Romanian not Romance?

From my reader mail, I received this one in particular which will allow me to discuss something I'm sure other Romanika visitors have wondered about:

I guess Romanian is no longer a Romance language?

I stumbled upon your blog and almost shit my pants with anger when I saw, "My everyday thoughts on the Romance Languages: Portuguese, Spanish, French, Catalan, Italian." Where is Romanian?? It is not only spoken by more people than is Catalan, but it's also way cooler!
I can understand if you don't have anything to blog about Romanian, but for Christ's sake, at least acknowledge its existence!
Mulþumesc ºi la revedere,

S. S.

Firstly, I'm sorry if the reader must almost ruin his pants because of this.
Now, the first reason why Romanian is not included in that list of languages is simple, and the reader has hinted to it: I do not speak Romanian. This does not, and could not, mean that I imply that Romanian is not part of the Romance languages; it is too a sister of theirs and nowhere in my blog do I state otherwise. I have thought of starting to learn Romanian, and I will probably engage in that in the future. However, because of the nature of this blog, being about the languages themselves, including their phonology, dialectology, and evolution, and though I know of these in a general way about Romanian, I am not as familiarized with Balkan Romance to cover it as I do with the others. If anything, by this blog alone, it would be seem that my specialty is Iberian Romance. Indeed, I enjoy all languages derived from Latin. There are other recognized languages not in that list either, such as Occitan, Galician, Leonese, Sardinian, Romansh, and many others. They are not in my list for the same reason Romanian isn't: I do not speak them, per se. Speaking the languages that I already do, it is easy to understand the others, and if they need to be brought up, they can usually be included in a bigger group (i.e. Gallo-Romance, Northern Iberian, etc). Romanian, though it can be set apart with Italian because of the way it handles plural formation and other features, is a group on its own, having its own dialectal variants, all encompassing Balkan Romance. Because this Romance group received a strong Slavic influence, I am not able to pick it up as easily as I have the Western languages.
When I began this blog, I had not began to study Catalan. Now, I feel rather comfortable with the language, and I added it to the list; I even announced officially in a post. Therefore, the statement with the language list on the top part of this blog also serves as a guide of what readers expect to encounter here.
Romanian is indeed great, and I think no less of it; one never knows, I might just learn Romanian within this year, and it will undoubtedly get the mention it deserves up there.