7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 128)

— 1 —

Can anyone recommend a good book light? This is a more important question than it might seem at first glance, since book light issues have started to take over my evenings. I have this little ritual where I turn on my main book light, act surprised when it goes out, get up and curse at the cord while digging around behind my bedside table to try to fix it, give up and resort to my backup light, and spend my reading time grumbling about how the hue of this one hurts my eyes. I think my husband is probably ready for me to find a book light that I’m really happy with.

My main one is an Itty Bitty Book Light that plugs into the wall. I really love the quality of light: It’s bright and has the homey color of a living room lamp. The problem is that I often have issues with the power going out. My backup one is a battery-powered Mighty Bright. It has great brightness and is much more portable than my plugin one; the only downside is that it has that harsh hue of fluorescent lights.

Anyone know of a better book light than these two?

— 2 —

I keep wanting to participate in Ann Voskamp‘s lovely 1,000 Gifts meme that she hosts on Twitter, but I think I should wait until I get some new reading material. I’ve been into adventure/survival books like Skeletons in the Zahara and Over the Edge of the World lately, which has impacted what I feel grateful for. I thought it might be startling to the online gratitude community if I started posting updates like:

Thankful that I’m not drinking camel urine. #1000gifts

Feeling blessed not to be enslaved by a violent nomadic desert tribe. #1000gifts

Joyful that my snack today was not a raw skinned rat. #1000gifts

Umm, yeah. I’m going to read a biography of John Adams next. Maybe I should wait until I’m on to that one.

— 3 —

I have found yet another awesome use for Evernote: Capturing family stories. I’ve created an Evernote notebook called Family Stories, and when the kids do something cute or funny, I create a new note and write it down. (If I don’t happen to have the program open, I can email it to my Evernote account and have it automatically added). Using the tags feature, I tag it with the name of every kid involved in the story (this is where it gets cool).

So now if I want to create, say, a little “Our Stories from 2011″ family booklet, all I have to do is open the notebook and sort by date. Or, let’s say one day I want to create a special booklet for each child containing only stories that involve him or her: I just open the notebook, click on the tag with that child’s name, and — voila! — I see only the notes for that child. It’s astounding to me that such a useful program could be free.

Related: Michael Hyatt just put up a great “getting started with Evernote” post.

— 4 —

In a flash of parenting genius, I went ahead and told my kids about the most fun game in the world: Mop Skating! Yes, you know the classic game that ALL children LOVE to play (cough-cough), where you take two damp rags with a little soap on them, put them under your feet, and “skate” around the kitchen floor. I came up with this idea the other day when a moment of epic exhaustion coincided with the realization that my kitchen floor was starting to look like a truck stop bathroom. The kids slid around the floor on their rags for about 30 minutes while I put my feet up and watched. By the time they were tired of it, the floor was spotless!

— 5 —

What is P90X, and why is everyone I know doing it? My friends keep getting all thin and buff and raving about this program, but so far all I can tell is that it’s a workout DVD. With as much as everyone freaks out about it and as effective as it seems to be, I guess I thought there was some secret component to it, like the package comes with a bubbling super-potion that gives you the metabolism of a hummingbird or something.

If it’s just another exercise program, I think I might start a competing program called J90X. Here’s the business model: You give me $100, and I send you a sheet of paper telling you to work out really hard for an hour and a half every day. Pretty compelling, right? If it would be a deal killer without a DVD, I guess I could create one. I’d walk into a fancy studio filled with state-of-the-art equipment, get some high-energy music pumping, and then sit down and have a glass of wine while I point to various pieces of workout equipment and tell you to go use them. Stay tuned for the opportunity to pre-order this exciting new program!

— 6 —

Important public service announcement: You can have a right-click mouse with a Mac. I’m still getting emails about that from my post from last Friday, so I wanted to publicly acknowledge my awareness of this fact. Also, if you have a blog and want to get a lot of traffic, comments and emails in response to a post, bring up either Mac computers or Trucknutz.

— 7 —

The weather is so crazy this year! So many cities are getting pummeled by severe weather, while we in central Texas are stuck in a drought — we’ve only received five inches of rainfall total in 2011. It’s better than severe weather (we once had 20 tornadoes hit this area in one day), but we could really use some precipitation. For everyone’s sake, I’m hoping the weather across the U.S. returns to normal soon.

Anyway, I hope everyone has a joyful and safe weekend!

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Posted On: May 27, 2011 in 7 Quick Takes Friday
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