We forgot to watch our usual winter movies this year: About a Boy, Love Actually, and Lord of the Rings.  There’s still time for Lord of the Rings — we knew December would be busy, so we’ve already decided to start the first movie in the trilogy in January.  But About a Boy and Love Actually contain Christmas.  You can’t watch Christmas movies after Christmas.  That’s like watching beach movies in October.  I mean… yeah… I get that people do it, but it feels discordant.

I’ll probably let Love Actually go, but I may try to work in About a Boy tonight.

Do you have winter movies?  What are they?

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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.

Little Bird has a post about thoughts that come after she crosses back and forth over a bridge during a busy day.  When she stops moving, her brain turns on: “My first thought: I miss Charlotte. That’s usually the first thought when things get quiet. Then: This has been a really hard year.”  There is good in the hard, a new baby in the hard, but it is still hard.  And I love her goal: “My 2019 goal is to get a little bit better. I’m not planning on moving soul mountains, but if I could shift my perspective even slightly towards more positivity we’d all benefit.”

POF and Now What looks at a heart-pausing moment from two angles.  A comment her daughter makes takes on new meaning through the lens of donor eggs.  I’m not going to say more than that because it’s a short post, and I think it packs the biggest punch if you go in and hear the words as she did in the moment.  It’s a great reminder that what seems one way to us can seem quite different to someone else.  I also love, “Back in the box, you thousand thoughts.”

Lastly, Not a Wasted Word has a post about being pregnancy avoidant.  Even though her family building days are behind her, she still feels strange around people who are pregnant.  I love this self reflection: “I tell myself it’s because pregnancy terrifies me … I kind of hope that is what is happening, otherwise it feels like I’m just begrudging people their happiness during one of the most exciting times of their life.”  It made me think of my own pregnancy avoidance, trying to get to the heart of the reason.

The roundup to the Roundup: I missed my winter movies.  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 December 14th and December 21st) 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.

In the same week, I had one friend muse via email that she wants to start blogging again and another muse that she wants to stop blogging.  In both cases, it came down to people feeling like no one was hearing their words.  Or, at the very least, no one was responding to them, hence why the blogger thought the Facebook grass was greener, and the Facebooker remembered the blogging grass as greener.

Here are my thoughts.

I’ll start with Facebook.  I’m not against Facebook.  I think of my blog as my house, and I think of my social media accounts as additional homes I have in other cities.  It makes sense, in that case, to rent apartments that require little upkeep in those other cities since my blog — my home — is my main living space on the Web.  That’s sort of what you’re doing on social media platforms: you’re renting space that you’re paying for with your content and personal information.

Some people are happy to live light or not deal with the stress that comes from owning a home.  But I’m not that person.  I like having my home, and I like having my blog.  I don’t think I’d be happy posting my thoughts solely on social media sites in the same way that I never loved renting apartments.  Again, I realize that is me.

We trust that people will see our Facebook posts, and that’s not always the case.  Some people whom you’re connected to on the site will not go on the platform, so they will not see it.  Some people will not have the algorithm show it in their feed, so they will not see it.  Some people will have your status in their feed, but there’s so much information on there and it moves so quickly that they’ll scroll over it without interacting with it.

And here’s the thing: they don’t even know that they’re missing it.  Facebook shows them one of your status updates and they believe they’re seeing all of your status updates.  So they don’t know what they don’t know.  Unless you are opening and closing every single one of your friend’s profile pages, you have no clue how many posts you’re missing daily.  And as much as Facebook wants to believe that they can predict what you want to read, someone of those posts you miss will be important to you or to that person.

Which brings us to blogs.  What I like about blogs is that I see every post.  If I like a blog, I enter their URL in my reader so I am notified when a new post goes up.  I sometimes read the post in the reader, and I sometimes hop over to the blog itself if I’m on my computer so I can comment.  Reading on a mobile device makes that difficult, so while I know blog readership has fallen over the years, I also believe that mobile devices keep us from knowing the whole story.  There are more people reading than people know by looking at their stats.

The Internet was a different place 12 years ago.  There wasn’t a lot to read, so we read everything.  We went back to the same blog post several times, reading the comment section to see how people were reacting to it during the day.  We had long conversations in there.  But now, the information flows so quickly, it is easier not to return.  But the one thing that hasn’t changed is that I visit each blog, one at a time.

