Category — Microblog Mondays

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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This weekend we went to a second Harry Potter festival.  This time the weather cooperated, so we got to wear our Ravenclaw robes.  This festival was a lot more crowded.  You’ve never seen so many wizards in one place.

We lucked out that our visit to Philadelphia coincided with the Rosenbach Museum in Center City displaying the original copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for the 150th anniversary of the book.  It’s the handwritten copy that Dodgson presented Alice Liddell when she asked him to write down the story, complete with the original, pre-Tenniel illustrations.

You could only take a non-flash photo from 2 meters away

It was very special that we got to see the book the day before St. Frideswide’s Day, who is the patron saint of Oxford and her story (and the church in Oxford connected to her) are entwined in the story of the book.  We celebrate St. Frideswide’s Day every year with scones and tea, which we’ll have after the kids come home from school.

What is the most amazing thing you’ve seen this week?

P.S. I wrote about St. Frideswide before this with the Alice tour of Oxford.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored posts.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Napping is apparently good for your heart health.  This is just one more way I’m shortening my life since I am terrible at napping.

I used to nap, back in college, but now I find that naps mess up the rest of my day.  I wake up groggy and feel mentally displaced the rest of the day.  If someone were to offer me nap time, I would probably politely tell them that I’d love the break, but I’d rather use it to read.

How do you feel about naps?  Love them?  Still take them?  Can’t live without them?  Or they do more harm than good?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored posts.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I read an interesting way of thinking about stress.  The gist is that stress is a response that highlights what is important to you.  If it wasn’t important, it would become an annoyance and not a stressor.  We stress about things we care about.

An example from the article:

Of course, not every stressor is going to be important; sometimes you get mildly stressed over having to wait at a red light. But if you find that you’re frequently highly stressed about your family, for example, you might conclude that having a healthy relationship with them is important to you.

I know a lot of us are dealing with a shit-ton of stress at the cosmic level, which I differentiate from the day-to-day level.  And when I considered what I stress about, I realized that, yes, they are all things that are important to me.

Think about your major stressors.  Are they things/people that are very important to you?  Does thinking this way change the way you see that stress?

And feel free to vent your stress if you wish.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored posts.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Not Quite Nigella had a post recently about an ethical dinner she attended.  She explains:

The Ethics Centre’s new series of dinners called “Hard Things To Talk About” pairs innovative and surprising food, performances, speakers and thought provoking conversation. This isn’t a regular, “safe” dinner but one where your preconceptions may be dashed and you may be asked uncomfortable questions.

At her dinner, the theme was bias.  The food, the conversation, the speakers, the interactions were all meant to challenge her to think about bias.

It sounds like a cool idea, though one that could grow quite uncomfortable if not done well.

Do you think you would be up for a dinner like this?  Would it be different if you were paired with someone you would have to keep seeing in life vs. a stranger?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored posts.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I’m working my way through a backlog of Note to Self episodes, and there was a particularly interesting one on space travel and specifically space tourism such as Virgin Galactic*.  While we may not get a person to Mars in my lifetime (or maybe we will?), I agree with the host, Manoush Zomorodi, that it seems likely that we’ll have to make a decision on whether we’re up for a suborbital flight, similar to the way that we have to make a decision on how we feel about airplane travel.

I don’t think I’m up for it.  There are plenty of places I’d like to go and things I’d like to see, but I’m equally okay never getting to those places or seeing those things.  Life is short, you can’t fit everything in, and I understand that some of those dreams may need to float away.  And space is one of those things: I’m totally okay never going up into space.

How about you?  If you had the financial means, would you take the risk of a suborbital flight if it meant you got to see space up-close?

*Heads up: Infertility pops up a few times in the episode.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored posts.