By Way of Introduction...

So, hey, Internet. Welcome to my blog. 

Fair warning: I'm not sure precisely what the first post of a new blog is supposed to look like. I don't frequent many blogs, and I've never created one myself, so this will all go up in smoke in a hot, New York-minute if we're not careful. So let's play it by the book and do what seems natural: maybe a few words of introduction to get us started? Enough for you to get to know me, but not so much that you start to feel an urge to leave. 

The good news is I'm a pretty easy guy to sum up. My name is David, I'm forty-something years old, and I'd rather play an attorney on TV than be an attorney in real life (since I live in Texas and not California, you can probably figure out how that preference panned out). Piña coladas are fine when on a beach, getting caught in the rain is awful, and I'm usually pretty-tired-but-not-that-tired by midnight. If it would help you to have a mental picture, you can imagine shadowy eyes, a rugged frame, a silky voice, and--most importantly--a glorious, full head of hair. That picture won't be me, but imagining things is fun and it'd be nice if you played along. 

Assuming I've now hit the right balance between casual curiosity and slight disinterest, I should probably get down to explaining what this whole blog thing is all about. The "nutshell" is pretty simple: Over the past year, I've discovered I have a real passion for, and interest in, boozy concoctions. It's a new hobby for me, and I thought it would be a lot of fun to keep track of the things I'm trying and the experiences I'm having. My wife thought the same thing, with the added twist of letting everyone else in the world read along, and... yadda, yadda, yadda, I'm a blogger. 

I'm vaguely aware of the fact that there are about a bajillion cocktail/drinking blogs already out there, and it would be fair to question my ability to bring anything new to the mix. If I thought very much about that question, I would probably avoid this endeavor altogether. Instead, I'm choosing to ignore my own redundancy and forge ahead into the great unknown. Because most of this subject is the "great unknown" to me. In my next post (See? I've already planned what my 2nd post to my first-ever blog will be! If that doesn't scream "professional," what does?), I will explain why so much of this is new to me. But, for now, you can interpret the title of my blog as my mission statement: To blog about cocktails from the perspective of an absolute (or, at least, relative) noob. 

I really don't want to overstay my welcome on my very first post, so I will close here with a hint of what to expect. I plan to post to the blog at least once per week (and rarely more than that). In each post, I want to talk about a single new cocktail I tried, giving some background about the cocktail, why I tried it, and what I thought of it. I may also devote an occasional post to a particular spirit rather than a specific cocktail. I don't promise to have any information you can't find somewhere else, but I do promise to try to make it entertaining and share my own perspective. My target audience is:

1. People who are new to cocktails and want to explore along with me;
2. People who are cocktail pros but think they might enjoy following someone else's journey;
3. People like the #2 people, but who really just want to make fun of the noob; and
4. People so bored at work they can't stand it and would rather be anywhere else.

If you've stayed with me this far, maybe you're one of my people. Or maybe you're just hate-browsing, which is okay, too. In any event, I sincerely thank you for your time, and I hope you will return.