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

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All last week, the news would report that we maybe-likely-possibly-definitely have a weather event. The weather event would be zero inches of snow or 3,000 inches of snow.

I do not envy meteorologists because people get so angry when their predictions are wrong. But they can’t really predict accurately until we’re close to the event. I still think it’s pretty cool that we live in a world where we get some advance warning that something is about to happen.

I prepped by putting batteries in the flashlights, locating extra blankets and thermal layers, and making sure we had ingredients for meals.

I always think that I want snow until I get snow. And then I realize that I don’t really want snow. At all.

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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.

When I first heard about the game 2025, I checked it out and then quickly closed the screen. The goal is to make 45 groups of 45 entries, pulling together the groups from the mixed-up options on the screen, which are all buttons with a word (or words) on it.

For instance, you may see two animals (donkey) (horse). You click one and then click the other, and if they go together, they snap into a single block. Now you find another animal. You click that animal and then click the square with the two animals, and now you will see the list form and a red number appear on the square so you can know how many you’ve found in that category.

Of course, you don’t know the categories. You figure them out as you click options together. While some are easy to figure out, others are words I didn’t know and had no clue what else would belong in the same group.

I kept seeing people posting about the game, so I opened it again and wasted a few minutes of my life forming groups. Then I set it aside and went back to it that night to waste more of my life. Then I told everyone in the house about it, and everyone rejected the game. But the ChickieNob left my room and admitted a few minutes later that it was strangely addictive and she was going to play. Two down. Two standing strong.

When I went to say goodnight to the Wolvog, he had it up on his computer screen. He was well beyond where I was and continued to clean up the board. By the second day, he no longer had to scroll all the way to the right. Three down. One standing strong.

Josh is the only one who hasn’t given in to the siren song of 2025. He has stood behind the Wolvog and pointed out Tom Hanks movies, which we appreciate because we all suck at that category. But he has not started playing himself once he observed how we all disappeared into a fog of options, the Wolvog crying out: “Is it a cheese or a Muppet? A cheese or a Muppet?”

The Wolvog cleared the whole board in two days. The ChickieNob took a few more. I finished last. It took me about six days to complete, but I had the lowest number of mistakes (908). I had to do a lot of guessing with the final 123 options.

This is what I’ll say about the game and its addictiveness. In a chaotic world, it is soothing to group together things, clean up the screen, and make everything neat and organized. There is no timer, so you can work as quickly or as slowly as you wish. There is nothing at stake.

And I now know a lot of Tom Hanks movies.

I know it’s boring to read about someone else’s dream, BUT in my dream, all newscasters around the world had stopped reporting on the news and were reporting solely about what I’m about to tell you. So technically, the dream-you already know all of this.

In my dream, the ChickieNob got a new, lemon-yellow guinea pig named Pepper, which was one of a new breed of guinea pig that were born without hair but covered entirely by the clear side of velcro. So about the size of Quentin when he was three weeks old, lemon-yellow body, no hair, clear velcro. The plastic tips on some of the loops were burnt, leaving a smattering of what looked like black dots through the plastic; hence the very uncreative name of Pepper. (Come on, dream-ChickieNob. You can do better than that.)

But all of that wasn’t what made Pepper newsworthy. What was so amazing about Pepper is that if you lined up a row of normal guinea pigs, all facing forward, Pepper would crawl underneath each one and pause to touch noses (which is how guinea pigs actually kiss) before crawling underneath the next one. And his Velcro body would never stick to the other guinea pig’s fur. Newscasters could not get over this fact. They kept running report after report about how Pepper had crawled underneath another row of guinea pigs.

This is how badly my brain is begging for a different story when I read the news.

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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.

A Separate Life took an amazing trip to Egypt, and she brought us along through a post and photographs. I am most impressed that she did the trip piecemeal, pulling together lodging, transportation, and tickets herself. I know that smartphones make a lot of things easier these days, but it’s still a huge undertaking (Cairo is enormous), so I was extra impressed. Click over to see Cairo and Luxor.

Lastly, Finding a Different Path writes about giving away the glider. Goodwill and a consignment shop felt wrong. An individual felt right, but it still hurt to give away an object that was symbolic of a larger dream. She writes: “It doesn’t negate the love that I had for a nonexistent, completely elusive child. But there was something about that glider being gone that reopened a long-shiny scar, at least for a couple of hours.” Sending a hug.

The roundup to the Roundup: Pepper the velcro guinea pig. 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 16 – 23) 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.

There is a saying that you’ll never be younger than you are today. I guess it’s not just a saying because it’s actually true. Whatever age you are today, tomorrow you will be that age + one day.

I’ve never quite understood the point. Is it that it’s easier to do many things when you’re younger, so if you wait to get things done, you’re making it harder on yourself? Or to not waste today because it’s technically part of your youth, even if you’re 89 years old?

It was in my head because we’ve been talking a lot in our house about whether today is the easiest day to be a human because tomorrow will be that much harder. And then that much harder the day after, and so on.

On one hand, it feels true. It feels like the world was easier in many regards when I was younger. But maybe that’s just because the hard things turned out to be surmountable because we surmounted them. I remember worrying a lot prior to this point. Maybe the media didn’t foment our anxiety to the same degree, but that doesn’t mean the anxiety wasn’t there.

A certain percentage of people have struggled terribly to meet (or failed to meet) their basic needs. A certain percentage of people have not struggled at all to meet their basic needs. And the vast majority of us are in the middle, worrying about how we’ll meet basic needs, sometimes making sacrifices we don’t want to make, but ultimately meeting our basic needs.

Is it harder to be human today? Will tomorrow be that much microscopically harder than today? Or, unlike the original idea about aging, do changes come around in time to help us move forward again?

We had our penultimate wellness visit with the pediatrician. Our doctor will see patients until they leave college, which means next year will be the final time we go to her office.

We secured her as their doctor while they were still in utero, and she saw them when they came home from the hospital in tandem with their neonatologist. She has known them their whole lives, through every stage, every milestone, every vaccine, every ear infection.

It would be easier to go to a GP at this point. The pediatrician’s practice is out-of-network, which creates extra steps for simple things. But I’m finding it hard to say goodbye to someone who has known them their whole lives, and the kids are not eager to start over with someone new.

But very soon, they will need to start going to someone who doesn’t know them at all. It’s such a small relationship; a person we only see once a year at this point. But somehow it feels much bigger than 0.27% of our year.