Sometimes, as I’m drinking coffee, I like to channel Peter Saarsgard on SNL, sipping his International Delights and saying, “I’m having one of the best breaks of my career. I cannot wait to tell my sister how good this break was.”

I always look forward to breaks and then never use them very well. I feel like I should use them to get stuff done, so I schedule tasks into every day and end up feeling stressed out by the time I return to work. That’s what I did this past summer.

And that’s what I was set to do this week, too. I had even jotted down tasks in my planner. Work on the photo project. Work on cleaning out the basement. Work on teaching the ChickieNob chess. (She suddenly wants to learn chess. I want to jump on that impulse.) I wrote down the tasks in pen.

But I felt tired looking at the planner, and I realized I had to do something different this time. I am spending every single day not accomplishing anything. I am sleeping in. I am reading with my pig. I am not accepting anything on my to-do list for any reason. I am going to go back to work recharged.

I am going to tell my sister about my awesome break.

Merry Christmas if you’re celebrating. (Or, if you’re not, Happy Friday, as we like to say in our home.) I am currently the winner of the Little Drummer Boy Challenge. It turns out that if you’re not Christian and therefore do not listen to Christmas music in the home, and you are not going out and therefore never encounter it at a store, it is pretty easy to win the challenge. But, you know, it still feels good to win.

I am spending the day reading a Jasmine Guillory book with Beorn. He’s in suspense. Will they hook up? Will they not? I’ve reassured him that the book will have a happy ending because these types of books always do, but he’s not so sure. He runs back to look at the book every time I turn the page. He just wants Vivian and Malcolm to make this work and snog under the mistletoe. Is that too much for a guinea pig to ask for?

I hope you are having a relaxing day. I know this holiday is different. Hopefully, everyone will agree to a redo after vaccine completions hit a critical mass, even if it means having Christmas in September and then again in December. No rules in 2021.

Much love and hot chocolate.

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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:

• “Stop Giving Child-Free Women the Side-Eye” (Atta Girl/Medium)
• “To the Childless Woman at Christmas – I See You” (Gateway Women)
• “Yes, We Can!” (The Road Less Travelled)

Okay, now my choices this week.

My Lady of the Lantern has a tiny post on something she’s learned about herself this year, and it made me stop and think about what I’ve learned about myself, too. Things I probably would have said, “I can’t” to last January and yet did by the time March rolled around. Or discovering needs or boundaries. I really love this little post.

Infertile Phoenix wants to ask less of herself this year. (Smart!) Fewer obligations. Fewer demands. Fewer shoulds. She writes, “Obviously, I am depleted. I’ve been giving more than I’ve been replenished. I need to take a break. I want to make a conscious effort to do less, think less, expect less. When I do find myself thinking, I want it to be reflections on all the ways that I kicked ass this year, showing up and not shying away from life.” It’s a great gift we can give ourselves, as she points out.

Lastly, The Barreness has a post in two parts: one section written at the beginning of the month, one section looking back on it and reflecting. I love this part: “I guess this year has made it harder to see things in the future, dreams that were once easy to imagine are now muted with doubts and wonder if I can go far away again. I will think on my dreams, the ones I can’t imagine for myself and maybe something, somehow will manifest for the future.” This post made me sigh; the capturing of the passing of time and the passing of thoughts. Plus, I love how the words form a little Christmas tree at the end.

The roundup to the Roundup: Merry Christmas, if you celebrate it. 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 December 18 – 25) 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.

Dear Prudence had a question this week from a man fed up with his wife’s attachment to a new stuffed animal following a stillbirth, a neonatal death, and a miscarriage. Yes, you are reading that correctly—three losses. He writes: “She never slept with a stuffed animal before. She doesn’t bring it in public or around anyone else, so it’s not embarrassing in that way—but I just think it’s childish and weird.”

He has asked her to get rid of it but admits: “She insists that for some reason she can’t even articulate that it brings her comfort and is a ‘baby that she’ll never have to bury’.”

Her response gutted me because I identified with it. Grief doesn’t always manifest as crying, and acknowledging that people express grief in a multitude of ways is the first step in comforting someone while they’re grieving.

Prudie put the question asker in his place when he said he threw out the stuffed animal, stating: “I hope this is an out-of-character moment of coldness for you, and not an indicator of your general approach to your wife’s suffering.”

And… yes… he is completely out of line. But that is why Prudie should have looped back to that original point: everyone grieves differently, and I think this man’s obsession with the stuffed animal is his way of expressing grief by fixating on something he thinks he should be able to control. He can’t control family building, so he goes for something else connected to it—his wife’s attachment to the stuffed animal. She holds onto a stuffed animal for comfort after the losses; he lashes out—even at loved ones—in anger after the losses. One person’s expression is only about herself. One person’s expression unfortunately affects the people around him.

I’m not excusing his behaviour. We need to own when our emotions impact people around us. But I am trying to extend a little of that understanding to him because he writes that he is in pain. And without knowing the inside of his brain, how can I possibly state what is coldness and what is a terrible manifestation of his grief? I’m choosing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

What do you think?

This year, at the start of January, I set a page-based reading goal for myself. 20,200 pages in 2020. This came out to 55.3 pages per day, which sounded pretty impossible. I’m always reading, but up until March, most weekends were spent running around and most weeknights were spent catching up on work, seeing friends, or attending meetings.

The pandemic changed all of that, and I hit my goal and kept reading.

As of December 1st (since I haven’t added up this month’s page count), I’ve read 20,732 pages. I counted pages by going onto Amazon after I finished the book and grabbing the hardcover page amount. Almost every book was in hardcover, so I felt this was the best way to get a fairly accurate count. Is it perfect? Of course not. But it meant that I read longer books because I wasn’t obsessed with hitting a book count. Instead, I chose what I wanted to read, regardless of how long it would take to get through because I knew it was all about the pages. In some ways, longer books were easier than shorter books because I didn’t need to learn a new set of characters or plotline. Even so, I also ended up reading more books overall this year. So it was a win-win.

It worked well, so I’m going to aim for 20210 pages in 2021.

This year, I’ve read 63 books so far. One was an audio book (so I didn’t add it to the page count). Ten were extra books I snuck in doing my #15Best thing, a mix of fiction and non-fiction.

All of my regular books were fiction.

My favourite things I’ve read this year:

• Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom (Leigh Bardugo)
• The Hand on the Wall (Maureen Johnson)
• The Sentence is Death (Anthony Horowitz)
• A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (Holly Jackson)
• A Deadly Inside Scoop (Abby Collette)
• The Vanishing Half (Brit Bennett)
• Exciting Times (Naoise Dolan)
• Blue Ticket (Sophie Mackintosh)
• Seven Lies (Elizabeth Kay)
• The Lion’s Den (Katherine St. John)
• Boyfriend Material (Alexis Hall)
• So You Want to Talk About Race (Ijeoma Oluo)
• When No One Is Watching (Alyssa Cole)
• His and Hers (Alice Feeney)
• The Silver Arrow (Lev Grossman)
• Last Tang Standing (Lauren Ho)
• Piranesi (Susanna Clarke)
• That Time of Year (Marie NDiaye)

What is on your list of favourite reads this year? (Feel free to list movies or television shows if books are not your thing.)

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

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You know I like book-y things. If you are holding a Jólabókaflóðið this year, NPR has a book concierge app to help you set up your personal book flood. It is pretty awesome. I ended up adding two books to my TBR list and starting one immediately.

Next, a bunch of people are doing a countdown calendar by reading the new translation of Beowulf aloud. It’s not too late to join along. You can find all of the past days at that link and start at the beginning.

What good book-y things can you tell us about?

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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.