Cup of Jo asked back in January, “What is your pro tip?” and people dropped over a thousand comments of life hacks.

Like this one:”I have a whiteboard on my fridge, but instead of writing what the meal plan for the week is (which I have written elsewhere), I write what I actually cooked for dinner each night as I’m putting leftovers in the fridge. Then I know what leftovers are no longer good.”

So smart. And this one we already do and have for years: “Travel with a plastic doorstop in your suitcase. Once in the room, wedge it under the door, making it impossible to open.”

And a perfect one: “Make a decision and then make it work.”

I am pulling out my top 10 from this list because there are too many good ideas to let float by. I’m capturing them in my bullet journal. What are your favourites?

I saw a bunch of people posting on Facebook about a “soup mother.” I assumed that it was a mother… who made soup? Which begged the question of why the soup maker needed her parental status in her name. But a quick Google session brought me here, to the idea of a soup mother.

It is sort of the soup equivalent to sourdough starter. Sort of. You take the remains of one soup and you add more ingredients to it to create the next soup. More like soup tag, maybe. Soup never goes to waste because one of the ingredients of your current soup is the leftovers of your last soup.

We did something similar with Stanley Tucci’s marinara sauce. We made it, and it was fine. But then his pasta e fagioli called for two cups of his marinara sauce. So we used the leftovers of the night before to make the soup, which was fantastic. In a true soup mother, we would take the pasta e fagioli and turn it into a vegetable soup by adding more stock and vegetables.

This appeals to my desire for zero waste, though I wonder how it works once you’ve added ingredients that don’t work in the direction you want to take the soup. Can you back yourself into a soup corner?

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

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As if you needed another reason to do Microblog Monday and write in your own space, I loved this article about the power of writing things down. When we give our thoughts a label — describe them and explain them — we make our thoughts manageable:

It is like when a doctor gives a diagnosis after hearing a list of symptoms; we give a label to describe a thought or a concept. And what happens to feelings that cannot be put into a label because they are too abstract? We use those categorical dimensions of positive or negative, self or others, past, present, or future, and so on, and it forces just anything to be labeled. It is a method for tricking the amorphous.

The diagnosis doesn’t remove any symptoms and it doesn’t solve the problem, but anyone who experiences unexplained infertility knows that a diagnosis (or label or name) makes a difference. It gives you a focus, a way forward.

Write it down. Get it out. Look at it on the screen. Release it.

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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.

I saw this super pretty way of capturing the year. (Or the month or, really, any time period. Don’t feel like you can’t start it today just because we’re in February.) You divide up a piece of fabric into 12 pie slices, and you embroider a tiny picture to remember the day. So, for instance, if you got coffee with a friend that day, you may embroider a tiny coffee mug. Or if you went on a trip, you may embroider a tiny landmark.

At the end of the year, you have a circle of fabric covered with tiny moments from your year, and you can frame it or turn it into a pillow, etc.

And then you start all over again.

I don’t embroider, but I loved the idea of doing the same concept with a doodle on a piece of paper. Make a tiny doodle to represent once moment in my day, and at the end of the time period, frame it.

Globle turned out to be the Wolvog’s gateway game. Initially, he was meh about Wordle, but once A told me about Globle (where you have to guess the country), his geography-nerdy heart exploded, and he got sucked into the Wordle world. We now all play Wordle, Globle, and Worldle, which is like Globle except you get the country shape and then the kilometer distance with each guess. We all play the three games in the morning, but then need to wait until dinner to discuss our guesses.

I save Guess My Word, Nerdle, and a few open-ended Wordle-like games such as Absurdle or Hello Wordl in the evening.

It’s like a second job by this point.

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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:

• “Change of Perspective” (A Blank New Page)

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ has a post about marking milestones. These milestones may be personal to each person’s journey, but you know them when you encounter them. They indicate a level of change. She writes, “But we can grieve loss AND embrace growth, mourn something that is gone at the same time hoping for something new, and in doing this, we can begin to look forward.” I love that.

Family Building with a Twist proposes a thought experiment that includes two brilliant questions, “What do you think your 16-year-old self would think of the life you have?” and “How do you think you would feel if you lived the life your 16-year-old self envisioned?” Like her, my 16-year-old self didn’t know a lot about infertility. But she would definitely be thrilled to discover that she will have twins. I love these questions.

Lastly, The Barreness checked in with an update. This post is why I love blogging, and why I still read blogs over all other forms of social media. Her stream-of-conscious processing of a life is more interesting than a snappy meme on Twitter. She asks at the end of her update: “Is anyone else feeling this too?” Again, that is blogging. To hear the echo, yes, we feel this, too.

The roundup to the Roundup: Globle and Worldle. 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 11 – 18) 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.