I’m going to try setting my blog to a stream layout for a while. In my blogging history I’ve always blogged with a list-of-posts style, which is where the original design of Pika came from. It was my preference: I have an idea and an idea fits nicely with a title and if the idea isn’t somewhat fully formed, why am I sharing it? At one point I even deemed that my blog was going to only contain deeply-considered, capital-E Essays, and so any sort of streamy vibe just didn’t make sense.

When my blog became about Essays, it may not surprise anyone to learn that within months I basically stopped blogging. Thankfully I’ve been off that trip for a long time. I’m a blogger, not an essayist, after all.

Maybe I’ll try this for all of 2026? Maybe I’ll actually write some short posts without titles? Maybe with this change I’ll blog most every day? I’m not sure, but I’m curious to experiment. I also think blogging in this way will lead to a lot of Pika feature refinement as I wrestle with any shortcomings I find.

When we visited Iceland a few years ago, I ran into the fascinating existence of a poetry book branded by Bónus, one of the grocery stores that we frequented. Paging through Bónus poetry by Andri Snær Magnason, it seemed to be a legitimate book with some light theming around a grocery store and the consumerism it can represent (and Dante). It made me giggle that such a thing existed and was sold in the grocery store. Though it made sense, as learned through that trip that the Icelandic population is famous for how prolifically it writes. I couldn’t stop commenting on the book to my family.

For some reason I didn’t buy the book while we were there, but when my birthday arrived after the trip, there it was wrapped as a gift. Thank you!

It turns out this book of poetry has a lot of edgy humor. By the time the series of “You Are What You Eat” poems ends, the protagonist is stuck on his ancestral farm with only Ikea Allen wrenches as tools and driftwood to eat. Their fate is sealed. The series of poems entitled “Couple” is filled with double entendres that would make anyone blush at the checkout.

A taste of Bónus poetry:

All Off

The slogan across the can of the All Off oven
cleaner says that it works better than in the
fairytales but I don’t think my storybooks
told me how Hansel and Gretel cleaned the
oven.

The book is very sharp in its critique of the products being sold in modern, consumerist societies:

Honour

My ancestors ate everything
They ate the blood and the brain
the spleen and the spine
and the fat and the feet
and the marrow

In their honor,
I reach for McNuggets

Yeah, this is a great collection of poetry!

In the past I’ve mused about getting a writing-only workstation. This led to explorations into things like the Freewrite, AlphaSmart, or searching for “the best laptop keyboard” and buying some old, used machine from 2010.

Meanwhile, I’ve been selling older and unused electronics (etc) on eBay this winter. As I was preparing an old MacBook Air that I expected to sell for $150 (at best), I realized this was probably a great test machine to see if I enjoyed writing away from my primary workstation (potentially with wifi turned off).

To prepare for sale, I had restored this 2018 MacBook Air to factory settings. In the time it took to install iA Writer I already was asking myself, “Why is this machine so slow? It didn’t feel slow when I bought it!” So I set about minimizing the things running on the machine, which definitely isn’t the first thing I should have tried! Here’s what you should do first if you want to get an old MacBook moving quickly…

Installing an older version of macOS

The reason the MacBook Air felt so quick when I bought it, and so slow when I reset it, is that it had two different versions of macOS installed. When I purchased the computer it  had El Capitan (10.11) installed, while the factory reset installs the most-recent macOS one’s computer supports, which in this case was Sonoma (14.8.3).

So I thought things through a bit and decided to click the link at Apple support to install Big Sur (11.7). This took me to the App Store and started downloading that version, which eventually finished and told me I can’t install an older macOS version on a Mac with a newer version. Bah!

I restarted the Mac and held down Command-R to go into recovery mode. Unfortunately, this mode would only allow me to install the latest version, Sonoma. So then I restarted and held down Option-Shift-Command-R, which allows you to install “the version of macOS that came with your Mac or the closest version that’s still available.” For me, that’s El Capitan.

