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 I say every game is my new favourite, but this one has the staying power of a Wordle.

With Whittle, you get two unrelated words. You have to tap letters to erase them while still making real words. For instance, “adds” can become “ads” if you erase the second “D,” but you cannot erase the “A” and make “dds.”

You win when you erase all letters, but then you can continue playing until you find all of the hidden words. Once you win, you see the words you’ve already found near the bottom of the screen with a blank box for any missing words. This is helpful because you can know how many letters the missing word has, and it goes in alphabetical order, so you can know the missing word comes between these two words you’ve found.

It is really brilliant and super simple. And it’s the sort of thing you can keep putting down and coming back to as you try to find the final few. Plus, you can play the archive, so there are hours of play.

Love this.

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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 connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

A friend of mine died after high school, and I encountered her mother for the first time in 34 years last week. We talked about her and cried a little. And as she looked between me and the ChickieNob, she commented that we wore the same necklace.

She is the second person ever to have commented on it, and the first person was a jeweler, so I expect him to pay attention to jewelry. We told her the story of the necklace, and while she gave me a lot of physical hugs that day, noticing that detail was an emotional hug because it’s something special to us. We’ve been wearing the same necklace in different iterations for 16 years. That’s a long time for only two strangers to comment on something.

And then I got home and the necklace clasp broke.

It was an easy fix, and I called a jeweler we use to see if he could fit us in. He’s about an hour away, but I trust them with really special things like this necklace. The woman who answered told me they wouldn’t do a same-day fix for me, no matter how easy or small the fix. She didn’t care that we would be driving an hour or that they had just done a same-day fix a few months ago. I hung up the phone and started looking for another jeweler.

But the ChickieNob told me to hand over the chain. She was taking it to the jeweler and getting it fixed that day. She drove it the hour, walked it into the store, and got them to change the clasp. The time in the store was about five minutes.

She was a lioness. Completely fierce. Making things happen. I am so grateful I have a fierce woman on my side.

Josh was away most of the week at a conference. When the kids were little, they always got sick when he went to a conference. Things always broke. There was always… something. Don’t get me started on the time when he was overseas at a film festival, and the local government suggested that we all prepare for a dirty bomb, and I ended up at Home Depot filling my cart with duct tape and plastic sheeting.

Anyway.

Before he left, I thought to myself, whenever Josh goes away, all sorts of things go wrong. I bet I will have to deal with a cricket.

Quentin ended up having an accident in our bed while the ChickieNob and I were watching television (first time ever, which makes me wonder if he was having issues because he was also totally chill, which is not like him), which necessitated two loads of laundry late at night. I was swept up in that strange Facebook glitch, which locked people out of their accounts. (Though I thought at first that it was just me and felt all kinds of panicked.)

There was a salad dressing disaster where I tried a recipe the New York Times promised was the most amazing dressing in the world, wasted a lot of olive oil, and had an enormous clean up, and it was inedible.

And the cricket came on the last night. Our final night. All the cricket had to do was wait a few more hours, and it could have been Josh’s problem. But it wasn’t. It was my problem. And I made it the Wolvog’s problem. He sucked it up in the Dyson, but also got water in the Dyson. So now I’m drying out the Dyson for a few days and hoping it still works.

And these things happen only when Josh goes out of town.

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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 to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

And now the blogs…

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But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Road Less Travelled writes about her mixed feelings attending a wedding for a person who is the same age her child would have been. There is the happiness for the couple and the joy of seeing family, but there is the emotional pain of what ifs. It’s a reminder that loss doesn’t magically resolve at a single point. There can be triggers, 27 years later.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ leans hard on lessons learned through infertility as she experiences a different difficult situation. She asks if you remember going through infertility, when it consumed your whole day and every thought. But one day you reach a point where it is not your entire day. It’s just part of a day. And then it’s only part of a week, a month, a year. She reassures herself and the reader: “It helps me to understand that it will pass, eventually, whatever the outcome, although the fits and starts might last the rest of my life. It helps too to remember the nature of grief, of worry, of irrational thoughts, and know that it is all normal.” Sending a hug and a thank you for this reminder.

The roundup to the Roundup: When Josh goes out of town… 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 August 8 – 15) 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.

As I say every month, I’m shamelessly stealing this idea from Jessica Lahey. She has a recurring monthly date where she reviews all the books she reads that month. Book reviews are important for authors, and I want to get better at doing this.

