Due to reading In Praise of Slowness and some other thoughts that have been swimming around in my head lately, I’ve decided to go for a new goal.

My new goal is to cut out pre-made or over-processed foods. I guess I don’t know exactly how to define the type of food I’m talking about. I’m talking about things that people made from scratch 30 years ago but now we depend on mixes or frozen boxes for.

This isn’t a big leap for us; I already cook nearly every meal we eat at home and most of our grocery shopping is already from the perimeter of the store. I haven’t bought frozen pre-cooked chicken fingers or bagel bites since we’ve been married (5 months today!). Those used to be my go-to lunches, so if I can cut those out, it won’t be hard to stop the rest. I already no longer buy canned vegetables, they’re either fresh or frozen fresh, and we don’t buy pre-cooked meats other than pizza toppings. So for us this means no more Bisquick pancakes (I’ve made pancakes from scratch many times, so not a biggie), no more brownie or cookie mixes (everyone loves these anyway), and no more Kraft mac & cheese.

The last one will be the hardest, I eat mac and cheese for lunch all the time. Don’t get me wrong, homemade mac&cheese is no stranger to me, this is just one area where convenience has me so won over it will be hard to break the habit.

Thinking on this same topic last night I asked Shawn what he thought about getting rid of the microwave. I don’t think that idea went over too well.

I have loved to read ever since I learned how. At my peak I can read 2 or 3 books a week, sometimes though I hit a slump. Usually these slumps are due to reading a book I find hard to read. If a book is hard for me to read or if I’m just not that interested in it, it can take me over a month to finish it. Occasionally a slump can be caused by a book I’m really enjoying though, it’s like I want to savor the book so I read it slowly to stretch it out instead of rushing through it.

What makes a book hard to read? Aside from finding little interest in a book, things that can make a book hard to read for me are not what you would probably expect. The author has a need to show off their vocabulary? Not usually a problem for me, and if I happen to not be able to figure out what a word means from the context I just look it up. Complicated sentence structure? No problem. Strange book structure, like no punctuation or paragraph breaks or 7 pages for one sentence that is entirely in italics with a open parenthesis that never closes? Been There.

What makes a book hard to read for me is when I can’t pronounce the characters’ names. This may sound strange, but if I can’t pronounce the names, I can’t follow the story in my head. I had a professor who said he would give nicknames to characters whose names he couldn’t pronounce, but this hasn’t worked for me. This is why I’ve been reading Doctor Zhivago for almost a month now and am only on chapter four.

What makes a book hard to read for you?

This morning I read that Amazon, in response to Barnes & Noble lowering the price of their e-reader, NOOK, has lowered the price of the Kindle to $189. I thought about it for a minute, do I want an e-reader? I admit I do think they are convenient and have their advantages like being able to carry over 1,000 books with you in a small device. Plus, if you got an Apple iPad, you have way more than an e-reader. But when it comes down to it, for me, I like books. I like holding a book in my hand, feeling the pages, turning them. I like the smell of books, I like the smell of libraries and book stores. With a physical book people see the cover and ask you about it, with an e-reader, they ask you about the reader, not about what you’re reading. And who really needs over 1,000 books with them at all times anyway?

So, no e-reader for me. However, if I were not an English Lit major, where most of our books for class are novels, an e-reader would have been a more serious consideration for me. I would definitely choose a gadget if the alternative was lugging around heavy text books.

I cannot end this post without mentioning that Nintendo has stated that e-reader features may be in the 3DS, now that would be something else to consider since I already want a DS.

Last time I mentioned that I’m currently reading The Confident Woman by Joyce Meyer, while I am enjoying this book I’ve reached a part that has caused me a bit of confusion. I’m thinking that maybe this confusion is just a personal thing for me and someone can give me some insight.

Meyer writes about doing things on purpose, not waiting till she “feels like” doing them. She writes about not being afraid or doing things afraid, so as to not let fear rule you. That I get. But she also says things about how she, at times, will decline speaking invitations or other such things because she doesn’t have peace about it.

My problem is this: how do you know the difference between something being a fear and it just not setting right with your spirit?

I considered prayer as the answer, and maybe it is. For prayer to be the answer though, a person would have to be completely open to hear God and be able to tell the difference between what God is saying to them and what their own feelings about the situation are, something that is incredibly hard to do if fear is involved.