I am happy for the Wordle guy — not just because his desire to entertain his partner brought him over a million dollars but because he sounded overwhelmed by the success of the game, and the purchase means that someone else (or, something else) will take over the maintenance of it. I’m hoping for a smooth transition over to the New York Times, and I trust that they will treat it like their mini — free for anyone to play once a day.

But moreover, it’s nice to hear a happy story right now. The world feels so heavy and overwhelming. I like hearing about a person who made something just because and everyone loved it and they lived happily ever after.

And I’ve gotten 78+ rounds out of it so far. For free. How can I complain?

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Speaking of creating things, Life from Scratch is on sale. Just 99 cents. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your neighbours. Buy a copy for everyone you know and love.

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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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

A Half Baked Life has a post about friends and health and reaching out. I related to this: “The other morning, seeing a photo post from one of those friends of a group of women eating and being silly and just enjoying each others’ company, I confess I felt sad and lonely. I don’t have a group like this, a group that I hang out with or go on adventures with or even eat a meal with when I’m not with my family.” And I think a lot of people will relate to it because group friendship is a different beast and (likely) not as effortless as people make it seem from the outside.

Res Cogitatae has a post about burnout, and while I was holding her in my heart, I also had to comment on this brilliant analogy about the impulse to stop testing and tracking COVID cases: “E. called the premier’s office to explain to them that stopping testing was ‘just like if you told everyone not to call the fire department. It wouldn’t keep any houses from being on fire, it would just mean that no one would know which ones were burning’.” It is so hard right now. The mental load is too heavy right now. But hang in there and vent it out.

Lastly, Grief Is the Word has a post about waking up to loneliness and fear. She writes, “Sometimes I feel like a different species – my life has veered off course so dramatically. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to have the kind of life most of my friends and family are leading.” Sometimes we need to feel arms around us. Humans need to feel anchored.

The roundup to the Roundup: Good on you, Wordle Guy. Life from Scratch is on sale. 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 28 – February 4) 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.

You know I like the word games…

There have been many takes on Wordle. And Guess My Word. But one that is actually a fun remix (vs. a duplicate copy) is Absurdle. I wasn’t playing it because I didn’t totally get it, but my friend explained it to me, and now I will explain it to you.

You start with a word, just like Wordle, and it tells you whether any of your letters appears in the computer’s chosen word. But then everything changes with the next turn. The developer explains it best, but the end result is that you’re chasing the algorithm into a corner, sort of like a game of chess. But with words. It follows its own logic, but it changes the word and removes options behind the scene until you end up with only one possible word left.

My best game was six tries. My worst was eight. I tend to end on seven. You can play it as many times as you wish; a nice distraction while you wait for the next Wordle.

I loved this list of yearly failures. Accomplishments? That’s Instagram. Failures? That’s blogging. Right? Because blogging is about the camaraderie that comes when another person reads your messy thoughts and says, “Me too.”

At least, those are the blogs I read.

So far, this year, I have failed at returning to writing books. Failed at waking up for yoga at least seven mornings. (Sometimes several in a row.) I failed to make the dinner that Josh chose and left the ingredients in the freezer. I also failed to make the cookie recipe that is sitting on my counter along with the ingredients. I failed at saying exactly what I was thinking.

There were many more things on my list when I was making it in my head, but I failed at jotting them down.

What did you fail at last month?

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

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There’s a line in Shari Lapena’s book, Not a Happy Family, where a character comments, “What a good thing that we can’t see the future” (p. 111). She is remembering happier times from years earlier, and her comment is more about how those older days would have been tainted to know what was coming in the future.

But I can’t help to think of things I would have done if I had known the pandemic was going to stretch into a third year. I would have pulled the kids out of school to travel more. Maybe that’s it. We traveled a lot, but I would have traveled more if I knew I wasn’t going to travel at all for years.

Do you wish you had known about the pandemic years earlier? Would you have done anything differently?

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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.

Ina Garten has given the world a fantastic chicken recipe…

[Side note: I’m talking about the first chicken recipe from years ago. The one where you stuff a whole lemon inside. It is everyone’s favourite holiday dish in this house. Except me. Because I’m a vegetarian.]

…and she has high fived everyone who is equally phoning in the morning. Yes.

I started the fall working on a new book. Midway through the fall, I stopped working on the new book and started spending the hour scrolling Goodreads, playing Wordle and Letter Boxed, and not accomplishing anything. I mean, I have a 61 day streak going on Wordle, so it’s not nothing. But it’s… kind of nothing.

I’ve been mostly okay with that. I wasn’t okay the first few weeks when I felt like I should be doing something more with my time before I started work. But this is what I can do at this point in the pandemic. I can play word games and read books and watch television and talk to friends via Zoom. Go to work, cook dinner, clean the house. And not much else.