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

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There was an opening to a recent Atlantic article that left me stunned (and grossed out) even though it made complete sense in retrospect:

Before you read any further, take a long, slow, deep breath. Congratulations! If you’re sitting in a typical American home, office building, or school, about 3 percent of the air you breathed in recently came out of the lungs of the people in the room with you right now.

I mean, yes, I clearly knew that the air in my lungs wasn’t pristine air that had never been inside another human being. But… it’s one thing to hold it in the back of my head and another to really consider the implications.

As someone who is against cup sharing or eating off another person’s fork, I was squicked out to think about this.

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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 kind of sort of love this. A social media platform called Minus.

Gizmodo explains that the user gets 100 posts. That’s it. Once those 100 posts are gone, you can’t post anything else. It would make us think twice about what we share and whether the moment is worth capturing.

As Grosser described it in an email to Gizmodo, “no likes, no follows, no feed algorithms, no accumulating metrics at all — only a single dwindling count of how many posts each user has remaining.” The only interactive function is a reply field.

The description on the front of the site promises there is still information to be gained by looking at a post—just not the same information you’re accustomed to when judging a post on another site:

The feed is reverse chronological, not algorithmic. Post timestamps are vague. Nothing is monetized. There are no likes or follows or noisy notifications. The site’s only visible metric counts down, showing how many posts each user has remaining.

I made an account and went on. Most of the posts are not as profound as you hope knowing that you only get to say 100 things. So maybe better in theory than in practice. But it’s still a super interesting idea.

I got to see my best friend from childhood for the first time in two years this week. She lives now in Canada, though her parents still live locally, and she hasn’t been able to see them for two years either due to the closed borders. So… it was an emotional reunion; to go over to her childhood home and sit outside and talk with her parents and see my friend.

(P.S. Visiting her is my empty nest plan instead of wine. I’m just going to her house for long weekends to eat Canadian candy because it’s better than US candy.)

There are so few people in my life anymore from my childhood. I was lamenting that recently with the ChickieNob because I had discovered a funny connection between an old middle school friend and another person’s sibling, and I had no one to tell who would care. Everything seemed so important back then, and I don’t even remember most of those people now when I flipped recently through my old yearbook with the kids. I certainly don’t remember the meaning behind most of the things we wrote in each other’s yearbooks.

Maybe it helped the twins put their own experience into perspective. It is important now, but with the exception of a few people you’ll carry forward into adulthood, the weight of it will slide away. The people who are upsetting you today will be the people you only vaguely remember tomorrow.

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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 in order 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. In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff…

Okay, now my choices this week.

Much Ado About Nothing has been having strange dreams about loss. She writes, “There isn’t much in common with any of them, yet all involve a small baby somehow. A baby I hold and help care for yet isn’t mine to keep. It’s been 3 years since my last pregnancy ended.” I think the rest of the world thinks there is a day where you step over a line and no longer feel sad about pregnancy loss. But as she writes, it’s something that stays with you and pops up from time to time. She is definitely not alone in feeling this way. I think there are a lot of us who feel the same way, too.

Another Canadian on the go! The Road Less Travelled writes about seeing her family for the first time in 22 months for Thanksgiving. She writes, “When we arrived at my parents’ house an hour or so later, I sobbed in the embrace of both of my aging parents — a little slower, a little more frail and a little more stooped since the last time I saw them. I am beyond thankful to be here with them all.” I got emotional reading it, and I’m not even in her family! I had a huge smile with this post.

Lastly, Finding a Different Path created an awesome anniversary gift for her husband. I’ll let you click over and read about it. And, yes, she does look smoldering in the picture she posted. It’s a great story.

The roundup to the Roundup: I got to see my friend. 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 October 8 – October 15) 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.

As I say every month, I’m shamelessly stealing this idea from Jessica Lahey. She has a recurring monthly date where she reviews all the books she read that month. Book reviews are important for authors, and I want to get better about doing this.

So. I’m going to review them here and also online, but I’m going to do it a little differently. I’m only going to review the stuff I really liked. I don’t see a reason to spend my time writing about something I didn’t love; it’s just using up more of my energy. So only positive reviews.

These are the books I liked (or mostly liked) from September.

In the Woods (Tana French): It was my first Tana French, and I know it’s not my last because I’ve already started The Likeness. This book is solid. And meaty. It takes a long time to digest. But the best part is the relationship between the two main characters: Rob and Cassie. They feel so real.

The Husbands (Chandler Baker): Think of it as Stepford Husbands… without the feeling of panic that accompanies Ira Levin’s book. (I really felt panicked reading Stepford Wives the first time.) And not really making commentary different from his book; just saying his thesis in a different way. It’s an enjoyable, quick read. You will not be surprised by anything, but not all books need a big reveal.

Bellweather Rhapsody (Kate Racculia): Kids snowed in at a creepy hotel that is hosting a statewide music festival. It’s quirky. And a little disjointed. And sometimes moves slowly. But it is also great writing and the characters grew on me. Plus, I loved encountering the memory of Fruitopia.

For Your Own Good (Samantha Downing): I wanted to read this book, and I grabbed it as soon as it was available at the library because I hated the cover and didn’t want to have to keep looking at it on my TBR. But it was such. a. good. book. Maybe the best example of don’t judge a book by its cover. It is creepy and wonderful.

The Great Godden (Meg Rosoff): This book feels like summer captured on paper. The writing is gorgeous, the characters walk off the page, the plot moves quickly, and I felt like I was part of their family for a summer. Such a beautiful and sad coming of age story.

A Slow Fire Burning (Paula Hawkins): This is the problem with book hype: decent books seem worse than they actually are when you’re told by every list that it’s the most amazing book ever. This book slips just onto this side of including it. I didn’t like any character, therefore, I didn’t care about the outcome for any character. But it’s an interesting story, and it moves quickly. I’m glad I finished it, but this is the second “big book of fall” that has not lived up to its hype.

What did you read last month?

Everything Happened has an essay about how she pulled her kid out of soccer so she would have time for going to the gym. She riffs on a familiar tale: you add one activity and that grows into many activities, and suddenly your weekends and afternoons are packed and you have no time for wall-staring. And I need wall-staring time.

She perfectly sums up how it feels to restart activities after the pandemic: “We were having to get ourselves places, ‘all of a sudden,’ and how do I put this undramatically… it felt like a creeping, shapeless asphyxiation. A gas leak.”

I used to have a lot of energy. I did a lot of activities. And a lot of work. And saw friends. A lot. And now, it feels like too much if we have to leave the house on both days of the weekend. If I don’t have 24-hour pyjamas time somewhere in there.

How am I still this tired 19.5 months into this?