Because that’s the biggest difference between social media sites and blogs; why I keep writing mine and why I keep reading them.  Because I like visiting one person at a time.  I go to their blog and see what they have to say, and then I go to the next blog and join that conversation.  I give one person at a time my complete attention.  On Facebook, it’s like trying to visit 100 people at once, and not doing a good job connecting with any one of them because there are so many people around.

I miss blogs.  I miss specific blogs — A Little Pregnant, Infertile Fantasies, Vee from Three Little Birds, Too Many Fish to Fry (she still sometimes has infrequent posts) — and I miss blogs in general.  My reader is still full at the end of the day because I subscribe to so many of them, but it’s not like it was back in the old days when there were so many of us.

Which blogs do you miss?  And will you ever go back if you stopped writing?

I came up with this idea back in early December, but I’m waiting until the new year to implement it.  It was partially because December has been so freakin’ busy and I felt overwhelmed about adding something on my plate, and partially because I wanted something new for the new year.

#15Best

I’m taking 15 minutes every day to do something that I believe will make me a better person.  It will usually be reading 15 minutes in a book that I think will make me a better person (for instance, Mo Gawdat’s Solve for Happy) or working on my happy list (also Gawdat).  But I’m also leaving it open to any activity that will make me feel better, such as learning a new skill (card tricks!) or practicing an existing skill. I’m going to find these 15 minutes by spending less time mindlessly scrolling through social media or playing match-3 games. I mean, yes, I’m still going to spend time on social media and match-3 games, but I can trim 15 minutes from that and not miss a thing.

I guess I want to feel like I moved the needle.  Even if it’s an incremental amount; I want to go to bed knowing that I did something in my day that brought me closer to being the person I want to be. Or that I best used at least 15 minutes of my day. Hence #15Best.

I’m starting my 15 minutes per weekday on January 1st.  There are 261 weekdays in 2019.  10 of them are holidays, and if I give myself a freebie, I get to a nice, round 250 days.  That means that on December 31st I will have spent 3,750 minutes (or 62.5 hours) becoming a better person. To ensure that I remember to do it, I’m going to set a timer on my phone and make a habit of writing how I spent the 15 minutes in my bullet journal.

Want to join me?  15 minutes a day.  250 days of the year (so, yes, you’ll need to track this by writing down how you spent the minutes, but we’re working on a trust system).  Add your name and blog/social media account URL below if you’re committing to the challenge so we can hold each other accountable.  I’ve also started a Google Group for anyone who wants to chat daily about how they’re spending their 15 minutes. Sign up for the #15Best Google Group. Or meet back here on February 1st to let us know how you’ve done.

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

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I love silence.  I work at home, without any extraneous sounds beyond a phone call here and there.  I drive without music, flipping on the radio only when other people enter the car.  If Josh is out for the night and the kids have gone to bed, I’ll enjoy a little more silence rather than opting for turning on the television.  I talk to friends and family and love getting together with people, but I don’t seek out sound.

And, yet, I come from a very talk-heavy culture, and I have a constant impulse to strike up conversations with people around me because I believe they expect the people around them to strike up conversations.  Does that make sense?

The BBC recently did a piece on why people in Finland don’t do small-talk, and it said: “silence functions as an extension of comfortable conversation.”  Yes!  If I am comfortable, I am quiet.

Do you make small talk, chatting with people in lines or behind the counter?

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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.

When I was little, I saved my Halloween candy, eating it for months afterward.  And when I read the Magicians trilogy the first time, I only allowed myself 10 or so pages per day, switching to a different book when my daily allotment was up.  In other words, I hold onto things that I really love and stretch them out for as long as possible because I don’t want to consider the day that I won’t have that thing in front of me anymore.

I was dumbfounded a week or two ago when Netflix cancelled their fourth most popular show — Daredevil.  Why wouldn’t they renew something that was clearly well-loved?  But they seemed to be cancelling all Marvel shows left and right, so it made sense in the moment that even a popular show wouldn’t survive the purge if they were shedding Marvel properties.

But then I read a hypothesis that Netflix puts more (different?) emphasis on binge watching.  So regardless of whether or not a show is widely watched (popular), it looks at how quickly a show is consumed.

But what about people like me?  I specifically save episodes BECAUSE I like a show.  I watch things I enjoy slower because I want to savour them as much as possible.  Sure, there are things we watch quickly, but on the whole, the more I like something, the slower I go.  I haven’t even seen the final episode of the second season of The Crown yet because ChickieNob and I are too sad to let that cast go.

I don’t want the speed in which I consume something to dictate whether or not I get to keep it.  I don’t fit in this quickly moving world.

Do you like to consume shows (books, etc) quickly or spread it out?