So I always thought the argument for the four-day work week was to make people more productive during the hours they’re actually at work. Shorten the work week and people will move unnecessary things… cough… Facebook… to home hours and use their time in the office to plow through their to-do list.

But the Guardian had an article about how environmental change rests on the four-day work week.

We also consume less in the process of getting our job done. Less work means less carbon-intensive commuting, less energy-sucking office space, and less time on power-hungry computer systems. In addition, working less would help to break down the work-spend cycle. Fewer hours at work mean we have more time to do other things such as travelling, preparing food or fixing broken household items. We are also less likely to rely on environmentally costly timesavers such as high-speed travel or takeaway food delivered in plastic containers by someone riding a motorbike.

So if we’re home more, we can find the time to do the things that we often say we don’t have time to do––such as cook a meal from scratch vs. use more energy having someone else cook and deliver a meal in disposable containers. Or take the time to repair something broken vs. dump it in a landfill and order a new item.

It sounds a little like the ideal version of what would happen if we had a four-day work week, but as someone who telecommutes full-time (no need for a work wardrobe or commuting time/costs/fuel!), I really love the fact that technology has made it possible to work with a team without leaving the house. I am productive because few people bother me during the day. I mean, except for Linus wheeking for alfalfa cookies.

Slack and Zoom make me feel like everyone on the team is close by. It took a little time to get disciplined and make work time actually work time, but now that I’ve worked from home for over a decade, I couldn’t imagine moving back into an office.

What do you think of the four-day work week?

Another great Carolyn Hax column recently. A woman writes in to say that her daughter-in-law and son refuse to socialize with the rest of the family. They’ll visit when it’s just the parents, but they won’t visit when the siblings and their children are in tow. And… of course… wouldn’t you know that she’s infertile and her unwillingness to be around kids is attributed to her inability to have a child. And that harpy is ruining the ability for everyone to get together.

I suspect the real reason for this is my granddaughter and now a coming baby. My oldest son’s wife learned she cannot have children after great medical trials, after which she was devastated. In the past she has complained about us through my son, so this sounds like a rerun.

And Carolyn Hax does such a great job reframing the situation in her answer:

From where I sit, I don’t just see a brokenhearted family matriarch; I also see judgy language in your letter, both overt and subtle … You don’t like her. I get it. Maybe she has earned every fine grain of your loathing. But if your opinion of her works its way into every line here, how much of it do you think you’re keeping from her?

In other words, this isn’t about infertility. This is about a daughter-in-law feeling like her mother-in-law doesn’t create an emotional safe space and responding by not entering the space.

There have always been babies I’m willing to hang out with and babies I dread seeing (replace the word “babies” also with “pregnant women” and “mothers” and the same holds). It all comes down to emotional safe spaces. Can I be my infertile self around them? Or, in other words, can I be myself around them? If yes, the baby/pregnant woman/new mother not only doesn’t bother me but makes me feel like being part of their happiness. If no, well, it gets a lot more difficult.

I love Carolyn for pointing out that this isn’t about infertility. This is about relationships.

What is your reaction?

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

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Robin Sloan (the author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore) sends out a weekly email containing a mishmash of thoughts. In a recent one, he talked about the Gutenberg Parenthesis and the whole idea of recognizing when you’re living between parentheses.

Or, as Sloan states: “Here’s a question you should ask sometimes, about the story of the world and your place in it: am I living inside the normal body text now… or a phrase offset by parentheses, set to close?”

Mind blown.

I think there are our personal parentheses and then there are societal/historical parentheses. And as Sloan says, the point isn’t to prove the theory. It isn’t to find proof that it is or isn’t happening. It’s to ask yourself the questions and simply wonder whether you’re “living (or reading books, or participating in the economy, or or or) at a point along a ‘normal’ historical continuum, or inside a bubble of strangeness?”

Life if pretty strange right now. Do you think we’re inside parentheses or is this just part of a new normal?

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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 bought Josh a copy of Circe by Madeline Miller at a used book sale. It was in perfect shape; the jacket pristine and the pages clean. If someone read the copy, they did so neatly. As in very neatly. They were clearly a book lover.

One night, Josh came in the room and tossed a photo onto the bed. “This fell out of the book while I was reading it.” ChickieNob and I looked at the picture. It was a family — seven people in all — posing on a Jaws-themed set, pretending a shark was about to eat them.

The picture, like the book, was in pristine shape, tucked inside a cardstock folder labeled Cinespia and printed by Amazon. We Googled it — it’s an organization that hosts viewings of classic films out in Los Angeles. Jaws had been shown back in June.

