This is a monthly series, published near the end of the month summarizing what I found, ate, watched, googled, and felt this month. New categories added from time to time.

Books Added to My TBR (e.g., books I just learned about that I’m excited to read… maybe)

• The Pinnacle (Abir Mukherjee)
• Sublimation (Isabel Kim)
• Offseason (Avigayl Sharp)
• Shrink Solves Murder (Philippa Perry)
• The Artful Anna Harris (Tracy Maton)
• Chosen Family (Madeleine Gray)
• Three Bags Full (Leonie Swann)
• All Grown Up (Daisy Buchanan)
• Death on the Royal Yacht (S.J. Bennett)
• Welcome to the Neighbourhood (Jane Fallon)
• A Neighbour’s Guide to Murder (Louise Candlish)
• The Night Stairs (Erin Kelly)
• Look What You Made Me Do (John Lanchester)
• The Parkwood Murders (Chris Chibnall)
• Time to Burn (Ellery Lloyd)
• The Body in the Bath (Ragnar Jonasson)
• Murder at World’s End (Ross Montgomery)
• The Opposite of Murder (Sophie Hannah)
• A Plot to Die For (Ardal O’Hanlon)
• The Distinctly Competent District Councillor (Jonas Jonasson)
• Such a Nice Girl (Andrea Mara)
• The Pie & Mash Detective Agency (J. D. Brinkworth)
• Getting Away with Murder (Shari Lapena)
• The Accidental Rewrite (Milly Johnson)
• Whistler (Ann Patchett)
• Murder by Memory (Olivia Waite)
• Bad Words (Rioghnach Robinson)
• The Exes (Leodora Darlington)
• Very Slowly All At Once (Lauren Schott)
• A Good Person (Kirsten King)

Notable Meals (new recipes, old favorites, and restaurant items we ate this month)

• Appetizers for dinner. We always do this on New Years. It’s a very brown meal, but so delicious and zero work.
• Vegetarian Canadian split pea soup with pumpernickel bread.
• Vegetarian BLTs with half sour pickles on the side.
• Thai noodle salad with peanut-lime dressing.

Television, Movies, and Music (watching and listening)

• Amazing finale to The Traitors UK, Season 4. Having people play for charity vs. their own personal gain made the whole game more enjoyable. The only bummer was that the US streaming removed the charities they were playing for. That was the whole point! I believe they aired the charities in the UK because you can see lists and discussion about it online. Zero clue why they edited that out of the US stream.
• We finished Pluribus. Wonderfully weird. I can’t wait to see where it goes in Season 2.
• I rewatched All of You with the ChickieNob. The writing and acting were even better on the second viewing.
• We started the US Traitors (season 3) but could not get into it. We switched to the NZ Traitors and liked it a lot more — especially how it ended. Though the group never felt as cohesive as the ones in the UK Traitors, which was odd because many of them knew each other outside of the show.
• We watched the new season of Man on the Inside. It was sweet.
• We LOVED Last One Laughing UK. They lock 10 comedians in a room for 6 hours, and they have to make each other laugh without smiling or laughing themselves. It was super amusing to watch. We have not found another version that we’ve enjoyed as much.

Added To My Ongoing Mix Tape

• Nothing added this month

Tabs I Left Open (things I Googled and left up on the screen)

• The words to the childhood chant “See See My Playmate.”
• Loop Quiet earplugs (considering purchasing)

Micro-Joys

• Teaching the twins how to make salmon in the oven using my freezer to plate recipe.
• Adding dried blueberries to my Special K. Little chewy bursts of joy.

Mood

• Really sad that winter break is over. And worried about the future.

What about you? Let me know what you’re eating, seeing, listening to, googling, feeling this month.

Lauren Bravo is one of my favourite writers. I’ve only read one book — Probably Nothing — but it was that good. One of my top books of 2025.

Every month or so, I look up writers I like on Goodreads to see if they have a new book coming out. Every once in a while, I’m happily surprised to see a new book listed. But her next book never popped up because she has been dealing with two miscarriages.

It’s secondary infertility, and while she knew that being pregnant used up your time and brainspace, “what I didn’t know then, privileged as I was, is that being not-pregnant makes its own demands – on your body and your time, as well as your heart.”

My throat got tight with that.

And this:

It is work, but it feels the very opposite of productivity – tending to your body as it unravels, diligently unpicking traces of the life that might have been.

What is it called to feel gutted for someone you don’t know and will likely never meet, but their words touched you and made your life better at one point and now you’re so sad that they’re part of a club you never wanted to be part of yourself? That needs a word.

Go read the whole thing. And then buy her book because it is as wise as this piece.

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.