This week I received an email from HarperCollins telling me that my three shipments of books were in the mail.  The problem was that (1) I had not ordered books, (2) they were being shipped to my old workplace’s defunct California address, and (3) no one at HarperCollins had any record of this shipment even though we could all track the progress of the boxes across the United States because the email contained a tracking number.

When I say this address is defunct, I mean that (1) they haven’t had an office there in ten years and (2) the company itself closed about two years ago.  And when I say that no one at HarperCollins had any record of this shipment, it’s because I spent Friday on the phone with customer service trying to figure out this mystery.  They had no record of any shipment to the company nor any record of my name or email address in the system, even though I had received a tracking email about my order.

It’s Sunday morning, and I still haven’t gotten a response on what is in the boxes.  So let’s all take a guess because there is no right answer.  After all, I will never see these books because it is going to a non-existent address in California.  The boxes will either sit outside, unclaimed, until the rain molds over their contents, or the boxes will be returned to HarperCollins.

So what’s in the boxes?

• Books that should have been sent over ten years ago that mysteriously shipped this week?
• A box of fantastic new bestsellers that someone decided I must read?
• A prank by a disgruntled HarperCollins employee?
• Ghost books?

I tried an Impossible Burger.  Our friends tried it years ago and told us about it.  It looks like beef and you cook it like beef, but it’s made from plants.  He told us that it was so realistic that he couldn’t tell the difference between real meat and the Impossible Burger.  That thought freaked me out so completely that I put the thought of it out of my mind.

But then a restaurant nearby started serving it, and I finally worked up my courage to try it.  At least, I felt courageous in the morning.  Then I silently obsessed about it for about an hour before we left the house for dinner.  Then I mentioned in the car that I was nervous.  Then I decided at the table that I didn’t think I could go through with it.  I ordered something else with the thought that I would try Josh’s burger.  If I liked it, we would split both of our meals, and if I hated it, I would eat my meal.

The twins took the first bites and reassured me that while it looked and smelled like beef, they could definitely tell the difference.  So I tried a bite and it was… fine.  I felt such internal pressure to eat it and enjoy it like everyone else.  So Josh and I split our meals.

I immediately started regretting it upon finishing, and I felt squeamish about the rest of my meal.  I get that it’s not meat, but it feels… too close.  Like I was eating something out of a Margaret Atwood novel.  It tasted fine, but the whole thing filled me with dread.

If you eat meat, you probably don’t recognize this dread.  But I’m assuming the vegetarians know exactly what I’m talking about.

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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:

• “You Are Not Your Grief” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Erin!
• “Can You See the Grief?” (An Unexpected Family Outing)

Okay, now my choices this week.

RisaKerslake writes about parenting after infertility.  “I believed them because back then, I had the illusion that if I could beat infertility, I could move on. That I was living sort of on pause and once I was holding my child, we could really start life as a family.”  This is such a great post about how the experience of infertility becomes part of your story; of course it has to inform your parenting, just like everything else you go through in life.  The post continues on another site, and the whole thing is a great read.

There were two posts that I read this week about unexpected pregnancies:

No Good Eggs writes about discovering she’s pregnant without assistance after three children through donor egg IVF.  Understandably, pregnancy wasn’t a possibility her brain was entertaining when she realized her uterus felt strange.  She writes, “How am I feeling emotionally. I feel everything. But really just scared. Scared this baby will have major issues and we will have to terminate. Scared this baby will have medium issues and we will be faced with a huge and confusing decision. Scared of giving birth again … And scared of raising a mix of donor and own egg kids, a combo I decided a long time ago I didn’t want.”  It’s a raw and wonderful post.

Much Ado About Nothing also has a surprise pregnancy post.  After a very stressful summer, she discovers that she’s pregnant.  She writes, “I didn’t want to tell anyone at first. After a few days of feeling turned upside down, my husband started to tell people. I only told my sister. I felt undeserving, I still do. I was still living in disbelief and utter panic.”  She is left in a limbo state after a scan, so I’m just holding her in my heart until she gets definitive news.

The roundup to the Roundup: I freaked out from the Impossible Burger.  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 14th and September 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.

I read a really interesting article about the pain of spending because Josh and I are trying to put a new budgeting/tracking system into place.  The general idea behind pain of spending is that “the less it hurts, the more people spend.”  In other words, the more inconvenient the purchase, the less likely you are to make it.

