Just a quick note that I am still alive, out in Arizona now and recovering from a wicked stomach virus that hit my daughter and then me. If any of you should find yourselves in Phoenix and in need of urgent medical care for your child, I can recommend Phoenix Children’s Hospital. I’m hoping to have a regular post up later today.

Also, there have been some questions regarding how comments work here. If you’ve had an approved comment here before, then your future comments are posted without moderation, although I do see them as they come in. The exception is comments with links – any comment with external links in it is held for moderation, so on Thursday, when I was traveling all day, a few comments were held for over 24 hours while I was offline. I also use a spam filter on comments and for whatever reason, it takes a dislike to certain users, so if you’ve posted legitimate comments and haven’t seen them on the site, that may be the reason why. Just keep trying.

Thanks…

I’ll be offline starting on January 9th, running through the 16th, for vacation. I’ll keep an eye on comments here, but won’t be posting on this site or writing for ESPN.com. Thanks.

As the year comes to a close, I wanted to take a moment to thank those of you who’ve chosen to visit this blog, whether it’s to lurk, to comment, or even to buy something by clicking through to amazon.com. I started the blog as an outlet for some food-related writing for which I didn’t have a proper outlet, and it’s grown in scope and audience beyond anything I expected. I’ll end December with over 10,000 unique visitors and over 150,000 hits for the month, and I can’t tell you what it means to know that I’m reaching that kind of audience.

So thank you all for coming, talking, buying, critiquing, suggesting, and cooking. The more you visit, the more it drives me to write. I wish all of you a happy, safe, and prosperous New Year.