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

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I always like to think about the early days of blogging, when there were too many posts to read in a day, and they would collect in your feedreader, waiting for you to add your thoughts in the comment section.

This essay puts the heyday earlier than expected. I think 2008 was a sweet spot in the blogging explosion years earlier, but I think the points about how getting exposed to another person’s story changes you are spot-on.

Enjoy.

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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.

Beyond writing names and explanations on the back of photographs (why didn’t I do this consistently?), I wish I had kept a spreadsheet of everyone I knew. Not everyone I met — that would be ridiculous — but there were friends from childhood or college, people I used to hang out with thirty years ago, people who I knew from preschool, people who were important to me on a day-to-day basis, but whose existence has slipped my mind because our orbits fell out of sync.

Of course, there are some people I remember. But there are many more that I’ve forgotten.

How amazing would it be to bump into someone or see them on Facebook and know that I know them and be able to turn to the spreadsheet and see my notes? And if it had pictures (from multiple points in time in case I knew them as a kid and wouldn’t know them as an adult) and I could see the person’s face with the name next to it? Even better.

I’m not a big shopper this time of year — we don’t have gifts to buy — but I normally love to browse the book deals on either Black Friday or Cyber Monday. I almost always find something on my TBR. I keep a spreadsheet of every book purchase (of course, I do), and so many of them take place in late November or December.

But this year, there was nothing. I mean, there literally wasn’t a special one-day flash sale. There were just the sale books that had been the sale books all week, just like every other week. The e-book dealers (at least in the US) skipped the big sale weekend.

I mostly buy physical books rather than e-books, so maybe it’s just as well. But it was a bit of a bummer. Even when I don’t buy anything, I like the lists to see what books make it on.

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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.

The Next 15,000 Days posted her Christmas wish, and it’s super simple to give it. You just have to send her an email. Tell her about yourself. Anything you want. Where you’re from, whether you read her blog, what you’re looking forward to this year. It’s the season of connection.

A day or two late reading this, but Middle Girl jumps back through the decades, starting with age 7 because she is currently 57. In little snippets, she talks about one thing she remembers from each decade. It’s a lovely exercise to look back on what was occupying your heart at various stage of life.

The roundup to the Roundup: Where did the book sales go? 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 November 28 – Dec 5) 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.

The fees are absolutely ridiculous, but I love this idea of building retirement communities on university campuses. You get access to highly walkable spaces, classes, activities, performances, and medical facilities (if the place has a medical school). It’s kind of the most perfect idea ever, and it’s what Josh and I have planned to do with our retirement, albeit in a much more informal way.

[Our plan is to either stay here and audit at the enormous university nearby, or move to a place that has numerous small liberal arts schools and audit classes there. In the summer, we wanted to do Oxford’s older student extension program each year.]

This part made me weepy:

She also volunteers twice a month with the school’s friendship bench program, in which older adults offer a listening ear to anyone who approaches. Those days have been especially rewarding.

I wish the twins had access to older people at their schools like this. Pairing the wisdom of each generation into something that benefits both groups. I would have loved this when I was in college. And I really hope we can do something like this in the future.

When Alexander Scriabin composed the piece Prometheus back in 1909, he wrote down notes for an instrument he called clavier à lumières. According to Wikipedia, “The instrument was supposed to be a keyboard, with notes corresponding to colors as given by Scriabin’s synesthetic system, specified in the score.”

The performance I went to last month hired a lighting designer to create tubes over the stage that accomplished this, so as the musicians played the piece, the tubes filled with the colours listed in the score. You got to see the music as well as hear it. It was so cool.

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Last winter, the day before we travelled, I was kneeling on the floor and then scooted back to be able to open the drawer underneath Beorn (and now Quentin’s) habitat. I immediately felt something pop in my foot, and within minutes, a knot formed on the top of my foot. I iced it until we left, and then limped along, thinking it would heal when we got home, and I wasn’t walking that much.

That didn’t happen.

The pain mostly went away, though it was definitely still there from time to time. And the knot was there all year.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I was doing yoga, and I was backwards in ustrasana, which is a back bend. Your weight goes onto your heels because you’re pushing down on them to hold it. I’ve done this back bend every weekday from the time that we returned to the trip until November — almost a full year — and nothing has ever happened. But this time, I felt something crack in the top of my foot, and when I came out of the back bend, the pain was gone, and the knot was disappearing. It took a few more days to disappear entirely, but now my foot is completely back to normal.

Strange.

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My body does not react well to junk food anymore. This is a sad discovery. But it’s not enjoyable to eat chips at the beach if I’m going to feel terrible for two days after.