Children tend to “read up,” which means that an 8-year-old wants to read about 12-year-olds, 12-year-olds want to read Seventeen magazine, and teens tend to focus on books set at colleges. The chain continues with younger people generally watching, reading, or listening to people slightly older than they are at the moment. Twenty-somethings watched ThirtySomething.

It could be that we do it as a form of preparation. You don’t need to learn how your age group operates. You’re curious about what is coming next. But it’s a general rule that we find people slightly older or farther down a road more interesting than people living in our same space.

What happens when you’re in the oldest or longest group? How do you read, watch, listen “up” when there isn’t a next tier?

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve slowly aged out of Facebook groups. The information is no longer applicable — we’ve lived there and done that — but there isn’t a next step to jump to, a next group to join, a next stage to read about. The actors on the television are younger than I am. The characters in the books are often younger, too.

There was an enormous dump of good television at the end of summer — many more shows than we could watch before the twins left. It came with the understanding that there would likely be a dearth of new television due to the writer’s strike. We were about to see what was finished before the strike began.

But I feel strange watching television without the ChickieNob. She doesn’t have the time to watch it from school, and it’s an activity I associate with her. I didn’t watch television, she got me into television, and then she took her television-watching self and moved far away.

I can watch the low stuff on her list, holding on to the other shows for breaks. But it is weird to sit on the bed without her. To turn my head and not see her beside me, ready with a snarky comment or to tell me where we’ve seen an actor before.

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

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I’ve written before that one of my biggest pet peeves is people who play music from a speaker at the beach. Even if it’s music I would typically listen to — and it’s usually not — it is not relaxing to sit between competing speaker set-ups blasting two different songs simultaneously.

But this summer, I did something brilliant. I brought my earbuds, downloaded the sound of ocean waves, and listened to a recording of the beach. While sitting on the beach. I had to turn it up louder than I wanted to drown out the competing Motown Medley and country music crooning, but at least the beach sounded like… the beach.

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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.

The lid on the kitchen rubbish bin broke off, necessitating an evening trip to the store to purchase a new bin. But when we got there, they didn’t have a white bin. They only had our bin in grey. These are the kinds of things that immobilize us. We walked around our garbage collection options — there were like six choices — for a half hour, looping back always to whether we could become grey rubbish bin people. (Spoiler alert: the answer is no.)

Our white bin was sold out online, too, but we ordered one for delivery later in October. And then we went home where I looked at the bin for about two minutes, fixed it, and we canceled the order.

When we talk to the twins at night, they tell us funny stories about people on campus, or weird things that happened in class, or things they learned in a lesson. They have so many stories to tell us.

And all I had to contribute to the conversation was our rubbish bin saga. I watched the Wolvog’s eyes glaze over, and he told me never to tell anyone else this story. So I promptly told his sister, who wondered why we were so obsessed with discussing the kitchen bin.

What she doesn’t know is that I saved her from the story about how Josh guessed that we needed more toilet paper upstairs and brought up some rolls, and he walked into the bathroom right as I was calling out to him, “We need more…” Just kidding. I’ve saved that story for this upcoming week to spread out all of my news.

I missed the Roundup; I missed the regular blog posts, too. Not writing my blog for three weeks changed the rhythm of my day. I enjoyed not feeling the pressure to write. I missed feeling the pressure to write. I’m pretty ambivalent about the time I spent away.

But I’m back with a wonky Roundup containing a few older posts and recent posts.

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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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Infertilityhonesty is back with a myth-busting blog post for World Childless Week, addressing the refrain of “you’re lucky you don’t have kids.” I especially like this thought: “All of these experiences don’t just end in an efficient punctuation of linear time, rather they infuse themselves as a part of you. They detonate and then restructure your view of life and the world. They are quite present alongside any arguably ‘good’ things that pop up on your childless path.” Go read the whole post.

The Barrenness was published recently. This made me smile, “The book is a beautiful collection of stories of infertility from a myriad of perspectives and it is heartbreaking and beautiful, and my artwork and words are collected in it. It is quite surreal, and a deep wonderful thing from so much loss.” Congratulations on the accomplishment.

Lastly, A Half Baked Life is having a really hard time. Not just a hard week, but very hard years. And she writes about two moments of kindness that happened recently. She writes, “Because sometimes it is so hard to try to communicate all of your needs when there are so many freaking needs, and you feel like you’re completely exhausting because you have so many needs, and when people just SEE you without you needing to say a word, it breaks your heart wide open.” Amen.

The roundup to the Roundup: I’m back. 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 August 15 – August 22) 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.