I had some  trouble getting El Capitan to install in recovery mode. At one point I read something about El Capitan not working on the latest Apple filesystem, APFS, so I reformatted the hard drive to an older file system. Then I was given a warning that El Capitan must install on APFS, I reformatted back to APFS, and things seemed to work. 🤷‍♂️

At this point I figured I’d just roll with El Capitan. In my ideal world this computer would use iA Writer full screen, an occasional web browser and that’s about it. As of this writing, iA Writer’s documentation says it supports macOS version 10.11, El Capitan, so all good!

In reality, when I went to install iA Writer from the App Store, I was given a warning that iA Writer only works on macOS 10.15+ (Catalina). So back I went to the Apple support link to install Catalina. From there, things have been working well. (Though I’ve found the version of Safari I get with Catalina, version 13.1.3, isn’t rendering the web well, so I’ve installed Firefox for now. Funny that I can get the latest Firefox on an old version of macOS.)

Other things I changed

I was reading an old article about a mnmlist mac setup and I updated some things:

• Hid the dock, which I do on my primary machine as well. I also hid the menu bar.

• Disabled Spotlight, including running sudo mdutil -i off in Terminal. This should speed up the system by avoiding Spotlight’s indexing. I installed Alfred, which I’ve used for many years.

• Disabled Spaces by unchecking System Preferences > Mission Control > Displays have separate Spaces

• Installed uBlock Origin on Firefox. Every time I accidentally hit a browser without ad blocker I’m completely aghast. (And a bit surprised that Pika isn’t more popular than it is, honestly.)

• Added a nice desktop wallpaper.

I’m sure there are other things I can to make this computer feel even more minimalist and focused. Let me know if you have any suggestions!

Let’s see how it goes

I’m writing this blog post in iA Writer right now. While I love the Pika editor, I want to try writing in a focused mode. (I was also going to say that I want to write offline, but opening Pika, turning off wifi, and writing in the Pika editor be fine, especially because Pika saves one’s writing in browser local storage). Will I really pull this computer out to write? Will it really help to focus my mind? Will I like the copy-paste workflow? We’ll see.

The only real challenge with this experiment going forward is that my old MacBook is one of the last ones with a butterfly keyboard. Even ignoring the double- and missing-key mistakes it makes (thank goodness for auto-correction), I hate the feeling of typing on this thing enough that I’m considering an inexpensive Keychron keyboard to sit on my lap while I write. That doesn’t seem conducive to actually writing, though. And if I’m doing that, maybe an iPad with a keyboard makes more sense.

My PS5 is going to travel to college with one of my daughters, so I picked up a lightly-used one to replace it. Some points of reference if you ever are doing this and have trouble transferring data between the systems on your network.

• If your problems are similar to mine, what will happen is the step that tells you “to hold the power button on the second PS5 for 1 second until it beeps” will result in the old console preparing for transfer while the new console says it lost connection with the old console.

• Do not bother trying to do this over wifi. Just don’t even try!

• After trying three different network cables to connect your new machine to the LAN (and to be fair, your cable might be the problem), try connecting the new PS5 more directly to your router. I initially tried a perfectly fine modem > router > in-wall cable > switch > cable connection and it failed. When I moved to modem > router > in-wall cable > cable, it started working. Keep removing variables until it works.

• This is why I’m always hesitant to go lightly-used. The whole time I was questioning if the used PS5 was the problem. I hate having that question in the back of my head (though even with a new machine I might still have that question).

Anyway, let the nine-hour transfer commence!

I proofread everything I write. Still, there is no better spellchecker than the "publish" button.

– Nick Heer via People and Blogs via The Jolly Teapot

So very much this!

As a blogger of twenty-plus years, I’ve experienced this phenomenon many, many times. That is why Pika has delays built into the system. When you publish a post, it’s available on your site immediately. However, your RSS feeds do not show the post until about five minutes after publishing. If you are sending the post as a newsletter, it will not send for about fifteen minutes. When The Pika Pulse was running, there was a delay before new posts landed on the feed. And we’ll include a delay if we reintroduce a similar feature to The Pulse in the future.

