My allocated blog-reading time has not kept pace with the growing list of blogs that I follow. I keep up with the blogs in my sidebar, but my feedreader (Bloglines) is bursting with unread material from around the blogosphere.

Some people might just click on that bloglines button that says “Mark All Read,” and they’d be instantly caught up.

Not me. Because that’s cheating. It’s okay to click on each blog title, and skim the list of unread post titles without actually reading any of them, after which they’re automatically all marked read. That’s not cheating.

I don’t know where these rules come from, but my life is full of them and I do abide by them.

So let’s see what I haven’t been reading lately:

I follow a nutrition blog. I don’t actually read anything in it, I just scan the titles and hope the information will soak into my brain. Here’s an example:

Four-week short chain fructo-oligosaccharides ingestion leads to an increase in fecal bifidobacteria and cholesterol excretion in healthy elderly volunteers

Without having to actually read the article, I can deduce that I should be eating more fructo-oligosaccharides. Either that or I should be eating fewer of them. Since they’ve got fructo and saccharides in their name, they sound like sweeteners, which means I probably should cut back on them. Note to self: Eat less sugar.

Moving right along:
Effect of a natural extract of chicken combs with a high content of hyaluronic acid (Hyal-Joint(R)) on pain relief and quality of life in subjects with knee osteoarthritis: a pilot randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial

I’ll just dash off an email to my son, who unfortunately inherited his father’s good-for-nothing knees instead of my fine upstanding knees, and suggest that he eat more chicken combs (those are the weird red things on top of their heads, right?).

Next I scan the Reuters Health feed for useful information like this:

Unnecessary appendectomy risky in pregnant women

Worm study shows antidepressant may lengthen worms’ lives

Lack of toilets is fatal, global association says (I’m not kidding you, this comes from the World Toilet Association, whose motto is “Toilet Is Life.” For real. Not to be confused with the World Toilet Organization, which organizes the World Toilet Summit and Expo, operates the World Toilet College, and celebrates World Toilet Day on November 19th each year.)

A trip to Dumb Little Man gives me dozens of lists of things I could be doing to improve myself and my life. I like skimming these lists. I rarely incorporate healthy new habits into my life, but I do like to count up how many things I’m already doing right.

Fourteen Ways to Stay Awake at Work
Thirty Easy Ways to Save Money
Seven Ingredients of Maturity
How to Avoid the Ten Worst Energy-Zappers
Eight Straight Benefits of Red Wine
Fifty Very Simple Ways to be Romantic

Next, I click on Zen Habits for the same kinds of things, only with an emphasis on productivity, and then Wise Bread for the same kinds of things only with an emphasis on money.

Then I skim through Vandelay Web Design just to freak myself out a bit on career-related matters, and then Simple Recipes to look at food I will never make, like Pan Seared Salmon with Avocado Remoulade.

There’s so much more: A couple of hundred Lifehacker posts, all the home improvement blogs (because I have a home and someday I might improve it), Make Magazine Blog, featuring a hand-sewn cardboard ukelele, The Librarians’ Internet Index, Gizmodo, etc. etc. etc.

After a couple of hours, I’ve run out of things to not read, and I’m all caught up!

The final round of voting for the Canadian Blog Awards got underway today. I’m actually pretty thrilled that I made it to the finals in a couple of categories, thanks to all of you who voted for me in Round 1.

I know I should be all nonchalant and humble, and pretend I don’t care if I win or lose. But I think you know me better than that. I’ve already confessed to you that I’m more competitive than any truly healthy, well-balanced, borderline buddhist ought to be. (Although, in my defence, I will say that it has nothing to do with wanting to triumph over others: I just want to win.)

Now, about the nitty gritty details. Knitnut.net is a finalist in two categories, and you can vote in both of them.

1. Best Blog Post. This one’s a bit tricky. Two of my posts have been short-listed in this category: The Real Reason I Support the Crack Kit Program, and Kindness Meters. You can only vote once. If you like one of these posts and don’t like the other one, by all means vote for the one you like. But if you want to vote for me and you like both posts equally, please vote for The Real Reason I Support the Crack Kit Program. This is in order to minimize the vote-splitting effect that comes from having two entries in the same category. (I told you I take this stuff seriously.)

2. Best Activities Blog. My activity is knitting, but I’m up against the phenomenal Yarn Harlot, so I haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of winning this one.

Anyway, go on over there and vote. While you’re doing that, I’ll go bribe my competitors to withdraw from the contest.

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Remember last week when I wondered if the streetcar tracks in Toronto would electrocute me if I stepped on them?

Well, it got me thinking about electricity. I have a morbid dread of electricity going bad, because when electricity goes bad, it can go very bad, very quickly and dramatically, with no warning. With volts, and amps and all kinds of awful things. One moment you can be happily and obliviously changing a lightbulb or scaling a tower or something, and the next thing you know, wham, you’re dead on the ground with smoke coming out of your ears. I saw what happened to the squirrel that touched the wrong part of the electric thing in my yard on Rochester. His eyes burst right out of his head.

I think the reason electricity scares me so much (apart from the fact that it just IS scary) is that I don’t understand it. I’ve never understood it. I think we learned about it in physics, but it didn’t make any sense to me, and I can’t retain information unless it makes sense. Various people have tried to explain electricity to me since then, but it goes in one ear and out the other (har har).

Some of us were talking at work the other day about what we’d do if we were in high school now and choosing our future careers. We all thought the trades would be a wise path to pursue.

“Electrician?” asked the consultant.

The editor and I both had the same instant visceral reaction to that suggestion. We absolutely, completely, gut-level, out-of-hand rejected any possibility of ever being an electrician. (And we both thought a nice girly trade like cabinetmaker would be the way to go.)

I have two memories of electricity as a child.

My sister stood on a chair to fix a flickering lightbulb, and suddenly she was not on the chair anymore and she was crying hard. She was okay after a few minutes, but I was vicariously traumatized. I wanted to know what had happened, and why, and most importantly, what it had felt like and why she was so scared. But she couldn’t explain what had happened or describe the pain. I inspected her hand but there was no blood, no bruise, nothing. I think that was the day electricity became the Invisible Enemy.

The other memory is of a series of events when I was thirteen and living in Kinburn, Ontario, population 300. Teenagers, being teenagers, needed more kicks than sleepy, drugless little Kinburn was providing. Sometimes we smoked cigarettes behind the boards at the skating rink. Sometimes we hyperventilated and then held our breath till we got high and passed out from oxygen deprivation. And sometimes we all joined hands and one person would grab hold of the electric fence. Yee haw.