So my friend Mags will soon be leaving Louisville and moving back to her beloved New Orleans. While I'm super happy for her I'm bummed that in a few months I'll have to pay shipping like everyone else when I want to buy her very cool art. My latest purchase? This great Obama shirt.

A couple nights ago B and I walked to dinner. She was wearing an Obama t-shirt, one from the campaign, and she was quite the conversation starter. We could barely go five feet without someone saying "I like your shirt" or "Cool shirt" or "Go Obama!" etc. I was a little envious. "I want an Obama shirt dammit, but a cooler one, a more artistic one." In comes Mags. Not only is her shirt awesome but by purchasing it I'm supporting an independent artist and supporting the Obama campaign (Mags is donating part of the purchase price).

The big ass win in North Carolina plus the really good showing in Indiana has re-energized me toward the campaign and I'm going to send another small donation. I can't freaking wait to stroll down Bardstown Road with this kick ass Obama shirt on. Did I mention that HRC's Louisville campaign headquarters are on Bardstown Road?

Kids you too can be cool like this buy ordering the Obama stencil shirt from the art by mags etsy store. If you're not in Louisville you're almost guaranteed to be the only one in your town wearing one, which will of course make you even more awesome than you already are.

I have a lot going on at the moment and I'm excited by much of it so I feel like sharing.

First there is my possible conversion to Judaism. That's obviously a major thing in my life though I've not spoken about it much with anyone other than B, a new friend on the west coast and actually an old friend on the west coast. It's not that I'm afraid of response or ashamed or anything like that. More, it's been very intense for me personally to be going from someone who bordered on anti-religious for many years to now feel very strongly that joining a religion may be the right course of action for me and I haven't quite known how to speak of it. And though I feel that this path is the right one for me to be on I am not 100% certain that I'll actually convert so the language and ways of discussing this are a little strange. I'm not yet a Jew, I'm not yet on the official conversion path. At this point I'm just reading, studying, speaking with a rabbi, thinking a great deal and spending a lot of time being introspective about the kind of person I want to be and the kind of life I want to live.

After the personal, religious stuff there is the work. I am blessed with work at the moment. Work that I'm enjoying and work that I'm passionate about in large measure. That is an incredible feeling. The list of projects I'm working on is long and varied so I'm just going to hit some highlights in no particular order. You'll notice a high number of projects with the word "Louisville" in their titles. What can I tell you? I love this town.

• Consuming Louisville celebrated its first birthday recently and is going strong. It sounds cheesy to say but I feel good about the work I do with Consuming Louisville. Each time someone tells me they went to an event or tried a restaurant because they read about it on Consuming Louisville I feel like I'm actually contributing something to the community and that is a great feeling.
• Imagine Louisville is a project that I'm so excited about but I'm afraid I'm not smart enough, creative enough or talented enough to pull it off in the way that I want to and not being able to pull it off in the way that I want to means that it might not be a long term project. I hate to fail but I'd really hate to fail at something like this. Essentially Imagine Louisville is a blog I'm writing and outreach efforts I'm doing to fill the blank slate of Louisville's impression with smart, creative people outside the region. In other words when people outside our region think of Louisville they don't seem to have much of an idea what Louisville is actually like. They might think Bourbon or they might not. They might think sports or they might not. Imagine Louisville wants them to think: great arts, culture, music and restaurant scenes. Imagine Louisville wants them to think supportive community for business and entrepreneurism. Imagine Louisville wants them to see the good balance of progressives and conservatives, religious and secular, industry and technology that we've got here. Imagine Louisville wants them to see what a great place this is to live and do business or take a vacation or spend a foodie weekend.  So yeah, it's an ambitious project and one that I think has to be looked at with really long term goals. I don't know if I'll get the opportunity to make and work toward those long term goals and that makes me a little sad. I could just be pessimistic for no reason so I should move on.
• Forge Louisville is a neat project that is trying to build up and strengthen the startup community in Louisville. We've got a lot of small startups, lots of individual entrepreneurs and many potentially high growth startups here (we've got biotech through the roof) and Forge Louisville is trying to bring the community together and promote it and help it grow. I write, near daily, for Forge Louisville's website about happenings in the startup community here.
• Louisville.com is well, Louisville.com. It's obviously a place people go for info about Louisville. They share some content with Louisville Magazine and have original content as well. A couple times a week I write posts about the food and restaurant scene in Louisville. Let me tell you, this is a fun gig. I love eating out so much anyway now I have a legitimate reason to try new places and think of fun restaurant projects. Next week I'm hosting a taste test comparing pies from a couple beloved dessert shops in town. How fun is that? So fun.
• VuPal is a startup. They're building online communities around lifestyle passions. They've hired me to write about food. Dude, I'm getting paid to write about food. So awesome. It's good that I'm getting paid to write about food because I think about food and cooking and baking all the time these days. I'm baking my way through Dorie Greenspan's book Baking: From My Home to Yours and loving every moment of it.
• I've always been shooting quite a bit and have updated my portfolio. I'm proud of some of the photography I've been doing and I'm really enjoy shooting more than I have in a while.

And that's pretty much what I've got going on at the moment. I'm talking with some people about other potential projects that I'm excited about but they're in far too early stages to be spoken of out loud. It's a really exciting time for me work wise but a little scary too. I have opportunities in different areas so I have to decide what direction I want my career to go in. That's a great choice to have, I just need like, a really smart adviser to discuss it all over with.

Now, to the shower and then to peruse Baking: From My Home to Yours to select what I'm going to bake this weekend. Happy Friday, Good Shabbos.