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

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I saw a tweet about a new book that asks an excellent question: “Why do we label some things but not others?”

I don’t expect any language to have a word for everything, but once we see a gap in our language, why don’t we fill it? With information exchanged globally, why aren’t we looking at words that don’t exist in our own language and creating an equivalent? Things that are important get labeled — the Sami have 180 words for snow — but there can be both initially-labeled and labeled-in-retrospect words.

Something to think about.

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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.

My Wordle streak randomly reset back to 1 last weekend. I’m using the same link as I always do, and it still has the number of games played. But my streak is currently back in the single digits. And before you start throwing out thoughts such as, “Did you miss a day?” the answer is “no” and I take a screenshot every day.

This is May 29:

This is May 30:

I won in 3 guesses on the 29th and in 5 guesses on the 30th, but the streak reset to 1. The whole thing is meaningless. There are no prizes for keeping a streak going a full year, and I can always know my true streak by adding the two numbers together. Plus, I only started playing on the phone in November, so all my earlier games weren’t counted towards my streak because they were on a different device.

Did I mention that a Wordle streak is completely meaningless?

And yet it annoyed me enough to write this, days later.

Thank you for the birthday wishes. I had a day this week where I didn’t have any meetings, so I took the day off to celebrate, but it was EXACTLY what you expect to happen during the pandemic. The moment I settled down with Beorn to read my book, the twins texted to let me know that school was canceled due to an issue with the air conditioner. So my pyjamas day at home didn’t go according to plan, but it was still relaxing.

Mostly it was all about sleeping-in. That’s what I wanted for my birthday week: more sleep. I live a wild life.

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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:

• “Being an Aunt” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Barrenness writes what we’re all feeling about gun violence: “This is just nightmare on top of nightmare, and then another nightmare.” She writes about her niece, and how children are processing their lack of safety. They should be learning how to share and count blocks and read books; not hide under desks.

Lastly, the Next 15000 Days writes about a wonderful seaside adventure. She wants to write about the rest of life — not infertility — now. She explains: “I have spent 10 years of my life writing a blog about life after infertility. I am glad I’ve been writing about that – it has helped me with the healing. But now I think I am done with it. The infertility took away too much from me. Now I want to focus on the life that I have and enjoy in small things.” Yes to that! And more seaside pictures.

The roundup to the Roundup: Thank you for the birthday wishes. 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 May 27 – June 3) 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.

I was driving home a few weeks ago and suddenly couldn’t remember how old I was. Was I 47? 48? Simple math brought me to the correct year. A few days after that, someone said they were turning 50, and I thought, “50 is old.” And then realized I would be turning 50 in a few years, and it is my birthday this week.

Gulp.

I’m clearly having trouble with aging. I want to age in the sense that I don’t want the alternative, but I’m not really a fan of this aging thing. It ceases to be fun once you reach a certain point.

Or maybe you have to make it fun.

At some point, we’ll do a day trip to the beach and eat French fries for lunch and read books on the sand, a tradition we started when I turned 40. That will be good. And I’ll hopefully remember my age.

Happy birthday to me.

There is a black bear wandering around our town. Every day, dozens of people post which neighbourhood he’s hanging out in, taking videos of the bear padding around their backyard or climbing into trees. And every day, I wish the bear would choose our house, would pad around our yard, would climb our trees.

We drove around the neighbourhood where he was spotted one morning, looping up and down the streets. But it was like whack-a-mole. When we went to that neighbourhood, he apparently wandered over to a nearby church where everyone put up videos of the bear near the church with messages like, “Guess who came to worship?” And by the time people posted that message, the bear had wandered away again.

I want a bear friend so badly.

I fear that he’ll leave town, and I’ll never get a chance to see him.