Before I started this blog I had a full-time job for The Sun writing one review a week (and a review is not something I knock out in an hour), reporting and writing the Table Talk column, reporting and writing lifestyle and food stories you probably never noticed my byline on, as well as bits and pieces like "Store Openings." Not to mention getting art for all these things. I actually like doing the non-food writing because it keeps me from getting stale.

My workload increased enormously with the blog. Besides writing three or four posts a day, including weekends, and finding and uploading art for it, I have to deal each week with the hundreds of comments and hundreds of e-mails it generates, both from readers and PR people. While I'm writing fewer lifestyle stories these days, that in no way makes up for the extra workload. I'm not complaining. I love doing the blog.

Add to that the extra work I did for the blog to get ready for the week off, and I was wiped out by the time I was ready to go on vacation. If I had tried to fit in another review, I would have lost another evening to work. (Yes, eating out for the paper is work, although usually pleasant work.) I'm not sure when I would have done the writing except the weekend before.

When you do that, the vacation isn't really a vacation. It's just comp time.

Finally, there's the burn-out factor. I need time off from writing descriptions of meals I've eaten. You'll notice that in the blog entries I did on the trip I may have written about food, but I didn't describe the specific meals we ate. That was deliberate. I needed a vacation.

Here is my answer to his suggestion that I use a guest reviewer, by the way.