There was a book on sale about your personality’s colour. I didn’t want to purchase it or do the test. It seemed easier to poll everyone in the room on my personality’s colour. We decided on a dark blue.

I asked what number I would be if I were a number. Which element if I were a witch? And finally, which letter of the alphabet would I be if I were a single letter?

“An M,” everyone decided. Not because my name begins with an M but because I’m a little spiky and rigid, but I slot nicely into many words.

A perfect statement of who I am. An M.

I loved Ness Labs’ recent post about change fatigue. It perfectly describes the spikiness that comes out in reaction to change. She explains, “Change fatigue [is] a feeling of resistance or resignation in the face of Change. When things keep on changing, and we don’t feel in control, our adaptive systems start breaking down.”

I haven’t been feeling in control because I’m not in control. The twins are going off to college whether I like it or not. It’s what happens next (life beyond this home), and they’re stepping into it whether I’m ready. But knowing this term helps me get my brain around why I feel like falling apart over buying and getting accustomed to a new vacuum or learning one more new tool.

How do you do with change?

On the topic of great confessional Substacks (I’m still Team Blogging, but I let a few Substacks into my inbox to go along with my blog reading), this one on envy was also thought-provoking. It begins:

I turn thirty-five in a couple of months, and it’s absolutely true that children come to define your social landscape at this stage of life – even if you don’t have them. Not being a parent feels like an identity I acquired at some point in the past few years, increasingly cited as a justification for my lifestyle and choices being different to many of my contemporaries.

That quote, “Not being a parent feels like an identity I acquired at some point,” — except it is only women. I don’t think most men feel defined by not being a parent before (if ever) they’re a parent in the same way that women are handed this identity like we’re moving off a conveyor belt.

She unpacks the envy she feels as she sometimes listens to younger friends experience those earlier stages of life — unconnected to the parenting thing — and she reminds herself that envy doesn’t need to be negative. It can be illuminating.

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

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Someone put this fantastic image together, breaking out pop culture by early, middle, and late for each generation. It highlights how much the years you’re born shape your cultural touchstones. I could identify 100% of core Gen X kid culture. And most of early and late Gen X (but not all). At the same time, large chunks of Gen Y and Gen Z sounded vaguely familiar but weren’t something I had seen or used.

Take a look at the segment of your generation.

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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.

Maybe Baby, a great Substack I read, recently wrote a newsletter about infertility. She has such a warm, friendly voice, and it felt a little bit like the old days of blogging when reading something felt like spending time with an inside-the-computer friend.

By this, I mean that it had the deep honesty and frankness of old blog posts before people could track metrics or curate things. Keeping things to yourself, sure. That’s what we do daily. But true curation felt like it started when we moved from words to images.

I nodded through most of the newsletter, but this part summed up the experience so perfectly:

So far, the worst part of trying and failing to get pregnant isn’t that I don’t have a baby, which is honestly fine, at times a relief, but that I’ve been waiting for the biggest news of my life—sweating about it, preparing for it—that never comes.

Go over and read her whole analogy with that paragraph.

And this: “It’s still early, in the grand scheme of things. Still, it’s been hard. Lonely, exhausting, almost impressive in its ability to carry me swiftly from the sense of joy and stability that compelled me to try in the first place.”

Yes. All of this. Exactly. And once again, the Internet reminds us that we’re not alone.

I wrote this yesterday afternoon and scheduled it because I will be at a meeting by the time you read it. Wearing real clothes. And shoes. It’s hard to be an adult.

We had to buy a new vacuum this week. We went with a Dyson again, especially since the last one is still somewhat kicking (more on that in a moment), and it’s from 2007. I like to write love letters to vacuums.

16 years is a good run, and the first Dyson still has some life left. So we dropped it off at the vacuum repair shop, and we’ll be able to get it back this weekend. It will be our backup vacuum for a bit as we make sure we like this one, and then we can give it away to someone through the help center in our town. I think of the repair money as cash keeping it out of a landfill. And it’s a damn fine vacuum, just with a few worn-out parts.

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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.

Dubliner in Deutschland looks back at a 101 things in 1001 days post derailed by COVID. It’s interesting to think about all the plans made on blogs in the first days of 2020 that we had no clue wouldn’t be able to happen a few weeks later. She looks through the list and reports back on what she was able to achieve from the list. I laughed at this one, remembering what my hair looked like that year: “My hair grew really long during the first year of the pandemic when I wasn’t able to get to a hairdresser but not sure that really counts as updating my style!”

Lastly, Finding a Different Path has a post about taking relaxing diversions and feeling stress from them. I feel this, too, with a lot of rituals. Except Wordle is still on this side of the stress relief line because it gives shape to the day. It’s part of my morning routine, and I always feel better vs. worse when I walk through the exercise, meditation, games, and writing I do upon waking. But that line is blurry, and it’s just as easy for me to step onto the other side of it and feel terrible if I don’t do something. Interesting read.

The roundup to the Roundup: New vacuums create clean floors. 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 January 20 – 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.