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

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I fully own that I sometimes choose books because I like the cover and sometimes avoid books because I don’t like the cover. I am likely missing out on good books and wasting time on others.

Recommend Me is the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen. It’s the first page of a book, but you read it without knowing the author or the name of the book. So you have zero preconceived notions of the book (unless you recognize a character’s name or the author’s writing style) and can experience it without knowing anything about it. If you like the book, you can click a button at the bottom of the passage and get the title and author. Or, you can skip to the next excerpt. It is amazing.

And sometimes it’s just fun to try to guess the title and author before pushing the button.

P.S. You can also go backwards, find a cover you love, and click to read the excerpt.

P.P.S. You can also submit a book to the database.

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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.

We have a new toaster. The old toaster died. No one remembers when we got the old toaster. Was it 19 years old, a wedding gift? Was it a more recent addition to the kitchen? I have zero memory of how our old toaster came to live on our kitchen countertop.

The new toaster is the simplest toaster we could find. It does not do anything fancy. It is not a combination air fryer toaster. Yet it has too many knobs. Too many choices. I am too old to learn a new toaster.

I think I’m just going to skip toasting things from now on.

I should add that I have lived with Josh for almost 20 years and have yet to learn how to turn on the television. Once upon a time, I wrote out instructions. But I lost them. So if I want to watch something, I need to ask someone to turn it on and find the channel. It’s totally okay. I just skip watching television.

I know I could learn these things. I am capable. But something in me whispers, “I don’t want to” whenever the subject is broached.

A person can live without toast or television.

Something about having a new appliance made me want to walk around the house saying, “New toaster, who dis?” The ChickieNob pointed out that if a person gets a new phone, they transfer their contacts, so they would obviously know the new caller. And if they lost their phone and had to get a new phone with a new number, the caller wouldn’t know the new number unless they had been told by the phone owner. So the whole thing falls apart if you think about it too much.

I am rounding into the end of my ninth month at home and starting my tenth month in a few days. At this point, staying home and not planning life feels more normal than going out to a restaurant or meeting up with friends.

I haven’t seen my friends in nine months.

I spend most of my time in neutral—it is what it is—but veer sometimes towards sad (“I haven’t seen my friends in nine months”) and sometimes towards angry. I spent a lot of this week feeling angry. Angry that people traveled and entered houses for Thanksgiving break despite hearing all the same warnings that I heard from the CDC. Angry that the numbers are steadily rising in our state. Angry because it is abundantly clear that we’re not all in this together, despite all the promises of that last spring.

Like Barreness below, I am a rule follower because I believe there is a point to the rules. They are there to help us avoid situations such as our hospitals being 90% to capacity.

But now we’re here. I really fear the numbers in the next few weeks.

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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:

• “On Thankfulness and Grief” (My Path to Mommyhood)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Barreness has a post that matches my mood. She writes of a mediocre Thanksgiving meal, “Why is this different? We have been cooking from home since MARCH. Making food and trying recipes for months… Why do we think that Thanksgiving is different?” As someone who has been going through new cookbooks at a quick clip, trying to make dinner as exciting as going to a restaurant, this spoke to me. I too am tired of being a rule follower, but I don’t think the answer is to not be a rule follower. And I love the good news at the end of the post.

Infertilityhonesty writes about the life she has now, and how is differs from what she thought it would be when she made her decision. She writes, “At the time I couldn’t, in actuality, see into the future but yet there was this supposed new life dangling in the corners of my blacked out soul.” Instead, the metaphor of the eucalyptus tree in the post gets closer to the truth. And I love, love, love the closing conversation with her inner monologue which includes: “That doesn’t exactly sound like nowhere to me.  As a matter of fact, that might sound like everywhere.”

Lastly, Citizen of the Month looks back on an internet project that points to a very different blogosphere. Having watched every year and knowing many of the people in the old videos, the whole thing made me nostalgic and wistful and really really really glad that I got to live through this great part of the internet.

The roundup to the Roundup: Sometimes I’m angry. 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 27 – Dec 4) 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.

