It has been nearly a month since your last blog post Mr. Carter, and frankly your last post was nothing more than a list of things you did in Madison.  What gives?  Where are you?  What is so important that you must leave with such reckless abandon as to not even say good-bye?   Honestly there is nothing specific I’ve been doing, but yet I’ve stayed busy with that nothingness to the point that I have not been compelled to write, but I have been reading.

Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. – Stephen King

I recently won an iPad Mini and have come to enjoy its size and utility, I even found some good learning apps as the abc app ipad for my children. One of the first things I put on this Mini was the free Amazon Kindle app along with a few books I’ve had on my to-do list. I’ve about half-way through my first full book, and have read a couple short PDF type ebooks as well.  I’ve slowed down on my obsessive blog reading (I currently have 136 unread blog notifications in my inbox, ohh the horror) as I was being a little ridiculously focused on ‘keeping up.’  Some of the literature I’ve read has told me to stop cold-turkey,  stop reading the news, Twitter, Facebook, and all media inputs and see how it affects my life.  Amazingly, the world has continued to function without me being slightly more informed to its happenings.  I know there is a happy medium somewhere, and I’ll get there, but for now, I’m slowing down my reactionary and piece-meal consumption to a bare minimum.

As well as putting eyes on paper to increase the level of comprehensive consumption, I’ve recently discovered audio-books.   I’ve tried audio books in the past, but in my first attempt, the speaker had a ridiculous accent that I could not bear to hear for any length of time, thus souring my first audio book experience.  On this go around, I’ve learned that the speaker makes all the difference in audio books.  Since my truck has a USB input, which can read MP3s as an audio source, I’ve simply plugged in an MP3 audiobook, and it just plays the book beautifully.  It has no trouble detecting the proper order of the chapters, and it picks up where it left off when I exit the truck, or change the station.   Natalie listens with me when we are in the truck, and we’ve had some great conversations about the book we’re currently listening too, so it is a double-bonus.

While I am on a media diet, there are a couple of blogs that trickle to the top of my must-read list, and it was one of those post that I felt was speaking directly to me.  You can find it here, give it a read and let me know in the comments if feels directed towards gypsy bloggers like myself.

I’ll try to get back to you on a more regular basis my dear readers, I will try.