I’ve been trying to get picky about new games because my game routine has grown ridiculous. In the morning, I play 9 games while I drink coffee. After work, I play 7 games before I start dinner. 16 games. Per day.

Granted, most of them take under two minutes, but still, that is about a half hour of my day given over to naming countries and guessing words.

A game needs to be exceptional to enter the rotation. Letterage is the latest game to achieve that status. It’s the final game in the evening queue.

You can play with 60 or 30 letters. The letters fall into slots on the screen, and you spell a word using your letters, like Scrabble. The difference is that you don’t have to hook onto any word, and you get more points if you use a letter more than once. For instance, if you had C – Q – K – E – N – R – T (you always have 7 letters at a time), you could spell “cent,” but you’d get more points for “center.” Once you use the letter, it disappears, though it may come back in a different set. The letters that fall into the slots change each day.

Enjoy!

We decided it was a good time to do a little subscription shedding. It’s partially cost — it’s hard to justify a charge if you barely use the service — and it’s partially maintenance. Each subscription brings a slew of emails telling you about all the exciting things streaming that week or reminding you about all the exciting add-ons you can get. I open all of those emails in case there is something I actually need to know from the service. But I will not have to open an email if we no longer subscribe to the service.

We’ll hop back on a service for a month or two to watch a show, but we’re trying to bring it down to the bare minimum of ongoing subscription services.

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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.

I was blown away by this post from Dear John, where she points out how her husband’s craving for external validation brought on a lot of unhappiness. She writes: “I think therapy would have helped you realize that your failures were a product of your willingness to take chances. That your self-doubt should have been cured by your many, many successes … Contentment is what you should seek, because that’s longer-lasting and stable. You wanted the highs, but found yourself far more entangled in the lows.” While speaking to an individual, she so perfectly captures that gap between the external and internal self. It’s a quiet, heart-tugging post. Go read the whole thing.

Lastly, there is a lot to process inside Road Less Travelled’s brain dump. I liked Elizabeth Day’s Magpie, and I wrote on Goodreads: “I have never felt more seen by a book. She captures infertility perfectly. And far from being a painful read, it was like spending time with a friend who got it.” Guess I now know why. And sending a big hug for the big changes coming to her parents.

The roundup to the Roundup: Backups are good. 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 September 19 – 26) 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.

Speaking of questions (are you doing 10Q?), I liked this list of questions that someone linked to recently.

I actually think they’re so perfect that they should be answered once a quarter – maybe Jan 1, April 1, July 1, and Oct 1, making the “leaves” question something more generally stated about hidden things being revealed.

I especially loved “What am I pretending is working, but isn’t?” and “What am I hungry to feel again?”

A lot of times, when I think about the concept of having “enough,” I think about time. Or togetherness. As in, not having enough time with the kids.

But we’re doing a lot of financial planning/updating documents right now, so I’ve been thinking about enough as in having enough money or the opposite, feeling like you’ve worked enough years and are ready for retirement. If you don’t have a retirement date attached to your job, you need to figure it out yourself. And those two ideas: having enough money and having had enough of work sometimes go hand-in-hand, but sometimes you want to continue work for other reasons, such as purpose or interest.

I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of not working. I know I could fill my time in other ways, but I like working. I like that structure. I’m not sure how I’ll know when I’ve had enough of that structure.

And financial planning is such a strange idea because you’re planning for a complete unknown. When you’re saving up for a purchase, you know the amount you’ll need, you know how close you are to having enough, and you know what you need to do to get more. But when you’re saving for retirement, you’re saving without an idea of how much you’ll need beyond a general ballpark range.

Like you can theorize that X will be the smallest amount you’ll need if nothing changes in terms of interest rates or the market or social security or your health or your home. And you can theorize that Y is well beyond what you could ever need. But the number in between those two numbers is so enormous that it makes it impossible to plan.

How do you not know you’re not going to need a little bit more? And if you do, how do you know you’ll be able to get it? The whole thing feels a little too loosey-goosey for my tastes.

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

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I find this “clock” relaxing to watch, though I set it on the hex code screen using the # button. If I see a colour I like, I quickly take a screenshot so I can replicate it elsewhere because the hex code is printed over the colour. While it jumps sometimes to a new colour (e.g., red instead of blue), inside each section, it moves in a pretty predictable way. If you miss a colour, you can figure it out by changing the sixth digit one or two ahead or behind.

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.