Darius Foroux had a brilliant set up for a piece about unclogging your brain that opens with this thought:

I want to ask you a question. How many hours per day do you think?

“I never thought about that.” So let me get this straight. You’re thinking all the time, and yet, you never think about how much time you spend thinking.

That sounds like an addiction to me. I know, because I’m addicted to thinking too.

He points out that you can’t stop thinking in the same way that you can stop overeating by not consuming more food or working yourself towards burnout by taking a break.  You can’t stop thinking for long stretches of time and give your brain a little vacation.

I don’t think (think!) his steps for not overthinking would work for me, but it did make me think (there’s that word again!) about the fact that we can’t stop thinking.  We can’t stop taking in information and processing information, even if we’re fully in the present moment.  When we’re lying on the beach, listening to the waves, we’re still thinking about the sound and how much we like it and how hot we feel and how hard it’s going to be to get the sand out of our hair later and…

Back to the sound of the waves.

I’ve had a break through with meditation.  I couldn’t do it; couldn’t calm my thoughts and focus on my breathing for longer than a breath or two.  So I decided to mentally build myself a place to go.  A room.  An imaginary room.

I spent a lot of time perfecting it.  Two walls are floor-to-ceiling glass so I can see outside.  I’ve decorated the room.  Sometimes I even leave a drink or cookies for myself in the room.  I mentally go there every morning during the time I set aside for meditation.  I sit down and think about myself in the room. My brain gets to keep thinking; just not about the things that are stressing me out about my day.

I love spending time in my mental room, watching myself read or eat a cookie or stare out the window.  It’s a brief vacation every morning.

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

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My friend just told me about a game: Kill Dr. Lucky.  It’s like Clue except instead of trying to figure out whether Mrs. Peacock used the candlesticks in the library, you’re trying to commit the murder.  As is everyone else at the table AND not get caught.  So you try to get Dr. Lucky alone and kill him off with one of the weapons you collect along the way before anyone else can do the same.

That sounded really dark once I wrote it out.

I love board games.  I hate trying to teach myself new ones from an explanation sheet, so I keep going back to the ones I know well: Yahtzee, Mahjongg, Backgammon, Chess, Sorry, and Monopoly.  I need to find people to teach me the rules to new games in real time.  There’s a board game cafe nearby, and if they’re not busy, the staff will sit down at your table and teach you new games.

Which games are your favourites?

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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.

The ChickieNob loves to borrow my shoes.  We’re almost the same size, so she often comes along with me when I’m purchasing new shoes in order to give her opinion and steer purchases towards things she’ll want to take from my closet in the near future.  She also constantly checks on existing shoes to see if they fit better. (I’m a size larger.) One of those pairs of shoes are my knee-high boots.

The boots are the ones I wore to BlogHer for the Voices of the Year performance.  You can see the boots in the beginning of the video.

My sister convinced me to purchase them.  They were awesome boots.  I loved wearing them.

Loved being the operative term.

The ChickieNob asked if she could try on the boots.  “Of course,” I said.  She went to pull them off the shelf and commented that they felt “stuck.”  I wasn’t sure how the boots could be stuck, so I reached down and yanked them.  The leather adhered to the shelf, leaving a large hole in the side of the boot.  The leather was cracked in other places and peeling away.  All in all, it looked as if someone had poured acid over the boot.  (No one, by the way, poured acid over the boot.  I have no clue how this happened because nothing could have gotten onto the shelf.)

The ChickieNob was heartbroken, but we were running errands the next day.  I would get a new pair of knee-high boots.

I tried on a few pairs, settling on a relatively inexpensive one that resembled my original boots except that the toe is pointy instead of square.  The ChickieNob tried them on, too, and declared them excellent.  Mischief managed.

There was zero reason to keep the original, ripped up boots, but I found it very hard to say goodbye to them.  I took a photo so I could remember them, and then gently lowered them into the trash.  The Wolvog watched with amusement.  “Hard to let go?” he asked.

