Once upon a time, I was walking across a parking lot and had an idea for a book.

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Once upon a time, I had an idea for a book, and I wrote it over the course of several months.  I wrote the book I wanted to read; about a blogger who was catapulted into a wide readership and wasn’t necessarily ready for the attention as she reconstructed her life after a divorce.  This was before sponsored content and branded social media handles, back when we all sat in each other’s comment sections and carried out long conversations about our lives.  Remember that?

It was only eight years ago.

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Life from Scratch is on sale from January 16th (today!) until January 31st.  It’s just the e-book version, and it’s on sale on all e-book platforms (Kindle, iBooks, B&N, Google, etc).  Do I hope that you’ll buy yourself a copy?  Yes.  Do I hope you’ll purchase a copy for a friend?  Yes, gifts are great.  Do I hope that you’ll help me spread word via your social media platform?  Yes, that would be wonderful — thank you.

It was my second book; the first piece of fiction that I published.  I will always have a soft spot for Rachel Goldman.

I haven’t read Marie Kondo’s book or watched her show because her method would not work for me.  I’ve written in the past about how decluttering brings out my inner Gollum.  I cannot consider whether or not something sparks joy because I am too busy trying to silence my brain from screaming, “Mine!”

But I recently discovered Julie Morgenstern, who marries time management and decluttering into one mindset, and THAT is a philosophy I can get behind.

Return stuff to the same place every single time and you’ll never waste time searching the house for it.  Put your important items, the items that always travel with you out of the house, in a single space, so you can grab and go.  Think of it as extra time you get added to your day.

Don’t think of decluttering as the same thing as organizing.  You declutter one category at a time, such as all of your books or all of your clothes.  You organize one space at a time, such as a drawer or a closet or a room.  You can’t really declutter and organize at the same time.

Don’t have more items on your to-do list than can be completed in the time that you have, even if all of those things really need to get done.  (1) They probably don’t.  (2) Even if they do, you’re not getting to all of them.  So place them in different days and tackle just the ones on today’s list.  Everything will actually get done rather than haphazardly leaving one or two things behind on the list every day.

And give people undivided attention in fifteen minute bursts.  Better to spend fifteen minutes with all devices closed, focused on the person in front of you, than to spend an hour one day and nothing the next.  Consistently giving small amounts of undivided attention is better than giving huge amounts of attention unevenly.

And that’s just what I was able to glean from the beginning of this article.  My plan is to dive into one of her books next week.

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

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I know how to play chess — I was even the head of the chess club at school (because I’m that level of cool) — but I would like to get better at chess.  It has been on my to-do list for a while: Get better at chess.  But I may be too late.  Apparently chess players peak at 36 and then slowly go downhill.

It’s a funny thought to think of yourself as too late for something.  Too young — that is a situation you live over and over again through childhood.  But too old, especially for something non-physical or biological, I thought I had all the time in the world.  I mean, yes, I recognize that there is a big difference between “get better” and “become a grandmaster.”  But still.

It made me wonder what other items on my wish list would be past their expiration date by the time I got around to it.  I imagined that I would learn how to use an D-SLR camera in my later years, add another language, master the sewing machine.

What do you imagine learning in your later years?

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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.

Let’s just kick this off by saying that (1) we’re not rich and (2) we don’t have a cleaning service.  But we ARE watching Downton Abbey right now AND I read this old post and wondered what a housekeeper would say about our lives.  It’s one thing to write or even photograph your life and put it online.  It’s another thing to have someone move through your home, observing every square inch.

On one hand, that housekeeper only knows the version she imagines by looking at clues.  On the other hand, you can pick up a lot of details if you’re opening and closing drawers, reading receipts, noticing which objects move and which stay in the same place, week after week.

And then there was this:

A week or two after she told me about the pregnancy, I noticed spots of blood by the toilet. She told me about the miscarriage when I left. I acted as if I didn’t already know. She slouched. I wasn’t sure what to say.

What story does my house tell?  A person who keeps a broken laundry basket but neatly recopies lists if they grow too messy.  The labeled meals in the freezer.  The bar of chocolate, several years expired, that I can’t seem to toss when we clean out the pantry.  The lack of televisions.  The multiple vacuum cleaners.  The stacks of books.  The wooden ducks.

All of it tells a story; though would everyone tell themselves the same story by walking through the same house?

Hey, remember my super-awesome new glasses?  They’re actually not that awesome.  They are the ones that broke while we were at Disney, which was actually the second time they broke since getting them in November.  So they went back to the store this week.

I have a great deal of broken glasses anxiety after this experience.  I have an up-to-date copy of my prescription on me at all times.  I always travel with a backup pair of glasses.  But the fact that I needed to use those backup glasses less than six weeks into using the new glasses made me feel like if I was going to keep these frames, I needed a backup pair of glasses for my backup pair of glasses.  Which seemed a bit much.

We returned to the store this week, and they exchanged them for the other pair that I had been considering.  They told me that it would take a few days to get the new pair made, so for the time being, I don’t truly have backup glasses.  I have an old prescription I could use in a pinch, but… yikes.  That one beach trip has left me with never-ending speculaphobia.  Unless that means “fear of glasses,” in which I don’t fear my glasses.  I just fear being away from home and holding a lens in my hand.

My fellow glasses-wearers know exactly what I mean.

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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:

• “Last of 2018” (Weathering Storms)
• “House of Broken Dreams, Home of New Dreams” (My Path to Mommyhood)
• “Take All Your Chances” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Cristy!
• “Top 5” (Lavender Luz)
• “In Defense of Pink” (Leah Campbell)

Okay, now my choices this week.

By the Brooke is expecting again, and she writes about that bittersweet state between enjoying the current moment and living on the edge of fear.  She writes, “As my friend Sarah kindly reminded me, planning for and talking about a baby is not a cause of pregnancy loss.  But when your baby dies before she is born, causation and correlation get really murky.”  So circle the wagons; she could use support and celebration.

No Kidding in NZ has a post about needing an advocate in old age and not having children.  She makes good points about the lack of guarantees with kids, but outlines what everyone needs to do to be protected: “If we won’t have people to advocate for us, then we need to advocate for ourselves. We can do this, as much as possible, simply by planning and then – most importantly – making our wishes known in advance. Time-travel advocacy!”  Not the cheeriest topic, but an important post to read and think about.

Lastly, Searching for Our Silver Lining has a post about guardianship.  Again, an important post to read and think about.  She brings up the question of how to choose guardians — do you go with someone who already has children in their home, or do you go with someone who isn’t parenting and can dedicate their time and energy to your children?  She writes, “Because the reality is Maddy’s and Teddy’s role isn’t to fill some void; no more than people who are not parenting should be waiting in the wings to take on child-raising responsibilities.”  It’s a fine line to walk and an interesting situation to consider, too.

The roundup to the Roundup: I have broken glasses anxiety.  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 January 4th and 11th) 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.