This is, believe it or not, my 16th year of blogging. My 16th blogoversary. I started writing in this space 16 years ago.

And I’ve kept it up, year after year after year. Five times per week. Year after year after year.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the start of this blog because we’re once again at a crossroads. When I started this blog, the twins were giving up their bottles. And now they’re a year away from leaving for college. My heart is heavy. Melissa back then didn’t know how hard this time would be. She didn’t know those would truly be her final bottles because she would walk away from treatments a few years later without her third child. And while she could fathom that one day her kids would be grown, she couldn’t really understand how it would feel to hear them say something super clever or apply to a college or reach out to a friend in need.

Crap. I thought I was going to write about writing, but it always comes back to them.

Any time I think about not writing, I think about how I have this account of what I was thinking and feeling and going through for the majority of their life. It’s over 5000 posts and 84,000 comments, and we often scroll back through random months to find old stories — most recently the trip to the potato chip factory!

It is not too late if you haven’t written in your blog for a long time. You can do it today, and then do it tomorrow, and then maybe even the next day. And you will pop up in my feed reader because I haven’t removed you. A blog post from you would be a little gift to celebrate this milestone.

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

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The Israeli writer, A.B. Yehoshua died last week. I found out on Facebook, which is always such an odd thing — to see the end of a life sandwiched between a post about gardening and another about graduation.

His books defined my mid-twenties. My late-twenties. My early thirties. It has been a long time since I picked up one of his books, but there was a time when he was my go-to, my touchstone, my favourite.

It’s sad to lose a writer, but I feel lucky that I still have his books.

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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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

Let’s be honest, it’s a shitshow out there. There have been plenty of other times when we’ve declared the world a shitshow, and in retrospect, it wasn’t but we didn’t know that at the time. We couldn’t imagine a world where we would be in our third year of a pandemic, facing down a war, monkeypox, gun violence, inflation, and everything else I’m not going to write down because listing it out is depressing.

But we have Wordle.

And as this article astutely points out: “It’s hard to converse in a straightforward way sometimes — but in their own small way, these games can make talking to each other easier.”

And, yeah, when the world is a shitshow, sometimes it’s nice to spend five minutes of your morning in the company of letters. And then check in with everyone to make sure they got the word, too.

I want to talk about really amazing customer service. Josh and I already had a lifelong addiction commitment to drinking Mayorga coffee, but this story ensured that we continue on our Cafe Cubano path into future generations.

Every six weeks or so, Josh orders several two-pound bags of coffee. After a day or two, they arrive and our house smells amazing because I leave them in the front hall until he gets home to put them in the freezer.

This week, I opened the box so the hall could start smelling like delicious ground coffee, and I could tell something was different when I picked up the bags. He hadn’t gotten the coffee ground like he normally does, and we don’t have a grinder for whole beans. We got rid of it when the kids were babies and the sound bothered them, and we never replaced it.

So we had no way of using this enormous box of coffee.

I called them to see if he could drive by and get the coffee ground — the warehouse isn’t that far from our house, and pre-COVID, we always went in person to get our beans. But the guy explained that he couldn’t run even sealed bags of beans through the machine once they left the warehouse. My heart sank. I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the window.

“But,” he said, “You could donate those bags to a local food bank, and I could send you the ones you wanted right now.”

“But it was our fault. We ordered the wrong thing,” I pointed out.

“I know, but we can make this right.”

It is such a simple thing: a solution where everyone wins EXCEPT the company. The food bank wins because they get coffee they can pass along. I win because I get the coffee I want. But poor Mayorga doesn’t win because they’re accepting the burden of making everyone else happy.

So. This is what I can do for Mayorga (beyond customer loyalty of life). If you are looking for really amazing coffee from a really amazing company that clearly cares about their customers and community and the world as a whole, please get Mayorga coffee. You will not be disappointed because it’s literally the best coffee in the world. As in the whole world. Tall claim but if you taste it, you’ll understand.

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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:

• “Grief Revisited” (Afterward Honesty)

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ muses on whether grief is forever. It’s a great post, pulling love apart from grief and showing how they’re two separate entities when you’re not in a space of active grief. She explains: “I honour my losses, and my pain, the grief I once felt. I do that because of love. Love outlasts grief.” It’s a beautiful post about the time after.

Scientist on the Roof talks about the pressure to be a superhuman parent. She writes: “You can’t be too permissive – that’s bad parenting. But you can’t be too strict, either (that’s bad parenting, too). You have to ‘connect,’ you have to show compassion and understanding. You have to be firm… but not too firm.” It’s not realistic, and the pressure sets up people for failure. I understand why she’s angry at all of the unsolicited advice out there.

Lastly, Infertile Phoenix has a post about opening up to her classmates about infertility. She posts her research topic, unsure of how her classmates will react to talk about pronatalism and IVF statistics. But she’s surprised by the support and the outreach. “Y’all. My cohort is small. Very small. Three people, not including myself, have already been open about being affected or having someone close to them being affected by infertility and involuntary childlessness.” She is looking for one more person for her research project. “If you are a woman who is permanently involuntarily childless after IVF failure and would like to participate,” contact her.

The roundup to the Roundup: If you could marry a cup of coffee, I would be wed to Cafe Cubano. 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 June 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 read that month. Book reviews are important for authors, and I want to get better about 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 May.

Though I am going to break my own rule for one of these…

The Shadow House (Anna Downes): This is one of those books that was enjoyable while I was reading it but forgettable about two minutes after I returned the book. A case in point, looking back over my May books, I needed to look up the synopsis to remember what this was about. But once I remembered, I was like, “Oh yeah, I liked this one.” So why can’t I remember it a few minutes later? Anyway, it was a solid, creepy second book from an author that I liked last year. Everything falls into place in the end and wraps up neatly. Maybe I would have loved some loose threads, but solid is good, too.

Portrait of a Thief (Grace D. Li): This is where I’m breaking my rule. I did not like this book. At all. It is the first book I’ve skimmed in years. BUT I didn’t stop reading it. On one hand, I’ve only stopped reading one book in the last five or so years, so this would have been number two. But while I felt okay stopping reading the other book, I felt compelled to keep reading this one. I wanted to like it, so badly. And I felt like it was my fault that I didn’t. I felt relieved when it was done, and I could remove it from my reading list and delete the library book. But I also felt terrible that I disliked it so much when I wanted to love it with all of my heart.

The Agathas (Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson): I love a book where the heroine rescues herself, and here you get two girls rescuing themselves in tandem. If you liked The Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, you’ll like these smart girls solving crimes. It was a very fun read.

The Younger Wife (Sally Hepworth): This was not what I was expecting, and I was pleasantly surprised. I couldn’t put this book down. I always like Hepworth’s writing, even when I don’t like her plots, but this is one of her best. Good pacing, good writing, good plot. Can’t wait for her next book.

Sleeping Dogs Lie (Samantha Downing): I love everything she writes, including this bananapants short novella. You can read the whole thing in one sitting. Everything she writes is clever and well-written, and I was so happy to get this story.

What did you read last month?