I needed another site to visit like I needed to be whacked in the head with a baseball bat during a Little League game played in a pouring rain at 7:30 am.

But I confess, I popped over to see what Pinterest is all about because my scrapbooking friends raved about it. And I have a passion for looking at crafty projects that I'll never have the talent to copy and pretend I thought of it all by myself.

If that describes you, save yourself some time and stay away. It's a much bigger world than that narrow perception.

Pinterest's creators describe it as a virtual corkboard. As you trip across the Internet every day, you "pin" things you find attracitve, and assign them to a category at your Pinterest profile: clothing, home accents, cake decorating, crafts, jewelry, fast cars, photographs -- you can even create a catalog of items colored orange if that's your thing. It's rather like building playlists in iTunes from your music collection.I

I've immediately seized on it as a way  to keep track of inspiration and ideas for those future projects I'll never actually get around to starting.

Because this is social media, folks will friend you, follow you and sometimes pin the photos you've saved to their own electronic corkboards. (This is a flattering tribute to your good taste, I'm told. Rather like copying someone's craft and passing it off as your own.) This entourage holds your feet to the fire in terms of selection; I don't want to pin a photo of my neighbor's faded, broken lawn flamingo, for instance, lest someone think I'm seriously coveting that. On the other hand, it's an excellent tool to get the skinny on what makes the people in your world tick --and if it gives you a gift idea, well, that is more subtle than the Target registry.

And in case a certain someone who stands about 6'3", weighs 240 pounds (cough, cough. I'm just repeating what he reports) and answers to the name of Ron is reading this -- my first entry was the Ephiphanie Lola camera bag. Purchase information is in the link.