30D won’t fit the new camera, I also had to get a lens, so I got the kit lens and have my hands on L glass for the first time.

And it’s awesome.

I’m seriously loving the new cam, and I’ll be posting my beloved 30D and some accessories for sale when we return from vacation. Oh yes, vacation! We leave in a little over a day for…Hawaii! It’s one of my favorite places on earth, and I’m so excited about sharing it with RH.

For those of you who may be new to my blog, let me go ahead and clear this up for you: no, I’m not Hawaiian.

I just love Hawaii. It feels like home. I’ve been three times (I think?) and every time I have to fight myself to get on the plane and come home.

RH and I will be spending two nights in Honolulu, four nights on Maui, and four nights on my favorite of the islands, the Big Island. I know it’s a lot of hopping around, and we will certainly leave a lot unseen, but that just means we’ll have to go back, right?

In anticipation of our trip, and in recognition of the fact that I am a total slacker blogger who probably should just consider shuttering this thing (did I hear a “don’t do it!”? or was that a “why the heck did it take you so long?”)—I’ve started myself a tumblelog. I am not abandoning my little home at sweetfrenchtoast; I see microblogging as filling a completely different need. But since I can’t seem to keep up with this on a regular basis, I thought a tumblelog might be more manageable and fun. And what better time to start than when we’re leaving on a jet plane?

So, without any further blathering on like the sleep-deprived woman that I am, I present to you pretty delicious. Note the URL, which is not a dotcom but is instead one of those clever URLs that uses the TLD (that’s “top-level domain”) to spell something out. I promise I’m not trying that hard, but the dotcom was already taken.

Those who know me well know that I love pretty things, and even those who don’t know me that well know that I love delicious things, so I thought it was a fitting name.

Anyway, that’s all for now. The next time you hear from me I’ll probably be screaming “aloha!”