Since visiting Iceland a few years ago, I’ve had a few books on my backlog list, including coffee-table-esque picture books. On a recent binge of buying used books on eBay, I picked up Iceland (Visual Explorer Guide) by Chris McNab. This is a smaller-format version of his larger Iceland: The Land of Fire and Ice.

The pictures are pretty nice. The text was fine. I don’t think I learned much from it, but it generally described what I was looking at. When finishing the book I was a bit surprised to find that all the images were stock photos!

Doing some research, this seems to be the same case for the larger-format version of the book. Given that the pictures are the standout, the real stars of these books are the picture researchers, Terry Forshaw and Justin Willsdon. And the original photographers, of course. I hadn’t really thought about how these types of books are developed, but sort of assumed the draw of such a book was the unique photographs therein; photographs with connective tissue between each other and the words on the pages.

I’m not necessarily casting shade on this sort of book. The photos are largely very good, and a picture is worth a thousand words, they say. It’s a bit…off, though, to have someone captioning a picture of fish drying on a windy, exposed hill without the writer having been there to feel the breeze nor smell the smells.

It turns out if you want such an authentic experience, you’re probably looking at spending a fair bit more money to find short-printed editions from actual photographers, such as Ragnar Axelsson. Artist-discussed, location-based photography books are most likely printed near their subjects, unlike the McNab book being printed in China. That’s one more quality you should expect to pay for.

As a lifelong spendthrift, I continue to push myself as best I can to support artists and artisans directly. I enjoy picking up visual books whose subject is my past travel destinations, and as much as I’m able I will try to purchase books that align with those desires.

We got this eReader remote (Amazon) for our daughter for Christmas and it took a little hacking to get it to work with her new Kobo Clara. Thankfully the internet is there for us! All credit goes to Reddit user BAUDR8 and his video for these instructions. I live in fear of these instructions and files disappearing. Since I’ll probably have to troubleshoot this in two years, I figured I’d document the process for posterity.

1. Download latest version of KoboRoot.tgz from GitHub tsowell/kobo-btpt. I have this file saved on my computer in case I need it in the future.

2. If your ring shows up as “D01 Pro” in Bluetooth syncing (hold down middle button for 1+ seconds until alternate flashing), the D01 Pro.zip configuration file can be used for config. At this time can download here. I also have this file saved on my computer just in case.

3. Connect the Kobo to your computer. Open the Kobo in your filesystem and navigate to the .kobo folder. (On macOS had to type cmd-shft-dot in Finder to see hidden files/folders.)

4. Place KoboRoot.tgz file in the .kobo folder. Unplug the Kobo and it will go through a reboot process. (Likely a multi-step reboot process.)

5. Reconnect the Kobo and you should now see a .btpt folder.

6. Unzip the D01 Pro.zip file to get the D01 Pro configuration file.

7. Drag the D01 Pro file to the .btpt folder. (If you see “D01” when looking at the ring while Bluetooth syncing, it might work to remove the " Pro" from the file name.)

8. Unplug your Kobo, go to Bluetooth settings, make sure the ring is in Bluetooth sync mode (hold down middle button for 1+ seconds until alternate flashing) and eventually you should be able to connect to the ring.

9. Up and down on the ring should page turn. If that doesn’t work, hold up and down for 1+ seconds, looking for a purple flash. Then it should work.

Related, this eReader is nice! I have a fancy Kindle Oasis and this snappy little thing with integrated library browsing has me a bit jealous. Since I downloaded my Kindle books in azw3 format before Amazon stopped allowing such things, I suppose I could fire up Calibre and be on my way? 🤔

I hate what drugs have done to parts of American society as much as anyone. The purveyors prey on people in a vulnerable state, a state they’ve arrived at for any of a number of reasons. The addictive qualities can be nearly impossible to resist.

While I’m not super-informed these days, news and events still cross my path. The latest of these is the American Secretary of Defense claiming that drugs are weapons. This is in order to justify bombing boats in the Caribbean Sea.

I’m uninformed. I don’t know the truth of these boats and their cargo. What I do know is that drugs are not weapons. Weapons are weapons.

