Pin It!

    The topic of social networking has come up time and time again through school, newspapers, blogs, television, etc. There's Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the list goes on and on. But in the last year or so, a new form of internet entertainment has emerged. I'm sure most of you have heard of the website Pinterest, but if you haven't, it's basically the ideal website for those of us who: A. ADORE being an extreme packrat and B. Enjoy procrastinating through browsing random internet articles and pictures.
    For those of you who don't know, on www.pinterest.com, you have "boards" on which you can "pin" random articles, pictures, ideas, sayings, really anything, that you would like to come back to. You can browse what other people pin, it's enough to keep me entertained for hours while I should be doing something more productive. Most of what I pin consists of either really amazing outfits I wish I owned, interesting ideas I had never thought of before, or recipes that look delicious beyond belief.
   I got to a point where I realized I was wasting WAY too much time on this website. While I found many articles extremely interesting, recipes to be enticing, and outfits to be dazzling, none of it was real. I could pin these things all I wanted, but in the end, it didn't amount to anything in the real world. So, I decided to make a compromise with myself. I would allow myself to go on Pinterest for a modest amount of time, as long as I actually DID the things that I pinned on the addicting website.
   So far, I've been pretty good about this compromise. Examples: I once pinned the fact that if you write a letter to your favorite Disney princess and send it to Walt Disney World Communications, you will receive a lovely post card back. My Cinderella post card now hangs proudly on my bulletin board. I also once pinned a recipe that looked far too beautiful and complicated for me to ever achieve for an Apple Braid. It involved braiding bread dough. But by golly, I did it, and it was delicious.
   Now that I actually take some of these virtual "pins" and put them into real-life actions, I feel so much more accomplished when I'm supposedly "wasting" time on the internet. Maybe it's just justifying wasting time, but hey, when the apple braid, lemon bars, cinnamon pull-apart bread, or WHATEVER you happen to "pin" tastes good, I say EAT IT!