No one is having a good time. It is the theme of my week — not good news followed by not good news — and based on my Facebook feed, it is the theme of everyone else’s week, too.

Our interconnectedness is never more apparent when everything goes wrong—for instance, COVID. One person does X (goes out while they’re sick), which impacts Y (gets sick because of the first person), who now cancels Z (because they’re sick), which throws A – W into chaos. You get it. Because you live it. So when bad news comes, you can usually trace it back through other bits of bad news.

Or sometimes it comes out of nowhere. Just a big bad news drop from left field. But more often than not, especially with little bad news (bad news with a lowercase b), it is connected to other bits of bad news.

Does it work the other way? Do good things lead to more good things for other people? Or is it only problems that spread from person to person?

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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:

• “Does It Make Us Stronger?” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Grumpy Rumblings is also swimming through a sea of bad news. They post a long list of rejections, summing it up: “ It’s hard to have so much rejection without a single acceptance in between.” Amen. I include this because the ending gave me hope. Feel what you need to feel, and then take the next step. Onward.

Lastly, A Half-Baked Life has a story of a GrubHub driver that made me cry. Thankful for people in the world who do the small things that make the big differences.

The roundup to the Roundup: Sorry if you’re having a bad week, too. 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 10 – 17) 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.

Tick Tock (Simon Mayo): This was my first Simon Mayo book, and it came to me at the perfect time. End of break. Didn’t want anything too mentally taxing. It’s a fast-paced thriller set during a pandemic. Everything fits together a little too neatly, but I enjoyed reading it.

The Thing in the Snow (Sean Adams): It reminded me of the book Finna, and the television show Severance. If you like either of those, you will likely enjoy this. I read it over a weekend and snickered a lot.

The Villa (Rachel Hawkins): I was super excited about this book, so I probably felt more let down by the ending than I would have if I had gone into it without the high level of anticipation. I enjoyed the writing a lot. Five stars. And I liked how the two stories weaved together. But I didn’t believe a lot of the actions taken by the characters. And by the end, I didn’t like any of them. At all. As in, I didn’t want to spend time with them. So 5 for writing, and a 2 for plot and characters, averaging a 3.5 that I rounded up to 4 because I like her other books.

A Murder at Balmoral (Chris McGeorge): It was cute. It was fun. I wanted to like it more because the setup was amusing — a murder mystery with an alternative royal family. But you’d have to love cozy mysteries to put this on your TBR.

Heartstopper (Volumes 1 – 4) (Alice Oseman): If you don’t smile while reading these graphic novels, you don’t have a heart. They are the most delightful, wholesome teens, falling in love and navigating big feelings. The four books go to some dark places but handles the situations beautifully. The television show on Netflix is equally delightful. It’s like Schitt’s Creek — it just feels good spending time with these people in this world.

Sweet Sorrow (David Nicholls): It was perfect to read this in conjunction with Heartstopper because it’s about teens in the summer after high school, putting on a community theater performance of Romeo and Juliet. This went beyond a five-star read for me. It was gorgeous and aching and I read it at the perfect time. It will make you cry and think deeply and enjoy your old memories. A perfect perfect perfect story.

What did you read last month?

When I put Tell Me an Ending by Jo Harkin on my TBR, it had one cover. I didn’t love the cover, but it was fine. A black bird flying across a blue sky. But before I could buy the book, the cover changed. And the new cover made me feel uncomfortable when I looked at it. I almost didn’t read it.

But I’m so glad I did because it was a gorgeous, thought-provoking book about where the self comes from and the importance of memories. The book is set when we’ve discovered how to erase bad memories. For $4000, you can go to an office, have a simple procedure, and go about your life unburdened by the memory. You can either know that you erased a memory — you don’t remember what you erased, but you’re aware you had the procedure. Or, in the case of truly terrible memories, you can have the memory erased plus the memory of having the memory erased.

A lawsuit forces the company to offer to restore the memories of all the latter group’s people. So people receive a letter informing them that they once erased a memory and offering to restore it. You follow four people — really five because you also hear the story of someone working at the building — and whether they restore or don’t restore the memory.

It’s not as simple as “it must be terrible if I erased it, and therefore I don’t want it.” Because that memory is part of you, it’s about events that happened to you that you no longer remember. Maybe learning about the memory now would be different because you have different coping skills. Or maybe learning about the memory now would be devastating, and you’d never be able to get rid of it again. It would be hard to not allow curiosity to get the best of you.

So what would you do if you received the letter? Restore the missing memory? Or let it rest?

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

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Neal Agarwal makes fun things. I’ve shared a few things before, like his absurd trolley problems. In January, he released a new fun Internet toy allowing you to jump around the world seeing unusual moments captured by Google Street View.

Like a motorcycle and sidecar in the process of falling over in the Netherlands. Or glaciers in Greenland. Or the Internet Explorer grave in South Korea. You use the random button in the top right corner to jump to the next spot.

Have fun.

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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.

UK Mother’s Day happens before US Mother’s Day, so my inbox already contains UK brands asking me if I’d like to opt out of Mother’s Day emails. I say this every year, always hoping that it will catch on in the US, too, but every year, UK brands are the only ones that send me a kind email, short and sweet.

Three sentences. No hand wringing. No trying to sell me anything else at the moment. Just a simple, “If you’d prefer not to receive any emails of this sort from us, opt-out by clicking here and we’ll take care of it.”

I love that. I appreciate that. And I wish it would catch on here, too.

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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…

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:

• ” A Decade Later…” (A Few Pieces Missing From Normalcy – An Infertile Man’s Perspective)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Uterus Monologues has a book announcement. She writes, “Life, Almost is a book that contains pretty much everything that happened on the road to having a baby. It’s a book about miscarriage, yes, but it’s also about fertility, reproductive medicine, and pregnancy more broadly, especially the many gaps in our knowledge.” It’s really a lovely post about why we need miscarriage memoirs and to talk about loss. Congratulations on the book.

Lastly, Bereaved and Blessed talks about mid-life aches (which reminded me of Spalding Gray’s Bermuda Triangle of Health from age 50 – 53). She explains, “Next month I turn 48 and it seems this stage of middle age brings with it a host of seemingly random, and at times rare, medical challenges.” These two are unusual, and I didn’t know about the dangers of antihistamines.

The roundup to the Roundup: Thank you, UK brands, for your thoughtfulness. 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 3 – 10) 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.