Enumerated Update

Photo by Norbet Fritz

How has your week been?

We have spent the last full week of summer cleaning, reorganizing and rearranging the upstairs bedrooms.  This type of project doesn't make for riveting blog material, but was necessary, time-consuming and exhausting.

Other than that, here's where we are:

1) Back to school organization: Some genius back-to-school organization ideas were shared on A Bowl Full of Lemons.

2) Fasting: I'm going to confess that I have never really understand the Biblical/spiritual aspect of fasting. Whenever I am trying to understand something Biblically, I usually look for some type of scientific/medical explanation (and vice versa). For example, all of those guidelines in Deuteronomy about planting our crops in certain rows makes sense to me when I think of crop rotation. (Now is a good time to mention that I am neither a Biblical scholar nor an agricultural specialist.)

As it turns out, fasting has a ton of medical benefits. Specifically:

“PKA is the key gene that needs to shut down in order for these stem cells to switch into regenerative mode. It gives the OK for stem cells to go ahead and begin proliferating and rebuild the entire system,” explained Longo, noting the potential of clinical applications that mimic the effects of prolonged fasting to rejuvenate the immune system. “And the good news is that the body got rid of the parts of the system that might be damaged or old, the inefficient parts, during the fasting. Now, if you start with a system heavily damaged by chemotherapy or aging, fasting cycles can generate, literally, a new immune system.”

A whole new immune system? Yes to that.

3) The new blog: I agree wholeheartedly that Instagram is poised to complement (replace?) blogs in a way that other forms of social media are not. Instagram is "light" blogging, and the photo-centric nature of it appeals to bloggers (IMHO) far more than Facebook.

4)  National Geographic Photo Contest Winners: I'm completely overwhelmed by these images. (First place winner from the "cities" category is shown above.)

5) Unplugging: We adore Aziz Ansari. In full disclosure, we never watched Park & Rec. However, Skip got me to watch all of his stand up specials, and I recently watched Master of None, which was exceptionally good. Ansari is smart, funny, insightful, and we like his humor.

And I especially appreciate his likening the Internet to "reading wrestling rumors". So much truth there. 

(Language advisory on this one but funny nonetheless.)

Have a great weekend!