If drugs from preying purveyors were weapons, we’d be bombing pharmaceutical companies   and their fleet of sales cars every other year. But we’re not. That would be ridiculous.

Oh, wait, he said “weapons of mass destruction.” Now there’s a phrase that we can trust coming out of the mouth of an American politician!

To be fair (for whatever reason), there is  a nuanced argument to be made that there is a drug epidemic and certainly as a society we would benefit from pushing toward a better position on the epidemic spectrum. Of course, there are also many and various nuanced solutions to each type of drug problem. That’s…not a conversation being had. (Are conversations even allowed anymore?)

In any case, this country has a major problem with actual weapons. A problem very few politicians care to do anything about.

Weapons are weapons. Drugs are not weapons.

It’s been thirty days since I departed socials. (Well, more like forty-five days, but who’s counting?) I must say that I continue to feel good about stepping away. The daily baseline of anxiety that I feel from  the big world and the small worlds I live in is much lower than previously. That feels nice, and I plan to stay off socials at least through the end of the year.

I do miss a few of the conversations I partook in on socials, but the biggest thing calling me back to the timeline is, ironically, Pika, the blogging product. Being an illustration of me dominates the Pika homepage, it’s probably not surprising that I’m personally associated with the Pika brand. Pika’s growth is modest in any given, month, but since I’ve left socials it seems to have slowed a bit. This slow-down feels correlated, but I have to remind myself that the sample size is far from statistically significant.

It’s awfully tempting to jump back into the fray in hopes of accelerating those numbers a bit. However, the research from the past year that’s stuck in my head is that social is really not a marketing channel worth betting on these days. This makes me think that my time is still better spent elsewhere, working on Good Enough products like Pika, Letterbird, etc. As things continue to grow, customers and friends of Good Enough will naturally post about our products and that’s a good, healthy way to interact with things.

Having a business makes it hard to completely step  away from socials since many people depend on that feed for announcements. We’ll continue to run our Bluesky and Mastodon accounts for Good Enough. That means I do spend some time on socials, and it’s possible that those channels will become a bit of a micro-post outlet for me in the future. Those accounts only follow Good Enough members, though, so the chances of them pulling me in to the lure of the timeline are small.

As you can see, I haven’t been blogging more during November. Aside from the demands of daily life, there have been other things drawing most of my energy. I’m very hopeful that 2026 will allow more of my work focus to be centered on building things. Exciting!

I have done a little more reading, and I may have even formed a habit of picking up the Sunday paper at a nearby gas station.  I haven’t read a lot of books, nor did I write a novel this month. No socials is no magic.

Hopefully you were able to take some time to step away from the social feeds this month as well. Let me know how it went for you! Write a blog post, or drop me an email, or write a blog post and drop me an email.

And have a great December!

I like to play Fortnite. After several failed attempts, my kids finally got me into the game a couple years ago and now I’ll sit down with it a few times a week. For good or ill.

I play on a PS5 in a display environment that doesn’t have the best refresh numbers. While most of my challenges with the game are skill based, skill that is also declining due to age, I get the sneaking suspicion that some of those times where my cross hairs are on an opponent and my shots are missing that maybe my setup is getting in my way.

I suspect my results would be much better if I were playing on a computer. I wonder what the least expensive machine would be that would perform well with Fortnite and also be a place to catch up that Steam backlog? Preferably without having to watch a “How to run Fortnite on X” video to do it.

I’m curious, but I also don’t want to house and maintain another computer. So perhaps it’s best to just accept my and my current setup’s deficiencies.

November seems to be a ripe month for challenges. Some people grow facial hair. Some people write many words daily hoping to come out with a novel on the other side. I’m sure there are five other such efforts that I’m not aware of.

For me, I’m going to continue my push away from social networks. I’ve logged out of all personal accounts, set my YouTube to stop suggesting to me via algorithm, and even found myself logged out of Reddit yesterday. I’m set to have a no socials November!

Maybe some of you reading my blog are also finding yourself overly pulled by the lure of social networking and tempted to take a break? Perhaps join me and see how it feels? Log out, delete the apps from your phone, and start the challenging process of breaking that muscle memory today. I believe in a week you’ll feel pretty good about the decision.

