I try about 3 – 5 new recipes per month, depending on the month. Sometimes I find a recipe that looks interesting, and I try to make it. Other times, I reverse-engineer something we liked at a restaurant. Last month contained three of those types of meals.

The first was a phở chay we liked from a restaurant. I was able to get it pretty close. Josh rated the first attempt an 8, and I know what I need to do to get it to a 9 or 10.

The second was a vegetarian ramen we liked, also from a restaurant. My first attempt was already nearing a 10, but adding shredded pickled ginger and baby bok choy pushed it over the line. We will make this one again and again.

But the final recipe, which I will not link to here because I still shudder thinking about it, wasn’t even rateable. It was that bad. It was a recipe for tofu shawarma.

Wait, Melissa, you’re thinking. Isn’t shawarma meat? Well, yes, it is. But this recipe told me that shaving down the tofu and adding spices would make a close facsimile of the real thing. I made my tehina and salad and got to work.

The end result looked nothing like the photo, and the texture was something akin to a scrambled egg. We had to trash the leftovers because neither of us could face eating it a second time and use the leftover tehina and salad with some falafel.

Tofu shawarma has earned a spot in the top three of my worst recipe fails.

The same article kept getting shared in various places, and I finally clicked over to the Cherwell to read it. Strange posters were seen around Oxford advertising events at Kingswell College. Oxford does not have a Kingswell College, and the dates were set in 2011.

A QR code brought you to a website where you could download the first few chapters of a story, sign up to receive new chapters when released, and an email address.

I love this sort of thing.

I’ve read a few pages, and it’s the sort of story I would decide to buy after sampling a chapter. Would I maybe regret that decision four or five more chapters in? Perhaps. But by then, I would finish it anyway.

If you haven’t read the article or heard about this story, I pass it along to you. It has already brought me at least a half hour of solid wondering time.

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

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A discussion about streaks made me realize how many streaks I was keeping, and while none of them feel onerous, it did give me pause. I close my rings every day on my Apple Watch, I meditate, and I read. I play 9 games before work while I drink coffee, and 9 games after dinner. I write down a single sentence about work, and in another notebook, a single sentence about my non-work life.

I clearly care about them, or I wouldn’t have tracked/kept them. But it does seem like a lot of things to keep going, writing it down like that.

Do you keep any streaks?

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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 assertion is that people are terrible at remembering colours, but I would argue that people may remember the colour, but are terrible at recreating it. Po-tay-to po-tah-to.

So the game is that you are shown a tile for about 5 seconds. Memorize the colour. Then you go to a randomly-coloured tile with sliders, and you need to recreate the first colour from memory. Like I said, if you’ve never played with sliders, it can be difficult to know how to recreate a shade of brown. But play at least two times, knowing the first time will be a throwaway game while you figure out the sliders.

I scored 41.07 out of 50, which is better than 57% of people. I’m happy with that. I tended to go slightly lighter than the original.

How did you do?

Purim crept up on me this year. When the kids were little, I started Purim planning and baking by January. But we stopped our big baking sprees during the pandemic, and now it’s just two kinds of cookies baked over one weekend. Apparently, this weekend. I just didn’t know until I turned the calendar and saw, “Oh, I should get on that.”

It’s natural for things to ebb and flow, to be super important at one point in your life and less important at others. But there is something bittersweet about seeing something that once took up a lot of my mental bandwidth between winter and spring shrink down in size. On one hand, it leaves me with more time to bother the guinea pig and teach him new tricks. On the other hand, I miss the chaos of packing dozens of boxes with treats.

Happy Purim next week if you celebrate.

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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:

• “Lichtblicke” (Elaine ohne Kind)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Woulda Coulda Shoulda is back with an update. There is a lot of illness dealt with in the post, but her words stayed with me for the story about the hairdryer towards the end. Especially this: “Believe me when I tell you that I had examined the handle and the intake multiple times, always concluding it must be immovable, always following that conclusion with a hearty round of self-flagellation for my inability to FIX IT. It may not be a sign from the universe—or maybe it is; I rule out nothing at this point—but I just couldn’t see the solution, until I did.” May accessible solutions reveal themselves for all problems.

Lastly, I deeply appreciated A Separate Life’s breakdown of cruising — its pros and cons. I have never been on a cruise, and it was helpful to see it written out in this way to judge whether cruising is for me. So many people just say, “Go, you’ll love it!” but what they mean is that they love it. And this was helpful for a person to judge whether they would love it. So thank you.

The roundup to the Roundup: Purim baking this weekend. 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 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.