Last week, I was wearing very old jeans while cleaning animal enclosures. I bent down to give a cavy’s head a scratch, and the cavy trotted away. I stood up, and as I was turning, the ChickieNob commented that the cavy changed his mind and wanted the head scratch afterall. I quickly squatted back down, cooing at the cavy, when I heard the soft swoosh of ripping material. I split open the thigh of my jeans.

I had to finish cleaning the enclosures with a gaping hole in my jeans, just south of my crotch. The silver lining of animals being unable to speak (and no humans besides the twins around) is that I didn’t need to hear all about my pasty thigh.

Unfortunately, the material is too thin to repair easily. Goodbye, jeans, you served me well. I mean, up until that last trip into the world.

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Josh and I are small town connoisseurs. I introduced him years ago to my favourite activity of driving around and exploring random towns—the smaller the better.

We found a great one a few years ago with a population under 600 people. It’s right on the water, with a more populated town across the river. It has three restaurants, a bookstore, a museum, and a few tchotchke shops. Plus, it has a fantastic public park with benches overlooking a rocky boat launch.

We’ve gone twice this fall to read outside, and it’s great because we only see a handful of people as we drive in and out. We call ahead to the bookstores and have them set aside books to pick up so we don’t have to spend a lot of time indoors, or get prepackaged ice cream containers to go from the ice cream shop. It’s getting too cold to do this many more times, but it’s nice to be able to go out a bit after a summer in the house.

Turning down random roads and finding tiny towns sometimes pays off.

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The school made us choose whether we’re sending the twins back if they test out a hybrid method in January. I wish they sent the survey to the twins—they’re affected by the choice just as much as we are—so we sat down with each kid to fill it out together.

It’s all a moot point. The case numbers aren’t low enough to start the hybrid option, and if the case numbers truly drop and stay low, they’ll likely reopen school for everyone. But, right now, we’re staying home.

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Most cookbooks have a handful of recipes I want, so it is an awesome thing when I find a cookbook where I want to try 70 – 80% of the recipes. I checked José Andrés’s Vegetables Unleashed from the library, and promptly purchased a copy the next day. (Okay, I sent Josh to Politics and Prose to pick it up, but you know what I mean.) I haven’t been this excited about a cookbook in a long time. It’s mostly vegetarian (though not exclusively) and sometimes even vegan. And everything looks so good.

I’ve had so much luck with my bullet journal, continuing to use it daily since 2014, that I often seek out other time-saving/productivity hacks to see if I’ll have equal success in getting a new idea going. Spoiler alert—so far, the answer is no. But I’m not discouraged.

The latest idea I’m explored is GYLIO or Get Your Life In Order. In a nutshell: “GYLIO is about bundling tasks into a single morning, day or week in order to clear your mind; learning to prioritise and find focus so that you can enjoy guilt-free downtime.” So instead of checking email throughout the day as it comes in, you close your inbox so you’re not distracted, and only check it during a set hour in the morning. Or Monday is laundry day, even if the hamper is overflowing on Friday. Or you set aside your worrying until 8 PM at night.

I like the concept, but I’ve never been successful at setting worrying aside for a set time, even when I’ve tried things such as jotting down what I want to worry about in the future and then returning to the task at hand.

But the point is to help you keep your focus. It’s also to create a space for everything that needs to get done. If your schedule is already full, you don’t add more to it. And if you do add something, it goes into a single slot so you’re not spending part of your time dealing with X and part of your time focused on Y, and not really taking care of X or Y well.

The BBC link above talks about setting up an admin hour in your day that you bundle small, unrelated tasks that need to get done. That becomes the time that you open your to-do list and take care of all the tiny tasks that only take a few minutes to complete but drag at your attention throughout the day. If you don’t need to use all of your “admin” hour, you get that time back. But if you have a full to-do list, you know that you have an hour set aside to power through it and can work, guilt-free, the rest of the time knowing all those items will get done.

I’m thinking of adding this twice a week to my life and seeing if I end up making dreaded phone calls where I’ve been dragging my feet or finally unclog the sink. We’ll see.