No pressure to stay off socials after November is over. You may decide you want to go back to your same relationship with social networking in December. You may decide you want to go back, but differently. You may decide you want to stay away.

I might try to blog more. I might not. We’ll see! If you’d like to try blogging as an alternative, I recommend  my good friend, Pika. In solidarity with #nosocialsnovember, there’s even a NOSOCIALSNOVEMBER coupon code for 15% off your first year of the service.

If you have any thoughts to share about stepping away from socials, email me via the link below. And if you’re blogging, let me know! I’d love to follow what you’re writing.

For those of us who grew up with a fall-to-spring school schedule, fall is a very natural time to feel a call to focus on what is important. Summer is a great time recreate and recharge by taking some pressure off yourself. When the crisp mornings arrive, though, it can feel good to point more attention toward the projects that matter most.

With that desire to narrow down and narrow in, it’s also a good time to think through habits and try to minimize those that distract from the priorities in life. For me, a big one of those bad habits is the daily use of social networks and the brain rot that comes along for the ride.¹

What follows is the logout process for each of the major social networks and social media platforms. I’m sharing the process to log out via browser on your PC. Is this trivial? Yes, but I find it interesting how some networks make it not-so-obvious how to find the logout button. Would it be more helpful to show screenshots of the mobile browser/app logout process? Probably, but I’m not re-installing all of those apps!

X

X makes it surprisingly easy to get outta there.

Bluesky

Another one that’s pretty straightforward.

Threads

Well, good job, Threads. This isn’t too hard, either. I could have sworn these major social networks made the logout option way more “dark pattern” than this.

Instagram

Instagram is nearly useless in-browser, so maybe you don’t have to logout?

YouTube

YouTube has a lot going on in its menu system, but ultimately it’s not too hard to logout. (Alternatively, if you want to be able to access your subscriptions, but don’t want to be fed by YouTube’s very effective recommendation algorithm, you should turn off and delete your watch history. Here are Google’s docs on how to do that.)

Reddit

Easy.

Mastodon

Again, I swear that I’ve struggled to find this in the past.

Pinterest

Like Reddit and YouTube, Pinterest can be a useful and informative social media platform, but it usually ends up wasting way more time than the benefit it gives.

LinkedIn

It has definitely caught me by surprise that LinkedIn has become an actual social networking platform.

Facebook

Sorry, I haven’t had an account at Facebook in over a decade. Here’s their help document on logging out, though!

Well, Actually

It turns out that these social media networks have made it fairly easy to logout of them. Good! I recommend stepping away, even if just for a couple of weeks. For me at least, it takes a week away before the muscle memory of browsing these social networks goes away. So you probably need at least two weeks to start feeling what it’s actually like to not have the daily/hourly dose of social media anxiety in your life. I hope you try stepping away and I hope you learn something in the process. Enjoy!

All screenshots and processes are valid as of October, 2025.

1. Yes, there are positive aspects of social networks. Yes, for some folks those outweigh the negatives. For me, the negatives vastly outweigh the positives. I suspect the ledger reads the same as mine for a vast majority of social network participants.

A short time ago I posted about some possibilities to bring more paper into my life. Here’s where I’ve traveled since then:

• I had lots of folks recommend The Economist over the Financial Times weekend edition. It seems that The Economist would be a lot less business focused, though the price is a jump. I might pick up an issue or two…somewhere over the coming months. I paged through it twenty years ago, but that memory is pretty faint.

• The Minnesota Star Tribune price tag is still putting me off. I reached out to their support department¹ about whether they could deliver a paper-only Sunday edition without the digital edition. I received a rather quick, helpful response. They do have a paper-only offering: $6.51/issue delivered by a carrier and $4.72/issue delivered by mail. I’m gonna visit a local gas station for a few weekends to pick up a copy and see how I like it.

• I signed up for a year of County Highway. If you’re considering it, add $10 for shipping in the US.

