I took a mental health day yesterday to read books and sit with my guinea pig, so it’s a little hard to get back into the swing of things today because there’s a part of my brain that says, “Oh, that felt so nice yesterday. Why don’t you do it again?”

But get back into it again I must because there is work to do and cooking to accomplish. Pesach begins tonight, and I have to prep for two seders. And amid it all, I need to not open social media and believe anything I read because it’s also April Fool’s Day.

That’s your yearly reminder not to believe the fake pregnancy announcements. I wish people wouldn’t write them.

This is a monthly series, published near the end of the month summarizing what I found, ate, watched, googled, and felt this month. New categories added from time to time.

Books Added to My TBR (e.g., books I just learned about that I’m excited to read… maybe)

• The Infamous Gilberts (Angela Tomaski)
• This Story Might Save Your Life (Tiffany Crum)
• Murder Like Clockwork (Nicola Whyte)
• Big Nobody (Alex Kadis)
• Nonesuch (Francis Spufford)
• We Chase Shadows (Richard Osman)
• How To Kill a Crime Writer (Sarah Lotz)
• The Library After Dark (Ande Pliego)
• Good People (Patmeena Sabit)
• A Sociopath’s Guide to a Successful Murder (M. K. Oliver)
• Cleaner (Jess Shannon)
• A Bad, Bad Place (Frances Crawford)
• The Quantity Theory of Morality (Will Self)
• Last Seen (Lucy Clarke)
• Boring Asian Female (Canwen Xu)
• The Tainted Cup (Robert Jackson Bennett)
• Dead and Breakfast (Kat Hillis and Rosiee Thor)
• Based on a True Story (Sarah Vaughan)
• One Last Thing (Katy Birchall)
• I’m Sorry You Feel That Way (Rebecca Wait)
• Ungodly Rich (Katharine McGee)
• Death Writ Large (Susie Dent)
• No Hard Feelings (Genevieve Novak)
• A Fatal Legacy (Charlotte Vassell)

Notable Meals (new recipes, old favorites, and restaurant items we ate this month)

• Phở chay: Made my own (though bought fried tofu from H-mart)
• Vegetarian ramen: Made my own. I think I like it better than our ramen place.
• Creamy walnut and basil pesto pasta.
• Pesto pizza with sliced tomatoes.

Television, Movies, and Music (watching and listening)

• I am excited to start Would I Lie to You (thank you, Mali). We’re waiting for the kids to come home.
• We finished the US Traitors season 4. We never enjoy it as much as the UK Traitors, but we liked more contestants in this one (e.g., Tara Lapinsky and Johnny Weir). And speaking of which, we are in the middle of UK Traitors season 4. Love it.
• Travel Man. This is our new favourite show. Richard Ayoade is so funny, and you get to see a new city every half hour. He’s on the first 9 seasons, so we still have plenty to go.
• We just started How To Get to Heaven From Belfast. We’re only a few episodes in, but it’s quite good.

Added To My Ongoing Mix Tape

• “Temptation” New Order
• “Iceblink Luck” Cocteau Twins
• “Strangers” Ed Harcourt
• “The Passenger” Iggy Pop
• “Alright” (Supergrass)
• “Pump It” (Black Eyed Peas)
• “Love Is Like a Butterfly” (Dolly Parton)
• “Everybody Wants To Rule the World” (Tears for Fears)

Tabs I Left Open (things I Googled and left up on the screen)

• An announcement for the new BBC1 show with Claudia Winkleman
• Unreal Deli’s website
• A google search for the life span of a kinkajou
• The menu for Doghaus
• The website for Hicks & Healey, England’s oldest whiskey company, which is only 22 years old
• Rocket Dog shoes. I saw a woman wearing the rainbow sneakers, and I loved them.

Micro-Joys

• In Series 1, Episode 2 of Travel Man, Richard Ayoade and Adam Hills try a tripe soup, which was sheep’s stomach in milk, and they declare the experience “too Turkish.” We’ve been using the phrase to mark a step beyond our comfort zone.
• Suddenly remembering a mnemonic from elementary school for spelling Halloween, and then finding it on YouTube!
• We saw the BSO perform the most incredible “Bolero” by Ravel. That percussionist keeping a steady beat for 15 straight minutes without a break, and then being part of 1,800+ people walking out elated.

Mood

• Riding the wave of endings and beginnings.

What about you? Let me know what you’re eating, seeing, listening to, googling, feeling this month.

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

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Another geography-based game, which I love because I can pretty much name and place every country in the world on a map as well as identify them by shape or distance between two places. That was not the case years ago when I first started playing Worldle or Globle. Yay games!

I like this one — it’s one of my evening games — but you first have to guess the continent the mystery country is on. So you may lose two or three turns just trying to get on the correct continent. So I don’t love that aspect. But other than that, Geografind is a super solid geography game.

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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.

It occurred to me this week that if we were about to celebrate our 25th anniversary, and I met Josh when I was 25, and we dated for a while before getting married, that at some point in the past year or so, I moved over the boundary between being together with Josh longer than not being together with Josh.

There’s a line I love in One Day that goes:

“Finally, she loved someone and felt fairly confident that she was loved in return. If someone asked Emma, as they sometimes did at parties, how she and her husband had met, she told them: ‘We grew up together.” (p. 239)

It can, of course, be taken in two different ways. The casual meaning implies that they have known each other since childhood. They grew up in the same town or went to the same school.

But there is another meaning, the one that is clear to the book reader. They had to figure out this whole growing-up thing, and they figured it out together. They had ups and downs since college, highs and lows, wins and losses, and they put it all together into a whole truth: They both emotionally grew over the many years they were together. And they couldn’t have done it with this particular result without the other one.

That’s how I feel about Josh. We met each other when we were fairly young, just figuring things out in new adulthood. And we grew up together.

I feel so lucky that I got to step over that line and have him in my life longer than without. Here’s to making this new side, this with side, infinitely wide.

Remember how I told you that Quentin was burying and urinating on the pea flakes to show me how much he hated them, and then he was grudgingly taking them and unenthusiastically eating them? He has catapulted past gusto into frenzy.

He now stands and watches me move through the room (it’s a little unnerving, to be honest), and if I go anywhere near him, he starts wheeking frantically and will not stop until he gets multiple pea flakes.

I know it’s what I wanted, but now he cannot calm down enough to learn a trick. He is so focused on the pea flakes that he won’t perform any action beyond shrieking for pea flakes. Maybe this is another stage? And he’ll get through this and then calmly consume pea flakes?

On the flip side, at least we know we’ll be able to get rid of 8 ounces of treats.

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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.

And now the blogs…

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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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Scientist on the Roof writes about a parenting fail. After going through middle school with two kids, she finds that she knows enough by now to know what she can skip. But everything is shiny and new for her child, so she has to go through things a third time. It’s hard to be the youngest kid.

Lastly, Infertile Phoenix captures within the personal what so many people are feeling collectively; there is too much upheaval. She is going through too much change, too much uncertainty, too many unknowns, and without the cushion of feeling stable, she can’t catch her breath. She writes about her last move, “I already knew it was going to be hard. I didn’t need to know how hard it was going to be before it even started.” Send her a big hug.

The roundup to the Roundup: From rejection to obsession, a guinea pig’s tale. 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 March 20 – March 27) 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.