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 decided about a month ago that we were going to go all-in with becoming birders. Remember the whole trying-to-set-up-things-to-do-before-the-kids-leave-for-college crisis? So birding in moderation felt like a good fit. The moderation is a nod to the fact that we have no intention of photographing them and asking our friends to watch long slideshows of birds we’ve seen. But we’re going to mark down finds in a notebook and go on some birding hikes this year. I just bought a book on birding. Bird steps. (Get it? Like baby steps… because birds are small…)

And then the New York Times did a piece last week on how the bird population is dropping off.  “The number of birds in the United States and Canada has declined by 3 billion, or 29 percent, over the past half-century, scientists find.”

This made me so. damn. sad. We’re still going to be birders, but now seeing each one feels like a moment of last chance tourism.

Do you notice birds?

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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’m reading 10% Happier, and one of the things that Joseph Goldstein tells Dan Harris to do when he’s ruminating on the same worry for the 90th time is to ask himself, “Is this useful?” I’ve been trying to remember it when I restart a stress loop in my head at 2 am when I’m lying in bed. Is worrying about this right now useful? Maybe it is because I’m trying to work out a solution. Maybe it’s not because I’m just replaying the same conversation in my head again and again, and nothing is changing.

I read a post on Gretchen Rubin about the idea of making lists when you’re anxious. She was interviewing Chris Guillebeau and he said that he uses two prompts when he’s anxious, writing out the lists in his journal.

Prompt One is “What’s going well right now? (Because no matter what I’m anxious about, there’s usually something that’s going well or that I can otherwise be grateful for.)” and Prompt Two is “What bothers me? (Because identifying the root cause of distress is the first step towards remedying it.)”

And I sort of mentally combined the two pieces of advice and started using the prompts to write out the things I’m anxious about and then evaluate (when I see them on paper) whether they’re worth feeling anxious about. Is it useful? Sometimes it is because writing it out gives me a starting point for tackling the problem. Sometimes it isn’t though the act of taking something out of my head has worth as long as I only do it once.

All week, people have been asking if we’re going to see the Downton Abbey movie. “Going to see?” Try, we’ve already seen it.

The ChickieNob was terrified that there would be spoilers if she waited to see the movie over the weekend. (We gently explained that spoilers aren’t really part of the Downton universe. The rich remain rich. The tea is always hot. Mrs. Patmore is making the same salmon, year after year.) So we went last night. And we bought the tickets the day tickets went on sale several weeks ago.

Not revealing any plot points but suffice to say that it was like hanging out with a bunch of old friends. It’s a show that has zero characters that I dislike, so I was happy with everyone on the screen. It was just a super enjoyable evening all around.

And it made me wonder if this was going to be a new trend: bringing television shows to the big screen a year or two (or three) after they end. I can’t really think of anything else I’d want to see in this way, can you?

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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 Luck” (By the Brooke)
• “Michael Burry Trashes Index Funds – Are We Screwed?” (Mr. Money Mustache)
• “Congrats On Keeping The Kids Alive–I’m The Mom Who Couldn’t” (An Unexpected Family Outing)
• “You Can Have Me” (Mrs. Spit… Still Spouting Off)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Life Without Baby has a post about World Childless Week. It runs through the weekend, so you may have been noticing posts around the Internet. If not, seek them out and support the childless not by choice community.

My Path to Mommyhood has a post about a back-to-school night that left her in tears. Teachers were sharing their personal lives with the parents. She writes, “To be the coteacher who has to follow slides full of extensive family trees with pictures completely devoid of children (look at my husband! my cat! my books! my garden! a trail near my house!) is a little… painful. It feels like an amplified contrast.” It’s a moving post about feeling a sense of Otherness.

Slaying, Blogging, Whatever… has a post about connections (and missed connections) that I loved. She details interacting with various family members throughout the day through the lens of connections or missed connections. It made me see my own day differently.

Lastly, Well-Conceived 180 has a football analogy. I admit that I don’t know football or what a line of scrimmage is… but I loved this totally accessible thought: “Because I’m reproductively-challenged and a foster parent in a family-oriented community, this prickly place is familiar to me. I am constantly deciding whether to speak up, potentially causing discomfort for my friends, or to just stuff it and move on.” It’s about going on the offense or defense (which I get!) when it comes to telling your story.

The roundup to the Roundup: Downton Abbey movie! 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 13th and 20th) 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.

We skipped a bunch of months going to Chincoteague, some of it a conscious decision and some of it just logistics. So August was our first time back on the island after many months. We kept hearing the same refrain: Where have you been? And while it felt a little awkward to explain why we had been away, it was really nice that people noticed that we weren’t there. It made me feel like we had reached an in-between zone. We weren’t locals, but we weren’t tourists. We were infrequent locals or regular tourists. Infrocals? Regists?

Anyway, it made us feel like our presence mattered–not just for the money we were putting into the local economy but because they liked us enough to remember us month-by-month.

It made me want to not let so much time pass between visits.

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Josh decided that we needed to become regulars somewhere close. I used to be a regular at the coffeehouse inside a bookstore, so much so that they named their chocolate egg cream after me. (Mel’s Egg Cream… okay… maybe not that exciting, but still.) And we’re regulars at a nearby water ice place. But a few years ago, he decided that he wanted us to become regulars at this small, family-owned Italian restaurant, and we’ve done a good enough job that the owner stops by the table and plays catch-up when we come in but not good enough that they can guess our order. Yet.

Where are you a regular?

The headline caught my eye: “Are Parents Enabling Their Grown Children by Paying for Them?” Enabling? That’s a word I usually use for parents who do their child’s homework. So… were these adults refusing to get a job, living in the basement and playing video games while their parents worked?

No. They were just adult kids. Full stop. Any adult kid. And the payment in question was the dinner check. Was it enabling if you took your grown kids out to dinner every once in a while and picked up the check or brought your kids on vacation with you and paid their way?

This was a case where I peeked into the comment section, and… wow… lots of opinions on an optional, family-by-family situation. In other words, I could pay for my kids and you could not pay for your kids (or vice versa) and neither decision affects the way the other family operates.

I mean, yes, it’s an advice column, so it makes sense for people to offer up advice. To state how their family handles the situation and allow the pooling of ideas to inform another person which decision they want to make. But the judgment! The name calling! The commentary on what other people do vs. what the comment writer does!

In the middle of trying to read the comments, a pop up came onto the screen with Oprah’s face asking if I was ready to live my best life and sign up for… something. Her newsletter? Her magazine? I don’t know because I was so distracted by the comment section on her article.

It’s interesting because we’ve been having a lot of face-to-face conversations with people about how we’re handling paying for college. There have been few times when the other person and I have the exact same parameters for covering (or not covering) college, but we both share what we’re doing and why and walk away either unchanged or maybe even rethinking how we planned to do things. It would be lovely if comment sections worked in the same way, especially when it comes to family-by-family situations.

For the record, we pay for the twins now, and we’ll pay for the twins later, choosing to only do both things–go out to dinner or go on vacation–if we can afford it. (Meaning, if we can’t pay for four meals, we probably shouldn’t be spending money on two meals, either, and instead choosing to dine together in a less expensive way.) Not because they expect it or demand it, but because it feels like a small kindness we can do to nurture them. But, of course, that’s not the only way to show a small kindness, so I trust that other families will find their own way.