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

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I have a new game I love called AITA Guesser. Every day, it pulls three real AITA situations from Reddit, and you have to guess how people voted. So you’re not voting whether YOU think the person is an asshole. You’re voting on what you think other people think about the person. Or sometimes I guess what I would have voted if I had encountered this situation and see whether I align with the majority.

I’m enjoying this game so much in a way that I’m never drawn to actually reading or voting in AITA posts. I guess it’s the difference between seeing whether I’m right or wrong vs. giving feedback to a stranger.

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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.

This sounds like the ideal retreat (for me). Manor house. Check. Everyone is on board with silent reading time. Check. Talking about books. Check. Lack of pressure to do anything more than read? Check. Check. Check.

Actually, it sounds like they took walks, listened to stories, and played games. So minimal pressure to do anything else, but those other things all sound like things I’d like to do, too.

I would want to do it with people I know, but I could also be happy doing it with a group of strangers in an awesome space. There’s a part of me that would feel a bit guilty — I traveled so far to do something I could do by myself at home? But I think it would make me happy.

Would you want to go?

Once a week, I diligently run down all of the tasks on my backup list, which includes backing up this space. I back it up four different ways, not truly understanding which type of backup I would want to use if I had to restore the site. Better safe than sorry.

So I was making my weekly backup in the cPanel file manager, when instead of clicking on the folder, I somehow MADE THE FOLDER DISAPPEAR. Like it was gone. And there is no undo button in the cPanel.

This story clearly has a happy ending because you are reading it on my blog, but I felt completely sick in that moment. I had no clue what I did. All I knew was that the file was not in the trash, and if you looked for my website on the internet, it showed a fatal error message because THE WEBSITE WAS GONE.

I started opening up nearby folders and finally found the folder inside another folder. Then I had to figure out how to move it back to the correct place. And then check that everything worked again. The whole thing unfolded in only a few minutes, but I felt sick for hours afterward because it was such a stupid mistake.

Note to self: Be extra careful when working in the cPanel.

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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.

Not a Wasted Word has a post about the stories we tell ourselves. In this case, it’s using coincidences to confirm that something is meant to be. She gives examples of small things and big things, but I related a lot to the post because we all try to make sense of a (possibly) chaotic world. But this is the part I found so interesting: “Anyway, I am definitely telling myself the story that, THIS WAS MEANT TO BE! Which makes me a little worried that I’m not considering all the issues. Can I be clear minded about something when I’m telling myself this story?” Yes? I think?

Lastly, The Barreness dumps out her brain and catches us up: From a trip that went well to car troubles to a scary moment with her FIL. She writes about the aftermath: “We went to a restaurant in town to stare at each other, ask each other over and over “you okay”; my hip/thigh pulsing in pain and try to process the evening that just unfolded under a beautiful full moon in front of the gallery on the biggest night of the year … Totally normal, totally surreal, absolutely baseline for this year.” I especially love the captured moment of kindness at the end.

The roundup to the Roundup: A blog backup horror story. 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 December 5 – 12) 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 liked this article about things deemed “old people hobbies” mostly because it is a strange phenomenon that some (most?) people don’t focus on connection until later in life, even though there are plenty of older people out there writing articles outlining how to have a meaningful life.

So… if you want to know, you can technically know.

Birdwatching has been “having a moment” for many moments. If you put that phrase into Google, it spits out over 3 million results. Though interestingly, if you look it up on Google Trends, birdwatching had many many more searches in 2004 than now. Just saying.

But they’re going by users on Merlin or people who purchase birdwatching guides. So, yes, there are likely more birdwatchers, which is a good thing.

Anyway, this is the point that I liked, and it feels fitting for the season:

The reason birdwatching is stereotyped as “for old people” is because our culture is so dysfunctional it takes most people 50 years or more to figure out what makes for a meaningful life. The answer is genuine connection to other people and nature.

Watching birds becomes a little like blogging itself. It’s about standing still, watching, noticing, commenting, and letting the thought — or bird — fly away while the memories remain.

Josh and I have been doing some major adulting, organizing our estate, which is just a fancy way of checking that we have everything set up properly and people know what to do after we’re gone. We’ve been filling out the worksheets and making a to-do list (and sometimes even taking tasks off the to-do list!). I like feeling organized.

But one thing I realized in the middle of all this was that I had savings bonds I needed to cash. We had been about to cash them many years ago to put towards a cycle, but when we stopped treatments, I put them in a drawer, and over the years, they had grown in emotional size to be the equivalent of my old sharps box.

But they were also under my maiden name, so I knew it would be an enormous headache down the road for someone else to cash them. And maybe completely impossible. So I went down to the bank, and my favourite teller carefully cashed them out and deposited the total into my account.

I wrote down the number in my notebook because I didn’t want it to go toward something like my mortgage or college tuition. It was supposed to be something big: adding to our family. And if we weren’t doing that, I wanted it to fulfill a childhood wish.

I think we’re going to go hiking in Cornwall. It feels like a good use of the money. Though a little bittersweet.