Comfort vs New Frontiers

The group I joined at my PhD schools is incredibly large for an engineering research group. The topics are also pretty spread out. It's all under the banner of ... hmm I suppose I need to pick an alias for my research. How about cars. So there are many many subfields we look at spread over quite a few people and professional support staff. The area I've focused in so far through my masters(at a different university) could be useful to this lab. On the other hand I have the opportunity to branch out and do something different. If I choose this route it's likely to lengthen the time until my first publication in this lab however. So do I go with something that will give me another skillset, but likely result in fewer publications, or a longer time to graduate, or do I stay with what I'm good at, but applied to this group's area?
What's the tradeoff between learning new skills(in a fairly different field, although somewhat related still) compared to getting publications. Does having a wide variety of publication topics look good enough to warrant this?

Graduate student freetime.

As as graduate student I don't have the most freetime. I have to teach and grade for a course(for free), do my 20-60 hours a week or research, and have 3 classes. Each of these individually is almost a full load for any person. I am not special, most graduate students have loads similar to mine. I have noticed that as the teaching and class load increased, my research has suffered. This is due in part to my research at this point mostly being to play catchup to a field I just entered, but also because I just don't have enough time to dedicate to thinking creatively about problems in my field. I find I can only make my brain be useful for so many hours out of the day. How many USEFUL hours do other graduate students manage to squeeze out of their day? If I can get 4-5 hours of very creative thought I'm usually pretty happy(plus another 10 or so of labor, note taking, and keeping track of small details about my work).
This begs the question though, in the small amount of freetime that we do get as graduate students, what do people do with it? I brew beer, some educational reading, and a lot of time just vegetating my brain on tv or movies. Its like television, or a book is the least effort my brain can manage to process sometimes. What does everyone else do?
On an aside, a question I have been wondering, in everyone's experience do you think that people in graduate school drink more or less than equivalent age people working(assuming same field, socioeconomic position etc). Ie your friends that finished college and worked at that engineering firm, or research lab...do they drink more than you in graduate school, or less?

How do you choose what to post when beginning a blog?

I was originally going to post a question about how labs start up, and I realized no one actually reads this. So this brought up another issue. When you start a blog do you just pretend you have a few readers at least even if you don't, and be able to post questions towards your readers, or do you mostly make declaratory posts? I would like to be able to post questions and get responses(How does your lab handle such and such) but without a readership it seems like a bit of a waste of the question. Would it be better to just post informative posts until I develop a readership? I suppose if I had people reading this that would be less of an issue, or at least one that applies less to me. If you do post the question and get no responses, would it be weird to post it again in the future?