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

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Many years ago, I read an article that said the Old Man of Hoy would fall into the sea one day, and I suddenly had to see this sea stack for myself. We took the ferry out to Orkney so we could pass it on the water, and we took a million pictures while we called our greetings. (Okay, I was the only one who called out things, but I think the rest of us were silently considering it.)

It’s the same impulse that made us schedule a tour to see Dark Hedges in Northern Ireland (damn you, COVID, for canceling that trip). Those trees will be gone one day, and we wanted to be there. To hang out with some tree friends.

It makes me sad when I hear about places we can’t go or amazing things that we can’t see anymore. Similar to closed restaurants or books out of print.

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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 connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

Five minutes before a small gathering of Egyptian geese in St James’s Park attacked us (It turns out that when you bend over and coo at one, every Egyptian goose in the area believes you’re on the verge of feeding them), I declared to Josh and the twins that I’m most myself in London.

This is probably an odd thing to say because I’m usually not in London.

But it’s true – I feel most myself when I’m in London, especially when we’re at the Tower of London. If we lived in the city, I would spend a portion of every day at the Tower of London.

But why do I feel at home in a place where I do not belong? Where I’ve never lived? Where I’ve only visited?

The only thing I’ve come up with is that the people around me sound like characters in a C.S. Lewis book, which reminds me of books from childhood that make me feel comfortable and safe.

Though I suspect my feelings may change if I had to live there. It’s always fun to be a visitor and have time for museums, book shopping, and hot chocolate alongside the Thames vs. going to work or dragging home grocery bags on the Underground. Just as any hobby can stop feeling good if it becomes your job, I assume a favourite setting could become a drag if you had to live there indefinitely.

So visiting it is!

It’s good to know what you like. To know a real place you can access and feel like you’re getting back to who you were when you were curled up reading a book.

On the heels of replacing the computer came major car repairs. Why does the universe group large purchases/repairs together? Josh and I were trying to figure out why windshield wiper fluid wasn’t spraying out despite a full well (broken pump), and in doing so, we watched the check engine light come on (failed oxygen sensors).

So off we went to the mechanic to give up another astronomical sum in exchange for a functioning car.

I rarely drive my car, which is why I also felt guilty about fixing it. Why were we dumping money into something I use somewhere between 1 – 3 times per month? Because the cost of a new car (or even a new-to-us used car) is so much right now, fixing the one we have seems to be the smarter move. But yuck to spending money to fix existing stuff.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “This Anonymous Blog” (Infertile Phoenix)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I remember wearing grey for Missy, so this post from Bio Girl made me want to reach out with a hug over all the time that has passed. This made me weepy: “These days we live a lot of our lives because of you. Everyday I go to work and do the things I love, they are because of you – you pushing me out the door to start my graduate program. You telling me it was okay to take that time to learn to do something I might love.” What an amazing person to have had in your life.

Lastly, Bereaved and Blessed has a post about a mistake made on her mother’s headstone. I love the beginning: “One of many idioms that I grew up hearing was how things aren’t permanent until they are ‘set in stone.’ I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what it meant or how literal I took the expression until today.” As well as the end — that we can change things, even the things set in stone.

The roundup to the Roundup: More money spent. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between February 9 – 16) and not the blog’s main URL. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week. Read the original open thread post here.

As I say every month, I’m shamelessly stealing this idea from Jessica Lahey. She has a recurring monthly date where she reviews all the books she reads that month. Book reviews are important for authors, and I want to get better at doing this.

So. I’m going to review them here and also online, but I’m going to do it a little differently. I’m only going to review the stuff I really liked. I don’t see a reason to spend my time writing about something I didn’t love; it’s just using up more of my energy. So only positive reviews.

These are the books I liked (or mostly liked) from January.

All the Queen’s Men (S.J. Bennett): I loved The Windsor Knot so much that I immediately started the second book in the series. It was even better than the first one, and the best part was going on a tour of Buckingham Palace right after reading it and getting to walk through a section of the palace impacted by the reservicing plan discussed in the book. And I saw the Canaletto exhibit they’re putting together in the book when it was at Holyrood in 2018. Real-life intersecting with fiction is one of my favourite things.

Murder Most Royal (S.J. Bennett): Then she did it again! Bennett made an even better book for the third in the series, and the first two were so strong. These books are exceptional, and I want to keep re-reading them. I love every character — the portrayals of the real people and all of the fictional ones.

Heartstopper, Volume 5 (Alice Oseman): Oh Heartstopper… these are very quick, sweet reads. You’ll cheer on these teens and hope they find college and romantic peace.

One of the Good Guys (Araminta Hall): This book is creepy, full-stop. It will make you think. It will judge you. It will provoke you. It is not a good mystery, and you probably will not like any of the characters, but it’s still worth a read if you go into it, knowing it’s about challenging how we think and talk about women.

The Fury (Alex Michaelides): I guessed his last two books pretty early on, so when I guessed the twist in this one, I rolled my eyes. BUT he totally got me because that twist was just one of many, and I was so distracted by it that I didn’t notice everything else coming down the road. It’s a clever one, and you’ll see characters from the other two books pop up in this one.

What did you read last month?

I tried to get the Wolvog and Josh to guess my favourite Pete Seeger song, but they couldn’t get it after three guesses.

“It’s his cover of Garden Song,” I told them. “But my friend banned us from singing this at camp because I would always burst into tears at the same line.” I hit play on my phone, and the song filled the kitchen.

Sure enough, even though I didn’t feel sad, when I heard the line, “We are made of dreams and bone,” I burst into tears, and we turned off the song.

I don’t know why that line still gets to me almost thirty years later. That idea that everything feels so precarious; we’re so small and insubstantial: dreams and bones, soul and body.

The friend who banned the song died a little over ten years ago. I knew he died at that time, but I didn’t Google him until after I cried listening to the Garden Song, even though I’ve thought about him a lot over the last few years because we keep returning to the camp area.

I found a Twitter account he set up a few days before he died, with about ten tweets in quick succession, most of them links. Five people followed it: The man’s other Twitter account (a replica of the one I was on but under a non-English version of his name), three other people, and Yoko Ono.

My first thought was, “What is the story there? How did Yoko Ono find your account?” And I wanted to write to him and ask, but I couldn’t because we’re just dreams and bones, and he’s gone. There was this great story in the universe, and I would never know it because he was not here to ask him about it.