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

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I am not normally a Buzzfeed reader, but I liked this post rounding up how things change as you move around the world in various categories.

For instance: tally marks. Was not aware there even was more than one way to make tally marks, but apparently, there are at least three. There are tons of food ones and animal ones. But also wedding dress customs, the way we respond to sneezes, and the monsters that haunt our stories.

Mentally travel without leaving home and learn that not all hedgehogs are alike.

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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 first heard about death cleaning years ago. It was part of the wave of Scandinavian ideas to reach the United States, such as hygge. Döstädning is the act of cleaning up your own possessions and papers before death so you don’t leave the task for someone else.

It’s a lovely idea, though not entirely practical unless you have a heads up that death is imminent. There are things that I know others will want to get rid of after I’m gone, but I’d like to hold onto these things until the last possible second. Like all of my VHS tapes. What if they come back into usefulness when I reach 80, but I dumped them at 79?

Can you tell that I like my things? I have a little Bilbo Baggins in me, except I could never be goaded into going on an adventure. That’s what they call me: Zero Adventures Mel.

But I digress. Kottke looped back to this idea recently with a musing on the little chores that take place after someone is gone (canceling subscriptions, etc) and how we can practice kindness by helping others as they go through these tasks. He writes: “Millions of deeply grieving partners and parents and children are dealing with little chores like this, trying to navigate a typically uncaring system while somehow holding it together.”

If we always come from a place of thinking the person may be going through something, it increases the chances that we’ll be kind to the people who need it most.

Our county has returned to its mask mandate. Most of us never stopped wearing masks, so the news was met with more of a shrug than anything else. Last week, we wore masks by choice. This week, we wear masks because we’re told to wear masks. In the end, we wear masks.

But here is the thing: No one can tell that you are slowly eating a Wilhelmina mint behind that mask. It’s just your delicious, little secret.

Secret mint consumers, unite.

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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:

• “No Shame in Stepping Away” (Finding a Different Path)
• “New Rooms” (The Next 15000 Days)

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ recounts a conversation she had with someone asking why she didn’t have kids. She writes: “In glorious hindsight, as I write this, I wish I’d just said that it doesn’t really matter whether I wanted children or not, because the outcome is the same.” It’s the push and pull between how much you tell, especially with someone you don’t know well.

Lastly, Infertile Phoenix ties together infertility and the pandemic, reminding people of everything they knew 18 months into infertility and how we can apply that to the exhaustion we’re feeling 18 month into COVID-19. There are a lot of similarities in the two events: “I felt lonely, sad, confused, frustrated, devastated, and angry. I was isolated from my peer group.” So true—and it won’t be like this forever. In some still-unknown way, it will be different.

The roundup to the Roundup: The masks that never left are back. 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 July 30 – August 6) 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 ChickieNob and I are partway through the third book in The Magicians trilogy. I think those books should be required reading for all high schoolers, especially the second book. I have a quote from it that I carry with me wherever I go, and I couldn’t wait to get to that point in the second book, for the quote to be in context and ChickieNob to understand it.

The Paris Review had a piece about reading Jane Eyre as a sacred text. She explains,

I asked my favorite professor, Stephanie Paulsell, if she would spend a semester teaching me how to pray with Jane Eyre. Throughout the semester, we homed in on what I was searching for, a way to treat things as sacred, things that were not usually considered to be divinely inspired. The plan was that each week I would pull out passages from the novel and reflect on them as prayers, preparing papers that explored the prayers in depth. Then, together, we would pray using the passages.

I don’t formally pray with The Magicians, but I certainly use the books similar to prayer. I mean, what is prayer—a way to make sense of life, right? And like prayer, depending where I am in life at the moment, I get something different out of the pages each time. So I love the idea of naming a book a sacred text, of gathering that understanding of the self and the world around you from its pages.

A super stunning article in Tricycle about miscarriage. It begins: “Today I would be (am?) eight weeks pregnant. But I am waiting to miscarry. I am waiting to no longer be waiting. My body is still catching up to what my mind learned last Friday.”

Isn’t that the most perfect description of it: The body catching up to what the mind knows. Both with miscarriage and with a pregnancy-less cycle in general: We are always waiting for our body to catch up to what the mind knows. And existing in that space between is a space of disbelief and hope.

The worst of hope. The hope that isn’t really hope but we call it hope because we don’t have another word for it. Those times when you talk yourself into not believing something because… chance exists.

This is a beautiful essay. A must-read.