Near to that post, I also logged out of  my social networking accounts, both on my computer and on my phone. Since then my day-to-day baseline of anxiety has lowered noticeably. I heartily recommend it.

 I  haven’t been frequenting Kagi News, in part because the feedback I’ve heard isn’t causing me to feel like I’m missing out on anything amazing.

I haven’t gotten back into a consistent blog-reading habit yet. I still might capture & reset the whole thing.

I’ve noticed that the YouTube algorithm has taken it upon itself to fill some of the space I’ve gained from the other changes above. It’s probably about time to shut off recommendations. Even though what I read there is interesting and low-stress, Reddit is another place where I spend a bit more time than I’d like to spend.

Do or do not, they say, but at least I’m trying!

1. Once I could find a way to do it under the guise of reporting delivery issues. 🙄 They use Zendesk, by the way.

In the 2000’s I listened to D’Angelo’s Voodoo and Brown Sugar on repeat. Cancer really sucks, man.

He was such a fabulous musician. I was always hoping that he’d come out of seclusion and put out like 4 albums in 8 years or something. Dang.

Rest in peace and thank you for all the music you shared.

As I’m thinking about disconnecting from the endless social media and news streams, I’ve been sniffing around the world of paper products. Here are a few publications that I’m considering:

• Financial Times weekend print edition. The price is pretty reasonable for a year. I’ve never even seen an issue of the Financial Times before, but I assume I’d get a bit of news on the weekend, along with the other interesting weekend edition sorts of things. Reading a global perspective, and perhaps a slightly different political perspective than my own, seems like a reasonable thing to try. I would also have access to the digital daily, but I wouldn’t plan on diving into it.

• My nearest metro paper is the Minnesota (née Minneapolis) Star Tribune. I’m a bit 😳 by the price for Sunday print and digital subscription. I’d love to pay a little less for just the Sunday print edition without the digital.

• I’m already subscribed to our city’s newspaper as well as a county weekly paper. Yes, I only page through about half of the issues.

• County Highway is only available in print. I don’t exactly know what it is, but I can’t help but try this, right?

A couple of other publications have caught my eye. First is Never Too Small magazine. I’ve purchased issues one and three, which I mostly enjoyed. I like some of the design content,  the clever home layouts, the magazine layout, etc. But I’m not quite perfectly in the target market enough to commit to getting every issue at this price. I think I’ll pick them up ad hoc.

Second is In Formation magazine. It just released issue three. Issue two came out in the year 2000 and issue one came out in 1998. So…I don’t think a subscription is going to be an option. I’m curious enough that I just might pick it up. But…depressing?

In the  non-paper world, I’ve gotten away from consistently visiting my blog feeds, and I need to get back into the groove (dance break). I also might dip into Kagi News for a bit.

And maybe I should finally stop resisting the siren call of writing a “weekly update” sort of post on this blog…

Any suggestions? Let me know!

What I wouldn’t give right now to be a bit more naive.

What I wouldn’t give for all of us to be a bit more naive.

A bit less social media.

A bit less 24-hour news.

A bit less needing to care about what’s going on in the ivory towers of our societies.

A bit less needing to worry about the safety of those I love.

A bit less needing to worry about the safety of those most vulnerable.

What I wouldn’t give for all of us to be a bit more naive.

As I start to make a concerted effort to turn down my phone and social media usage, I’ve moved to a new Home Screen experiment. First, I tried Dumb Phone. It’s good! The immediate impact of no icons was pretty effective, but I realized over time it trained me to search-then-open all apps and I was back to quickly accessing every app that was available in the background of my phone. Still, I may go back to it.

So I deleted Dumb Phone’s widgets, but left its other setup (color adjustments, disabled animation, etc) in place. Then I went back to large icons of my recollected most-used, and not undesirable, apps. Here’s where I’m starting:

As to social media, well, more to come.

The massive county fair has come and gone, finishing with a blast of a thunderstorm shutting everything down early last night. And my weight is down a few pounds, which is better than the alternative!

I resisted fair food, especially fried fair food, better than I have in the past. Still, a friend of our daughter was working the ice cream stand and I received an epic portion Zanzimint®. (It was very, very good.)

