There was a season when I was too busy blogging to read blogs, but then that started feeling weird and wrong, so I started reading them again. (I learned my trick: I need to write first, producing before I consume.) So I started reading blogs again, after I’ve written my day’s personal quota, and reading them reminds me continually why I love this blogging thing in the first place. I have a carefully-curated lineup of favorites, and add more as I find them unmissable.

By far, the easiest way to keep up with blogs is to subscribe to them—it’s free, you don’t have to constantly check to see if there’s something new, and if you want to click over and read on the actual site, you can—the link comes to you, in whatever inbox you use to receive the blog’s feed. (“Feed” is fancy web talk for frequently updated content, if you were ever too afraid to ask.)

And like many of you, I used Google Reader for years, and was shocked to hear its ultimate demise by July 2013. So I started exploring, found my new favorite way to subscribe, and now I can’t imagine ever going back to Reader, even if it were sticking around.

So consider this your primer for how to subscribe to blogs—whether you’ve never subscribed to a blog before, or whether you subscribe to hundreds and are looking for a new place to do it.
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I‘ll confess that in the midst of all our moving back to our passport country from the one where we lived for three years, and then moving again across the U.S. to the Pacific Northwest, we spent about a year where our family just winged it, food-wise. No menu planning, no giving much thought to our meals, mostly either whipping something up on the fly or going out to eat.

Stressful, eventful stages in life will do that to a family, and we’re not immune—even if I’ve written about the beauty of menu planning many times. Life just sorta happens, pretty or not, and you often knee-jerk into survival mode.

But this said, I can honestly say that looking back on that stage, life would have gone smoother had we taken the time to make a simple menu plan. I was in a cooking rut, which I used as an excuse to not menu plan—when, by golly, that’s the time more than ever to make that plan.

Nonetheless, here we are, back at menu planning, and reveling in the peace and freedom it brings. I’ve remembered how much saner dinnertime flows when we’ve made a quick plan.

So for this back to the basics installment (we’ve already talked about your bag and your beauty routine), I thought we could talk about menu planning. It might sound boring, but believe me, it’ll bring peace to your dinner. It might even toss in some zest to your cooking rut.

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I was a late adopter to the smartphone phenomena. When I finally sprung for the iPhone 4, in the summer of 2011, it took me approximately 2.6 seconds to realize how this baby was going to either help my life enormously or hinder my ability to have any boundaries whatsoever.

I’ve come to learn how to harness this pocket-sized tool for good and not evil, so aside from the occasional time-suck of scrolling through Instagram (though it’s come to be my favorite social media tool), my phone has helped me in ways I never imagined.

I find it ironic to call it a “phone,” because what I do least with this thing is make and answer calls. I hate talking on the phone, and like my friend Myquillyn said in one of our podcast episodes, I wish there was a way to delete the phone-app part of the phone. Alas… there is no such way.

So here are some of my favorite apps that I use on a regular basis. Yep, these are for the iPhone, though many times, they’re also available for other smartphones. I don’t mean to be exclusive here at all—this is just what I know from my own life.

(If you use something else, I’d love you to add your favorite apps in the comments!) Read on after the jump.

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In the 1960s, Charles Hummel published a little booklet called Tyranny of the Urgent, and it quickly became a business classic.  In it, Hummel argues that there is a regular tension between things that are urgent and things that are important — and far too often, the urgent wins.

In the business world, this means that demands of your boss, your client, or petty office relationships can often take priority over things like thoroughly completing a task before starting the next one, or building unity in a work team which would instill camaraderie and longevity.

The urgent, though less important, is prioritized, and therefore the important is put on the back burner.

This is no different in home life. Far too often, we focus on the urgent things in front of us, and at the end of the day, the things we really care about — the important — were barely given a glance.

Here’s what this looks like.
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