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

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I read about a different way to do gratitude. Instead of noting what you’re grateful for, which can sometimes feel like a statement of the obvious, think of one positive aspect of your life (such as a loved one, job, home, friend) and then mentally subtract it. What would your life be like without that loved one, job, home, friend? How would its absence change your health or day-to-day life? What are the ripple effects of not having this aspect of your life?

That is appreciation.

Realizing that there is always an otherwise, but you’re not living that otherwise. You’re living this life.

I thought that was an interesting way of looking at things.

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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 was gifted a TisBest Charity Gift Card. It works like any other gift card, and you spend it at one (or several) of the 1.5 million charities listed in their database.

My card was for $100, and we could give it all to one organization or split it between two to three organizations. My first instinct was to make another donation to a place where we had already donated this winter, but Josh pointed out that we had 1.5 million options. It was a pretty heady experience.

We started listing causes that make us who we are. What was important to us? LGBTQ rights, anti-racism work, animal conservation, environmental protection, food security, clean water… the list grew longer and longer, especially once we started diving into TisBest’s curated lists by topic.

The hardest part of this gift was narrowing down the list to three charities because there were so many good places on the list. And not immediately having a “but we forgot about!” moment the minute we hit submit on our choices. Of course, there is always next time.

I had never heard of this before receiving one, so I’m passing along the idea if people are looking for an off-the-beaten-path gift. It was a lot of fun to play philanthropist for the day.

Chanukkah started last night. I am notorious for missing lighting the chanukkiah several nights each time the holiday rolls around. (Fun fact, all chanukkiahs are menorahs, but not all menorahs are chanukkiahs.) In my defense, you have to keep it up eight nights in a row, and keeping a streak going eight times is hard. But we’re not going anywhere, clearly, so I have zero excuse this year. It may be my first time using every single candle in the box.

The only thing I like about this holiday (it really is my least favourite holiday) are sufganiyot, which are jelly doughnuts. There are places around here that are making sufganiyot, but I can’t really justify going out for a doughnut. And I don’t make doughnuts. So we’ll skip sufganiyot this year. I don’t think anyone cares.

I’m sort of hoping that one day the twins decide they love Chanukkah, and they drag me into the spirit of celebrating it. But four people meh about Chanukkah means that we all stay meh about Chanukkah for another year.

But I will light the chanukkiah all eight nights. I think.

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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:

• “Twilight” (Infertilityhonesty)
• “A Tribute to Mrs. Patmore” (The Road Less Travelled)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I had the tribute to Mrs. Patmore by The Road Less Travelled on my list for this week. She touches on all of the people Mrs. Patmore nurtures and mothers throughout the many seasons of Downton Abbey. She’s one of our favourite characters, and I loved reliving the show through this lens. She is the heart of that kitchen, and she cares about everyone who moves through it.

The Next 15000 Days has a very tiny and sweet post about the point of the valleys of life. They make you notice those peaceful moments.

Lastly, By the Brooke writes about the day after the ten year anniversary of Eliza’s birth. She explains: “One thing about writing about grief is that it is really hard because it always seems to come out as More Than or Less Than. Even when it’s exactly what I’m feeling in the moment that I write it down, in the next moment (or the next day) it feels like Too Much or Not Enough to really describe what I’m feeling.” Yes to that. You can’t hold it or describe it because it’s too nuanced to be captured completely and conveyed to another person.

The roundup to the Roundup: Will I remember to light the chanukkiah all eight nights? 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 4 – 11) 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 we round on 2021, I had to make a decision about #15best. Yes, I still use 15 minutes every morning to do something to make my life better.

The first year, I read a lot of random books either aimed at giving me a new way of viewing the world or teaching a new skill or enhancing my productivity.

The second year, I started off with a big mystery-reading project with the goal that I would start writing a mystery in the spring. The COVID-19 hit, and my desire to write a book fizzled. I took a detour with a bunch of anti-racism books, and finished with style guides and cookbooks. (Style guides as in AP Style, not style as in clothing fashion or home design.)

What to do with the third year to make this time a little more… cohesive? To stick with a theme and move the needle towards a goal?

I considered using the time to work through a backlog of purchased books. I have A LOT of unread, purchased books, and I thought I could assuage some of the guilt by reading the owned books in the morning and reading library books the rest of the day. I also considered tackling classics that have been on my TBR list for a long time with the idea of plugging cultural holes. I also wondered if I should try to loop back to the mystery project.

But then I realized I didn’t have to move the needle. 2021 isn’t the year to move the needle. In some ways, it’s even harder to create a project right now because… I am depleted. It is enough to get through the day. Enough to get through the week. If I emerge alive from this pandemic, I will have grown as a person because I will understand that I can do things that I didn’t think I could do until I had to do them. Sort of like infertility, no?

So.

For the third year, I’m taking comfort in old favourites. I’m still going to meditate for ten minutes every morning, but I’m following it with 15 minutes of reading books that make me feel good, starting with The Lord of the Rings. I cracked open Fellowship of the Ring a few weeks ago, and I feel good after spending 15 minutes with Frodo. After I finish LOTR, I’ll probably go on to re-read the Narnia books or Louise Fitzhugh books and her new biography by Leslie Brody.

At this time next year, I will be able to say that I spent 6,786 minutes of the pandemic feeling good.

And that’s no small thing.

Carolyn Hax had a column a few weeks back with a wonderful little nugget towards the end of her answer. The situation was about a cheating ex-boyfriend and whether a leopard changes spots. The person states they are cautiously moving forward with trying again.

Carolyn tells the person:

Some things are dangerous. Like mountain-climbing. You don’t tiptoe up, hoping the mountain has changed. You go into it knowing what you can and can’t control, equipped to handle the worst …

These are not choices that affect other people—for instance, and I’m just pulling this out of my ass, COVID-19 choices. Those choices, such as mask-wearing or staying home or taking this seriously, affect everyone else. That’s sort of a defining feature of a pandemic. It spreads. And it spreads due to human choice. If we all stayed home as the CDC has asked us to stay home, we could have stopped this from reaching the levels it has reached in the US.

But that is another post.

These are choices that affect only the people who need to live with the choice. Such as whether to follow a certain career or marry a certain person or build a family. Of course, there are other people who claim your choices affect them because your choice changes their relationship with you. But no one is owed another person following the career path they’re trying to impose (except, perhaps, the royal family) or marrying a person that meets someone else’s criteria or providing grandchildren; no matter how much we really wish the people around us would make a different choice that would make us happier.

I like that idea—the only value in a choice is how well the choice suits us. If the choice doesn’t actually suit the person, it isn’t a good choice for them. Choices, in and of themselves (except for masks and staying home), don’t have value.