simplicity and the zen of waffles

I recently came across another blog about simple living, the overall message was good, but the blog read like an encyclopaedia. The intro post (and there are over 500 posts on this site) contained a list of to-do's to help simply your life. There were 72 steps to this list.... yes, I said s-e-v-e-n-t-y t-w-o. Almost every step (each one a paragraph in itself) contained a hyper-link to a longer article on the topic of that step... whew. I breezed through a few, thought they made sense, but somehow got distracted and lost my gusto around step 14. I'll admit in an attempt to simplify my reading-commitment I skipped to the end, and found a suggestion by the author that if I really want to simplify things, I should buy one or all of his 6 books on the topic, each one to help me understand the previous volume I guess... again, whew.

Now don't get me wrong, I think this guy had a lot of great stuff to say and maybe one day if I have a really long flight or a short prison term to occupy I'll dive into some more of his posts, but I think for my purposes I'll just condense his list a little;

1. Identify the things in life that are most important to you (my personal list below)

• The well-being of my wife and children
• Spending time with the above mentioned wife and children
• My environment (home, neighborhood, company etc...)
• My work (gotta do it, so might as well enjoy it!)

2. Ensure everything else in your life supports or at least does not detract from the aforementioned item(s) above in number 1. 

All I can think of now is that I desperately need to have a garage sale. Quick. I also think I'm on the right track with the idea of toning down my life so that I can focus on the things that really matter, and less on my house full of meaningless crap. Again, really big garage sale coming up.

I will give full credit to the original blog author though, who has a great message buried in all those lines of text, someday I may read them all. Link to his site here;

I also learned something really important this past weekend from my son E;
Apparently waffles do have a crust - and we should never eat them. Waffle crust is bad.