Yes, little man, it’s hard to let go because those shoes weren’t daily sneakers that you wear out and move on to the next pair.  They were lifetime shoes; shoes you purchase and make memories in over the years.  Those shoes have been to weddings and Bat Mitzvahs.  The White House and my friend’s house.  They’ve saved me on numerous occasions when I didn’t have time to shave my legs.  They were a great pair of boots, and I assumed they would be there forever.

Thank you, boots, for being so awesome for so long.

ABC News is airing an interview this Sunday (9 pm ET) between Robin Roberts and Michelle Obama where Obama talks about her miscarriage and using IVF to conceive Malia and Sasha.  It’s a topic she’s unpacking in her upcoming book, Becoming.

Reflecting on it now, Mrs. Obama says she wished she knew other women had experienced miscarriages as well — a lesson that would have helped lift the shame she associated with it.

“I felt like I failed because I didn’t know how common miscarriages were because we don’t talk about them,” Mrs. Obama explains in the ABC interview. “We sit in our own pain, thinking that somehow we’re broken.”

She’s hoping that by sharing her story, other women don’t feel that same isolation.

I love our former First Lady and the grace she shows as she educates and educates and educates.

Anyone else having trouble accessing my blog?  Though I guess if you can’t access it, you also wouldn’t see this.  One person told me: “Lately, your posts will show in my reader, but when I click on them to go to your blog, I get an error message about the server. I can go to other web sites, just not yours.”  Are you having the same issue, and if you are, could you screenshot it and let me know which browser you’re using?

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I tried to give myself a day or two to step back from the election results before I fully processed them.

I’m happy that Democrats took the House because it’s never healthy to have one political party controlling every branch of government.  We need checks and balances, and not an echo chamber of ideas.  Actually, the healthiest situation would be not having political parties at all and having people state their personal platform rather than conforming to a party line.  But… since that won’t happen, the next best thing is to have more than one political party in power.

There are some people who I would have loved to see win, but they didn’t.  Some people who didn’t win, and I was relieved.  A few moments of diversity.  A lot of frustration at voting conditions.  A sense that the chasms between us are getting wider.  Appreciation for the people who put in the time and effort to get voices heard.

Thank you.

So… I left the night feeling like expectations were met or exceeded.  Not happy that I had some of those expectations in the first place, but very little happened that surprised me; good or bad.

How about 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:

• “Reading Diverse Books” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Mali and Jess!

Okay, now my choices this week.

Magpie Musing has a post about a tiny plastic baby that lives in a jacket pocket.  She’s thinking about the things she carries (and her post made me look at the things I always have with me: phone, book, bullet journal, hand sanitizer, cinnamon mints) and she moves to the items that inexplicably have a certain space.  She writes, “It is a comfort to me that tiny plastic baby is still in the pocket and ever will be, even though I can’t remember where tiny plastic baby came from. But every time I wore that coat, or moved it to a new closet, I checked for tiny plastic baby, ‘ah yes, there she is.’ Carried.”  Not about infertility, but… well… it made me think.

By the Brooke has a post about how the difficult time of day has moved from morning to night.  After her daughter died, it was morning, when her eyes opened and her brain remembered everything that had happened.  But now it is the worries that come in the evening hours, that look manageable by morning.  She explains, “I just needed to write out this reminder that no matter how terrible I feel at bedtime, life is generally more endurable in the morning.”  So true.

Lastly, RisaKerslake has a post about her new cycle.  She begins: “So I sat, peeing on yet another pregnancy stick, watching for that second line to appear, and giving yet another disappointed sigh when once again, only one line showed. Doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. I was officially going insane.” They’re doing something different this time — endometrial receptivity array — and transferring two embryos.  Click over and read about it.

The roundup to the Roundup: Problems accessing this site?  Your thoughts on the midterms?  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 2nd and November 9th) 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.