The Duped Project: An Introduction

The other night, my husband surprised me. We were winding down for the evening, getting ready for that much-anticipated time of the day when both our girls are sleeping and we are still awake. Grown-up time. At this exact moment, one kid was down for the count and the other was getting seriously heavy-lidded, and hubs says, "I have a surprise for you. Guess what we are watching next." Insert a lot of very bad guessing on my part. The answer, as it turns out, was the movie "Julie & Julia," which was exciting for me because I had mentioned that I wanted to watch it a few days prior and hubby had remembered and found it on TV. Can we say brownie points? Atta boy.

So we watched. And because he is the amazing, empowering, encouraging spouse that he is, he says, "You can do that with your blog!" Eh? What's that you say? I couldn't hear you over my own eyes rolling. Excuse me, superman, but I can't do that! She did over 500 recipes in a year! That's, like, 2 a day, most days. I'm lucky if I shower every day.

"Well, what about one a week?"
"Maybe. MAYBE. But what would I do? What would be my goal?"
"Do what you already do. Find ways to do something yourself instead of buying a ready-made product."

Ok, so admittedly I do find a lot of pleasure in doing this. I hate the idea that I have to pay someone exponentially more for something I could have easily accomplished myself. And I relish showing them I am, in fact, highly capable of removing their middle-man tushes from my life. Not that there isn't a time and place for buying a good frozen pizza, for example, but knowing that I could have made the pizza completely from scratch is very satisfying (or maybe that was the extra slice of pepperoni...).

2012 is still a new year, so with 52 weeks in a year, I set a goal for myself: 50 projects in 50 weeks. With one week of this year already gone, my resolution still leaves me a 7 day vacation. Gulp. Can I do it? Sure, why not. I do this stuff already! But what am I going to call this project? Do It Yourself. Over done. Hey I can do that? Too cheesy. Wait, what did hubby say? "So many of the things we do, we do because we don't want to be duped." I like. So here it is. Welcome to the Duped Project, Week 1.

A note on how this will work: If you want to see all the posts on this site for Duped Project, just click the tab at the top. If you want to see them sorted by subject, there's a tab for that too. If you want to follow me, click that button on the bottom. If you want to send me cookies, just let me know, and I will surely make arrangements.

I hope you'll follow me. Maybe I'll have resounding success like Julie did. It was a real story after all. Maybe by the time I ring in the new year again, I'll have fans galore. Or maybe I will just send off my projects into the sunset. I hope not, because that seriously decreases my likelihood of actually finishing this crazy thing. Either way, I will have accomplished my goal. I will have told off those middle-men and all their preservatives and their synthetics and their high-fructose poly-carbonate pre-washed for your convenience bull. That makes me a winner. Right?

I'm crazy to do this. Lordy.