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.

It has been a hard week. The twins returned to school. We returned to our normal schedules. But nothing felt normal.

It reminds me of COVID coverage — we know about the cases where people remain home and the cases where people die, and we reduce the issue to life or death. You are either alive, and that means you are fine, or you are dead, and that means you are not fine. And the news moves on to the next story.

But the reality is that 11% of adults and 10% of kids end up with long COVID. And the other 89 – 90% sometimes end up with lingering symptoms for weeks that are not counted as long COVID. My point: There is a range of ways how life continues after COVID or a school shooting that goes beyond the binary of fine and not fine.

I found myself unreasonably annoyed by mistakes in the coverage. It made me wonder how many articles I’ve read and thought I had a grasp on the situation, and the reality for the people in this situation was completely different.

It is impossible to bring it up — I mean, how do you drop the topic in someone’s lap when they call you to catch up, not knowing what’s going on? So I found myself not saying anything at all because I didn’t know how to find the words. At the same time, I was surprised by the lack of conversation and outreach from people who knew about the shooting.

I found I could not participate in the various meetings and events they set up for parents afterward. Josh watched them for both of us and reported that their old middle school principal — possibly one of the best humans in the world and definitely one of the top five educators in the world — attended to help the kids through the week. It made me (and the twins) feel so much better to know that he was involved.

But mostly I mentally checked out when I was not at work. I worried about the kids. I came up with zero answers on how to move forward out of the feelings. I wondered if maybe it was a good thing to stay behind and keep thinking about this. We should never normalize violence.

Thank you to everyone who reached out with a comment or email. It meant a lot, and I’m sorry that I didn’t have the energy to respond properly.

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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.

It’s Inconceivable has a post about self-isolating when you don’t have extended family nearby. She writes, “When you’re CNBC and don’t have any extended family around to help you have to prepare for all eventualities.” She goes through her story, but I also love this point: “The Gateway Women forums were a great source of comfort as well during all of this because there are many women there who get what it’s like to not have the family connections where people can step in and step up to help out.” Community matters — online community, too. Go read her whole story.

No Kidding in NZ also talks about widening her support network in light of COVID. She writes: “I felt very alone. My friends with grown kids in the city would probably call on them, or one of their many friends they made through their kids. Their priority would be their kids, their work, and not some lonely old couple out in the suburbs.” Except in thinking about this, she realized she does have people she can call for help. It’s an important mental exercise everyone should do.

Lastly, Scientist on the Roof made me smile thinking about my old Home Economics class. I sewed shorts, but I did not line up the pattern properly on the seams. They looked hideous. And cooking was nerve-wracking for a vegetarian. Thank you for this trip down memory lane, and I loved hearing about Home Ec in the USSR vs. Home Ec today.

The roundup to the Roundup: The aftermath. 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 21 – 28) 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.