As I often say, this isn’t a political blog. If you want to see my opinions in that arena you can visit my personal Facebook page or read articles I’ve written myself over at one of my other websites, Intentional Conservative. I’m not concerned within the context of this article with the winners and losers in this rather farcical non-event endlessly trumpeted about from the Right and the Left. Instead, I’m sort of tickled at the way the RFNE illuminates human nature.
Yet Another Anti-Sugar Rant
Hope I’m not sounding like a broken record here, but I wanted to share some recent experiences with sugar intake that might save some of you from needlessly depriving yourselves of grain products. Many if not most people who think that going gluten-free is going to make them healthier are buying into a false premise. This is not to say, and I want to emphasize this point, that there isn’t real gluten intolerance, with the most extreme of course being full-blown celiac disease. But most of us need to cut out sugar, not gluten.
This Week’s Whopper of a Page-Turner
Well, I’m still plowing through The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left
Making Intelligent, Intentional Donations
The article at the end of this post got me thinking about the whole issue of fund-raising and how we spend our time and effort on activities (such as collecting box tops) to raise money for a favored institution. If we really thought things through, would we intentionally choose to support our causes by doing this type of thing?
Let’s look at the specific program discussed in the article: the use of various cutouts (box tops, bar codes, etc.) from certain products to be turned in to the company making the product in return for a certain amount of money per cutout. The article says that the refunds/reimbursements range from about “5 cents to 38 cents.” So it seems fair to take the midpoint of that range for my discussion, around 20 cents.
The Wonderful World of Podcasts
Really, folks, I don’t spent every waking minute reading blogs and immersing myself in the wonderful world of podcasts. I do have to remind myself, though, just as I used to remind myself about my book-reading habits, that sometimes taking in all this material from other people means that I’m not participating as fully as I might in my own life. That being said, I’ve greatly enjoyed getting into this whole new way to access a very old type of information, that of the spoken word. Instead of my just having the radio on to Colorado Public Radio and being forced to listen to whatever they’re droning on about, I get to choose my material to keep me company while I’m walking or cooking or cleaning.
How Did My Time-Tracking Week Go?
I wrote last week that I had signed up for the Laura Vanderkam Time-Tracking Challenge for 2018, in which participants were asked to log their activities for one full week, 168 hours. I’m happy to say that I stuck to it for the full week this year (having almost immediately dropped out last January) and also thoroughly enjoyed reading Laura’s daily updates (link is to the first day’s post; you can then read the rest if you’re interested) on how she spent her own time. I used my fun app, toggl, which I’ve written about several times, most recently last week, and this morning I had a neatly categorized weekly report, all ready for me to look at and then send on to Laura. I managed to record a total of 167 hours and 22 minutes, so only a little bit of time fell through the cracks. How did I do? Here are some highlights:
New Year’s Resolution #3–Be Assertive, Not Bossy or Wimpy
So far I’ve mentioned two New Year’s Resolutions: my main one, phrased as the question “Why deny myself the pleasure?” about not letting small annoyances spoil my enjoyment, and my desire to read more books in the place of online articles. In pursuit of that second resolution I’ve gotten s little over a quarter of the way through The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left
Letting Go and Making Room
I had planned at some point do a write-up about all the different blogs and podcasts I follow, and maybe I’ll still do that, but perhaps it’s a better idea to deal with some of my favorites on a more individual basis. So today I’m taking ideas from two blogs, one a recent discovery and one that I’ve followed for some time. They each deal with the concept of simplifying and decluttering, and they each wrote a recent post that together form a unified whole. (I had a terrible time with that previous sentence.)
So the blog I’ve been following for some time is “Happy Simple Living” authored by Eliza Cross. If you follow me on my Facebook author page you saw the post I put up yesterday about her moment of truth in the garage as she contemplated two bins labeled “bookends.” She realized that those bins represented her dreams that someday she’d put them to use in a happy home; that those items represented the hopes she had going into a marriage that failed. I won’t try to re-tell the story here; I’d encourage you to follow the link above and read it for yourself. In the end, she decides to get rid of them. They represent a life she no longer leads, and they’ve been sitting unused for 11 years. Time to accept reality and move on.
Time-Tracking Tools
As you know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, one of the bloggers/podcasters I follow is a woman named Laura Vanderkam, a speaker and writer whose area of expertise is the efficient use of time. She tracks her own time regularly, and every year she invites her readers to participate with her for one week. Last year I started to do it but quickly fell off the wagon, as I couldn’t figure out how to characterize time spent sitting at the table and talking to my husband while at the same time eating a meal.
A Weighty Book on a Weighty Subject
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” So begins this monumental work by the well-respected theologian and historian Mark Noll. The rest of the book is simply amplification of that one statement. Whatever your interest in Christianity, the Bible, science and the Bible, or why some churches are so fixated on the “end times,” you will find the answers in this book. I cannot recommend it highly enough.