Two times I had breaks at home and ate some junk food around lunch or for snacks. The first time I was apathetic at lunch and just couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t have anything healthy pre-prepped and so it went. That night I started feeling sick, so I think the apathy was a sickness precursor. The second time I regretted the junk snacking pretty quickly, feeling bloated shortly after.

A couple times I was able to convince myself to grab some good filler carrot and celery snacks rather than the usual snack-sized bag of chips. Pat pat on my back for those wins!

And so it’s going…okay. I’ll take okay, but I’m still feeling fairly unconvinced that simple emotional discipline will stop me from falling back into the junk-food habit. Though I’ll admit there were also some good signs in there.

My August experiment is to avoid junk foods on the daily. I promised an update and it’s going…fine. The time during the experiment saw one weekend visit to family, one social event, and a weekend away in Chicago. In terms of general eating, I didn’t achieve the desired food intake. In terms of the plan I set for myself with all of its social-event exceptions, though, it’s going pretty well.

At home, outside of hosted social events, I’ve avoided junk food. When I’ve wanted to reach for it, I’ve either not eaten anything, grabbed something nutritious, or made myself some tea. There’s a lot more exercise to be done, but it’s been a good start.

Come evenings on the days I was able to achieve my goals, I think that I’ve generally felt better physically and digestively. I can’t say if it’s helped my sleep. Certainly it hasn’t been a magic potion. I should probably take some notes on how I’m feeling each evening. 😆

I snacked very appropriately on the six-hour drive to Chicago. On the drive back I wasn’t so successful. It didn’t help that a lunch of deep dish pizza was followed by a dinner of nothing. It’s a rarity. It’s okay.

This week will see its own challenges as the county fair (largest free fair in the state) is in session. Fried food will beckon. I may also have a social event, so a couple of beers are on tap.

As you can probably sense, I’ve been looking for a change in the normal course of things. While I’m awfully tempted by Manuel Moreale’s recent experiments, I think I’m going to put those off for another month while I pursue an experiment slightly more tuned to how I’m feeling at this moment.

While I don’t eat terribly, I have long had a desire to eat more nutritiously. My forty-eighth birthday is fast approaching. Shoring up my general health is an important factor. Sleep is a thing I’m terrible at, and eating a bit better would certainly be good for my sleep health as well. Aside from the obvious health benefits, I also have an emotional connection on a few levels with this sort of eating. I love the crunch of these snack foods. I really enjoy the feeling of finishing a thing, even if that thing is a bag of chips. I tend to need to fill time that I’m bored, and snacking is one of those bored habits.

My first instinct is to “outlaw” most such foods from our home. I’ve talked about this desire to eat better with my family. Recently I told them that one day soon they will probably open the pantry door and find most of the junk food has disappeared. I haven’t done this yet. Before going that far, I’ve decided to try an experiment to exercise my emotional discipline.

In August, while in my home, I am going to attempt to only eat nutritious, non-junk foods. What does this mean for me?

• No chips, crackers, or other junk dippers and crunchers

• No mass-market bread

• No alcohol or high-calorie beverages

• Pasta will only be consumed sparingly, and then only in moderation (let’s set 100g as a serving)

• Same with tortillas

• If we’re traveling to a kid’s event or to visit family, the vehicle will be considered my home and off-limits to junk food

• If I end up at a restaurant, I’ll try to order reasonably

Generally, I know the replacement foods I’ll have around the house. Driving around the region for events is trickier, so I will need to plan ahead a bit better.

Exceptions?

• If I’m in a social situation or a guest at someone’s home, I will eat what I’m served

• We have two social nights planned at our home and I’m going to have some cocktails

• We’re driving to Chicago next weekend and I will probably have a snack, if only to keep myself awake

I plan to give an update here each week. This experiment makes me a bit nervous because I’m not so sure I’ll be able to pull it off. There is a lot of me that thinks all-or-nothing (tossing the junk food and resetting) is a better option. But I’m also aware that an all-or-nothing attitude comes with its own downsides.