Another good quote that will make you think comes on page 78 of Shaun Bythell’s The Diary of a Bookseller. He sells a copy of Decameron to a young Italian woman, and he explains how he came to have this two-volume set from 1679 in his shop.

He picked it up when he went to clear out the books from a woman’s house after she died. He’s talking to a person at the flat and she tells him a little about the woman’s story. She was the daughter of an Italian father and a Scottish mother who once upon a time ran a very busy cafe on the ground floor of the building.

He tries to mentally construct the story of how this book ended up in the woman’s flat since it doesn’t fit with the rest of the contents of her bookshelf.

The optimism of that young Italian man, with his Scottish wife, his thriving business and his young daughter, the courage it took him to move to another country, learn a new language and start a business and a new life could never have anticipated the sad end that fate dealt to his dream. I am quite sure that the two-volume Decameron would have been among the few possessions he brought with him from Italy, and I wonder how long it might have been passed down through his family, only to end that inheritance here in a damp flat in New Cumnock with nobody to pass it on to. But now it will have a new life in the hands of the young woman who bought it today, and who knows what the next few hundred years will have in store for it.

I love that idea of our possessions sometimes having stories. Or the thought that things in my house could end up hundreds of years later in someone else’s hands, making them happy. Like the wooden duck I keep on my bedside table, Lachlan, could one day end up on the shelf of a random person who makes up a story of how this little wooden duck moved through the world to end up in their home.

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

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Josh and I celebrated our 18th anniversary this weekend. 18 holds special significance in gematria because the way you write the number 18 is the same way you write the word “life” (because our letters all have a numerical value)… sort of. I mean the letters are in an opposite order, but STILL. Everyone associates 18 with “life,” hence why you get things from people who are Jewish in denominations of 18. Seriously, every Jewish adult can multiply anything by 18 in their head. It’s like a special skill you build once you reach an age when you start writing checks.

So we spent the weekend at the beach, reading and walking and eating ice cream and testing out our interest in birdwatching. You know, just living life.

I always thought that when we hit our 18th anniversary, we would do something huge like a hot air balloon ride around the world (because I’m mega-realistic). But it turns out that it’s better to just live life. Plus I’m scared of hot air balloons.

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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.

This article on tourism was making the rounds a few weeks ago. Well, really about overtourism. And it starts with the premise:

The stigma of overtourism is contingent on the sense that a place without as many tourists is more real, more authentic, than it is with them … Overtourism is also a subjective concern based on a feeling: It’s the point at which your personal narrative of unique experience is broken, the point at which there are too many people — like yourself — who don’t belong in a place.

So, Iceland, for example. And the article asks this question: “If fully one-fifth of humanity are traveling away from home, then how foreign are tourists, after all?”

But there is another question the reader begins to ask herself. If it’s not authentic; if your visit to a country is not the experience that someone who lives in the country would have on a normal day, is there a point to tourism?

I think there is, but I am cognizant that the experience I have in the country rarely mirrors what a resident of the country experiences or even picks up on from the world around them. Even when I am staying with people in their home, eating homemade food. I know that it’s true based on the opposite: that I can spot the DC tourist or recent transplant within seconds. It’s what they’re not picking up on from the world around them; the subtle cues every area holds. Therefore, I assume the same is true when I’m moving through the streets of another country. There is stuff I am missing because I just don’t know.

So what is the point of tourism if your experience is always going to be surface-deep? I think, for me, it’s about being a witness. It’s observing. It’s sitting in a space and trying to understand a portion of it. There are things that I want to see up-close vs. in a picture.

And sometimes it’s about meeting other people on the road. I once met this amazing woman when I was walking around Barcelona, looking for a museum that had unknowingly closed after the publication of my tour book. (See, kids, that’s how we lived back in the old days, with outdated information.) She was from Massachusetts, also visiting Barcelona at the same time. I ended up spending two days with her before she left to go back to the US. Was it an authentic Barcelona experience? Not at all. But it’s hard to feel sad about that when you’re hanging out with someone fun.

The twins took out a cricket for me this week. I didn’t even have to ask them. They saw it upstairs, alerted me of its presence, and then sucked up the cricket with the vacuum. They learned the SAT word “tenacious” from the experience when I thanked them for their tenacity in hunting down the cricket when it tried to hop behind the dresser. And this thing was huge. It was the size of about half a doorknob. Which means that it felt like it was the size of a truck.

I know some parents brag about their children’s grades or awards. But do those things really hold a candle to cricket hunting? Not in my world.

They immediately followed up the experience by confirming that I would be making them their own batch of cookies as a thank you gift.

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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:

• “The Experience of a Lifetime” (LindsayMader)
• “Cultivating Gratitude” (Infertile Phoenix)
• “Baking” (Inconceivable!)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Empty Arms, Broken Heart tries to blow some adoption myths out of the water when she sees a cousin’s thoughtless post, though her words were ignored. Still, they’re important to say. She writes, “I think if anyone is going to promote adoption they should do it with their eyes wide-open to reality. There are beautiful sides to adoption but there are also hard truths that can’t be overlooked.” Thank you for expanding the story.

Baby Ridley Bump has a post about postponing her IVF cycle. These are the types of posts that people need to read when they cavalierly speak about IVF as if it’s the easiest solution in the world. She writes, “Sometimes when I think about it I think to myself, such is life–there will never be a perfect time with no stress and nothing going on, I realize that, but there will be a better time, a time when things are a little more settled & I think right after the holidays, first of the year will be exponentially better for us.” It’s a post about listening to your gut and knowing that it rarely steers you wrong.

Slaying, Blogging, Whatever… has a post about missing writing in her space. I love this (not the fact that her year has gone off the rails, but because I also give myself stern lectures): “This year has gone off the rails so fast and we have never really recovered. I told myself that I would steer into the slide, and with each new road block, I have found myself having a harder time having the emotional (and sometimes physical) energy to steer. Okay, self. Enough!” I related, which is why I love blogging: When you connect with another person’s story because it reminds you of your own.

Lastly, The Next 15000 Days suggests practicing acts of kindness and including someone on the sidelines. She writes, “I realized why it has been so hurtful to go through life unnoticed and excluded – just because I am a childless woman. I stopped counting how many times I was excluded from conversations just because some people assume I have nothing to say (just because I don’t have children of my own).” Reach out today to another blogger.

The roundup to the Roundup: The twins are braver than I am. 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 8th and 15th) 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.

I missed the New York Public Library’s Instanovels when they first came out, maybe because I’m not big into Instagram. It’s a whole book, beautifully laid out, as an Instagram story. The pages turn like an Instagram story, but you can control the timing by placing your thumb over the icon (it’s unique to each book) in the bottom right corner.

There are only five books right now, and it’s not clear if they’re going to make more. They are so gorgeous that I hope they do.

Which books do you wish they’d make? I know they’re pulling from the public domain at the moment, but I would love to read Lev Grossman’s The Magicians series this way. I mean, wish big if you’re going to wish for things.

P.S. Scroll all the way down the website. It’s fascinating.