So. I’m going to review them here and also online, but I’m going to do it a little differently. I’m only going to review the stuff I really liked. I don’t see a reason to spend my time writing about something I didn’t love; it’s just using up more of my energy. So only positive reviews.

These are the books I liked (or mostly liked) from July.

Can You Solve the Murder? (Antony Johnston): Let me start by saying that I read this when I got my shingles vaccine, so my enjoyment may have been tempered by the fact that I felt terrible. It was also high-involvement: You track the clues and what you’ve learned. It got a little tedious near the end – two hours of reading time would have been the perfect amount because you’d be more inclined to try again if you didn’t solve the crime. But very clever format and a fun read.

A Novel Murder (E.C. Nevin): Another possible literary victim of my shingles-vaccine induced mood. I thought this was going to be more of a quirky cozy (Richard Osman) but it was a solid cozy cozy. So if you’re looking for a cozy mystery, this is a good one. Lots of drinking in the pub, friends helping friends, police who include writers in solving the crime.

Bitter Sweet (Hattie Williams): This was amazing. I immediately handed it off to ChickieNob who agreed. This book will stay with me for a long time. I started crying trying to talk about it. It is a book that will profoundly impact your heart and brain, a similar effect to All Our Wrong Today’s or The Other Side of Night, but with the familiar growing pains of The Rachel Incident. So achingly beautiful and infuriating and moving. It is quite literally bitter sweet.

What a Way To Go (Bella Mackie): No one writes terrible people as well as Bella Mackie, and these are the worst. Is it a little rough in places? Yes. There were a few times that whole paragraphs repeated on two different pages (e.g., look at p. 131 and 338, and the description of Tanners), which I noted because I thought it was a clue. And there were chapters that came out of order near the end. (That was weird and also not a clue.) But even with those things, it’s a 5-star read. You’ll snicker through the book trying to figure out the ending.

Culpability (Bruce Holsinger): A solid story that asks a lot of questions. It feels like it would be a great book club book, lending itself to discussion. I’m a little surprised that the environmental impact of AI never comes up, especially because the majority of the book takes place on an enormous body of water. But it is less a story about AI and more a story about family dynamics.

The Sentence Is Death (Anthony Horowitz): This was a re-read. I love this series so much, and slipping into a re-read of it is like hanging out with old friends.

Bring the House Down (Charlotte Runcie): An amazing five star read about art and our relationship to it and to each other. About awful behaviour and the way we thoughtlessly and purposefully impact each other’s lives. I was blown away by how much this book made me think. How much the complex characters got under my skin. Cannot wait to see what else this author writes in the future. I loved every messy page.

What did you read last month?

I just read a book about reality television while watching reality television. Not at the same time; the activities were one after the other. But you get the point.

I’m not a big reality television person. We started watching Traitors this winter, and we finished 3 UK seasons and 1.5 US seasons. We definitely prefer the UK and everyone entering as strangers.

I saw 2 seasons of the Real World about 30 years ago. I’ve seen a few reality cooking competitions. I don’t know where that puts me on the watching reality television continuum. Probably somewhere near the middle? Maybe closer to the not watching reality television side? I have no clue how many people watch, but based on the number of shows, I would guess I am leaning toward the minority in reality television consumption.

I make this point because there was a line in the book (The Compound by Aisling Rawle) that captured something we talk about all the time as we watch Traitors: (1) What makes a person go on a show where they know they will be manipulated or voted out? (2) What makes a person watch someone else get manipulated or voted out?

One character says about the possible reason they went on the show:

I think probably all of us must have been very unhappy, otherwise why would we have done that to ourselves? I know we told ourselves that we wanted to live peacefully, but I think we were looking for new ways to make ourselves miserable.

Do happy people go on reality television shows? You have better odds of winning the prize than you do winning the lottery, but it’s still more likely than not that you will walk away with just the experience. Maybe with a travel show, the experience would be the greater prize than a monetary prize, but for so many of these shows — like Traitors — the end prize IS the point. And the friends you make along the way?

And then the other side — why do we watch reality television competitions? Sometimes when we’re watching Traitors, I feel terrible. I feel gutted for people who are certain someone has their back, only to discover they were lying the whole time. My stomach hurts when I hear them confidently state that another contestant is telling the truth when I know that they’re lying. What does that say about me?