Some hurt more than others

I am a junkie for words. I'm subscribed to, like, 2,000 RSS feeds and I typically spend the first 7 hours of each workday reading news, blogs, commentary, reviews, whatever. But there are only few sites that I always read as soon as they update, and Hermitude in NYC was one of them.

Early Tuesday, Hermitude in NYC (the blog, not the blogger) made its journey to the big bloggie park in the sky, never to return. Yeah, it's just one of the many, many sites I read everyday, but this one, I always looked forward to and will be missed dearly.

I first came across the site after she linked to my grocery store post and kindly pointed out a grocery store near my apartment that I didn't know about.

As soon as I started reading Hermitude, it went on my must-read list. This was a blogger who did not suffer fools or Stephanie Klein lightly. Her anecdotes were funny and insightful, called spade a spade without resorting to gratuitous meanness. She didn't drown us in self indulgence but still made us feel like we could get to know her and share her ups and downs.

What I appreciated the most was that she never took this blogging thing more seriously than her real life (or that she had a life at all, unlike many of us) and looked at the blog culture with some bemused detachment. I gather that her real life is the primary reason behind ending Hermitude, to make room for bigger and better things. So I'm happy for her, even if it is a loss for us readers. I can only wish her good luck.