warning: as addictive as heroin ...

Ok, so I hinted in my Mother's Day weekending post about a new internet addiction of mine ... forget blogging, this has become my guilty pleasure before bedtime each night since that fateful day my "invitation" to join arrived - and join I did.  Dear God, I'm exhausted from all the late nights surfing this site - but I just can't to stop myself!  Only Dana knows my pain for sure since she's the guilty one who fed me this addiction, but is there anyone else who's recently been consumed by this wonderful place, this online nirvana ...

It's basically an online profile made up of virtual bulletin boards that I customize, manage, and share with others.  Folks on pinterest share images.  Just images.  Things that inspire them.  Anything from quotes to gorgeous photos of children, clothing, architecture, landscape, you name it, it's there.  It's a veritable smorgasborg of deliciousness - and I bit in hook line and sinker.  In setting up a profile, you create customizable "boards" and "pin" them with your very favorite images.  When I started 2 weeks ago, I created 7 boards that I'm perpetually adding "pins" to - I've customized them into categories: weddings, travel, style, design, photography, food/recipes, and quotes.  As images get "repinned" within the community, they appear in a news feed of recently pinned items.  Naturally, with hundreds of thousands (?) of members in the pinterest community, that news feed is constantly changing ...

By the time you reach the bottom of the page (like a mile down the page) and hit the refresh key, the entire feed has updated ... hence the addiction ... oh, i'll just take one more peek ... and suddenly it's midnight.  As part of my addiction recovery, I am starting to streamline what I see.  You can see in the upper left of the above image that you can filter the news feed to reveal only certain categories, such as design, art, food, etc.  You can also "follow" other pinterest members and limit your news feed to only what those members are pinning.  This is what I've had to start doing because scrolling through the main newsfeed is so darned ... well ... addictive.  I now try my best to follow only Dana and a couple of others, as well as a handful design bloggers who are well-established on pinterest.  When I see an image that I especially like, any one of them can be "repinned" onto one of my own boards.  My total number of "pins" is about to hit 200 ... did I mention how addictive this place is?!  My homepage, where you can see only my boards, looks like this ...

Can you see all of those beautiful thumbnails of gorgeous places and spaces I've been pinning?!  I swoon with each and every one - inspired to redecorate my whole house, travel to exotic locations, be an amazing photographer, dress myself with oodles of style, churn out delicious recipes one after the other ... well, you get the idea.  Fortunately, I also have a board dedicated only to "inspiration", a place to pin quotes that really speak to me - things intended to make me smile or to keep me grounded.  Or both ...

Ha!  Sad, funny, and true all at once!  Note to self: reading that every now and again is also going to be an important step in my addiction recovery ...