Over the next day or two, we kept going back to the picture, unsure of what we should do. I asked the used book organization. They thought the book was probably donated by someone in Maryland, but it could have come from anywhere in the United States. For instance, it could have been from Los Angeles, where the picture was clearly printed.

“You could post the picture on Facebook,” the ChickieNob offered. “Maybe with a message like, ‘Hey, I have your family photo. Do you want it back?'”

Because they kind of looked like an awesome family who was having the best time with one another. I thought about how this was why I thumbed through each book I returned or donated a dozen times; because I was so afraid to leave anything behind. Plus the picture was from an event and it looked expensive.

Then one night, Josh came back in the bedroom and dropped a boarding pass on the bed. “Another clue.” At that point, we asked him to thumb through the book for any other slips of paper, but these two items were the only things tucked into the crisp pages. The boarding pass had a name on it and a date for the flight, one day after the date for the movie.

I Googled the name and found two people with the same name: one in Los Angeles (promising!) and one in Maryland (promising, too!) The one in Maryland had her work email address listed on a website, but the Los Angeles one did not, so I decided to start with the Maryland one.

She wrote back the next day saying that it certainly sounded like her photo. We made plans to meet at a Starbucks so I could reunite her with her photo and boarding pass. (Okay, maybe she didn’t need the boarding pass, but it does make a handy bookmark.)

The woman was lovely and told me the story of the photo. It had been the only four days her three children could get together over the course of the whole year. One was living on the west coast, one had been traveling through Vietnam, and one was in medical school. The family met in Los Angeles and went to the movie together on the last night. This was the only copy of this photo, capturing a silly moment for their reunited family. I was so happy that I got it back in her hands.

There’s not really a point to this story because I ultimately reunited the photo with its owner without needing the help of the Internet, unless you count that quick Google session. It’s more a PSA to take your bookmarks out of your books before you return them. AND it’s a PSA to buy used books because you never know what you’ll find inside.

Thank you, random person, for gifting us with a fun two-day mystery.

Let’s pretend someone who knows nothing about investing wants to learn about investing. (Actually, we’re not pretending. I know nothing about investing.) How does one go about getting started? I have a 401K that I am probably mismanaging because I don’t really know what I’m doing. And I wanted to understand the different types of saving programs… programs is probably not the actual term but I think you all know what I mean.

Is there a book that teaches you what everything is and how the stock market works and how one goes about setting up an e-trade account and doing something like that with a small amount of money?

This is part of the whole “find a hobby” thing. I just thought it sounded like this topic had a good learning component and it would be fun to check on the stock market every day and understand what I’m seeing. Plus if I did well, there would be a clear benefit whereas learning about birds does not provide the family with a clear benefit beyond bird knowledge.

Um… does anyone have a good book explaining investing and stock and bonds and all of those other keywords that pertain to money management? Something really straightforward and simple for the true beginner?

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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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Of Needles and Noodles writes about family building for the second time after infertility. She writes, “The stakes are most definitely higher with another frozen embryo transfer than they were with Laurie’s round. Before we had Laurie, we’d only experienced loss; now we’ve experienced success, it’s just another added pressure; we’re more fully aware of what’s at stake than we ever were before.” She explains what other people can do to make things easier for the person who is still family building. It’s one of those posts you hope everyone reads.

An Engineer Becomes a Mom writes about the “messy middle,” that time that comes between the beginning when things are finally changing and the end when it looks like things will work out. The messy middle is “the part where it’s so comfortable to slide back to where I was, to just wallow in the mud puddle of me vs. them, I’m gonna go hide, I’m not going to show up, I’m not going to embrace this.” Cheer her through this patch.

Baby Ridley Bump is trying to add to their family. She admits, “For the first time ever in my treatment, I am hesitant to move forward.  I’ve never ever wanted to wait for anything on this journey … But now that I’ve taken a break and enjoyed these last several months, I find myself often questioning if one child is all that we really need.” She is starting the process for another transfer, taking her time to do it in the best way possible. Go wish her good thoughts.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ has a bittersweet post about losing a cousin but realizing the strength of family and friends. When her cousin got sick, “they were concerned she had no partner or children or parents who could help. One of her brothers told us that she wasn’t dejected. ‘I have cousins!’ she declared enthusiastically.” It only took a few days to put together months of support. It’s a good reminder that we all need to nurture our relationships.

The roundup to the Roundup: How do you get started in understanding what you’re doing with your 401K? 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 August 9th and August 16th) 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.