For instance, paying in cash is harder than paying with a credit card.  You need to get the cash and carry the cash and count it and hand it over.  That is more work than taking out a piece of plastic and swiping it.  The credit card company mails you the card; you have to go to the bank or an ATM to get the cash.  See, easy vs. hard.

Okay, cash isn’t really that difficult, but businesses are making it easier and easier to spend money.  It doesn’t even feel like real money when you’re talking about gift cards or swiping the phone.  So the article was about making it more difficult for yourself.  Putting a system in place that is enough of a pain-in-the-ass that you decide NOT to purchase something because it will mean doing X, Y, and Z.

I’m not a big spender — my dislike of change extends to not even getting new clothes and switching up my wardrobe — but I was sort of smitten with this idea of introducing pain-in-the-ass tasks in order to curb spending.

But there was a thought that I was still chewing on after reading the article.  George Loewenstein critiques the author’s recording system and points out that it isn’t effective:

It is ineffective, he says, because it focuses on the wrong type of transaction … There are usually more savings to be had from revisiting one’s auto- or home-insurance policy, or one’s phone bill, than from skipping the marginal cup of coffee. Loewenstein said it’s more effective to make changes with larger “one-time decisions,” instead of regularly having to make “all these micro-decisions.”

It’s not the random cups of coffee or the books or the totally adorable wooden duck I bought for myself in Scotland because IT WAS SO ADORABLE.  It’s the fact that we’re probably spending money on services that we’re not really using.  Or paying hidden fees that we don’t notice because we don’t look carefully at the 15 page bill.

Josh and I have started doing an audit of all existing bills, looking at things we can cut.  It will be interesting to see how much we save yearly when we’re done reading all the fine print.  So far, we’ve managed to cut $60.  Maybe not that impressive, but companies make it reeeeeeeally difficult to trim down bills.

How often do you audit your bills and see places to cut spending?  We’re thinking once every six months.

I’ve been meditating daily for almost a year, dutifully checking it off the to-do list once I’ve sat quietly, breathing in and out.  I usually do this early in the morning, though there are times when I forget or don’t have time, and then I phone it in right before bed, fidgeting around while the meditation app plays just so I can cross it off my list.  Look, I did it.

But in ticking off the box, I’ve missed the point.  I started out really meditating for the sake of quieting my mind, but I’m now meditating for the sake of completing the task.  I know this.  I feel it all the time, how I come out of meditation feeling the same way as when I went in.

Clearly, I need to return to meditating for real, but I also really love this idea of scheduling in quiet time.  Maybe not the suggested half hour because I just don’t have that kind of time in my life right now if I also want to catch up with Josh, but more than the four minutes the teacher uses in that TED post.

Does it need to be screen-free?  The article specifically mentions over and over again that it’s the screen that’s creating this monkey-mind, but… I think about the time that I spend reading blogs.  I’m not jumping around, feeling frantic.  That’s me time.  That’s quiet time and thinking time.  I’ll admit that reading on the phone means that I’m more likely to stop reading and start playing Farm Heroes, but sometimes the judgment of screens feels like old quotes you hear about other technological advances, such as bound books or telephones.  It’s not going to ruin us any more than telegraphs ruined us.  Telegraphs didn’t ruin us… right?  Or maybe it did, but this will ruin us in the same way.

Anyway, I put a 15 minute alarm on my phone so I’ll remember to take 15 minutes to read or write or think.  Maybe sometimes read blogs, other times read books.  Whatever makes me feel quiet.

Do you schedule in quiet time or just grab it where you can find it?

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

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Real Simple put out a form this summer for conducting a chore audit in your home.  It’s a little limiting, and it would probably work better if it had it as Person A, Person B, Person C, etc. and you could fill in the name and work on the form together.  But it’s a fantastic idea to take an honest look at what everyone does and see where people can step in to help.

Because you may think you’re doing everything and then realize as you fill out the form that other people in the home sometimes take those tasks.  Or you may think that you’re not doing enough but then see how much you’re actually doing to keep the home running.

Like there are only six tasks on that list that are solely mine.  Almost everything else, Josh or the twins do a quarter or half the time.  And there are four things I never — or almost never — do.

Take a look at the chore audit list.  How do chores in your house shake out?

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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.