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.

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.