You know how there are people who can match the perfect wine to a meal?  That is not me.  I don’t drink wine, so I have no clue how to pair it.  But I am totally that way with books and my own brain.  I can’t do it for anyone else, but I am so good with holding books and then reading them at the right time.

Take, for instance, Us by David Nicholls.  I owned it for years, and I kept it by my bed for years because I didn’t want to forget to read it.  Every so often, I’d read the first page or two and think, “not yet.”

I read it while we were traveling through Scotland this summer.  Even though the family in the book exits the UK, they at least begin their travels in the UK.  Being away from home heightened my enjoyment of that book.  It was the best pairing I’ve done in a while between book and experience.

On the other hand, I’m planning to read Andrew Sean Greer’s Less while I’m at home.  It’s also a travel story, but instinct is telling me to read it from home, preferably in winter, though it technically could be enjoyed in any season.

I went back to the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy because they felt best consumed in summer, and it’s currently summer.  Though I just slammed shut and returned When Life Gives You Lululemons to the library when I was only a few pages in because I realized that it wouldn’t work for me in any location OR in any season even though I wanted to read the book.  I left a note to check back with my gut in a few months to see if I can find a place/time to read it, but… if not… I have to drop it.  There’s no life experience to pair it with that would work.

Can you read any book at any time, or do you hold certain books to read in a season or place?

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

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After reading (and seeing) Crazy Rich Asians, I am devouring every article linked to inside other articles, and found this one about crazy rich honeymoon planners.  (Actually, it’s not that the honeymoon planners are crazy rich.  It’s their clients.  So I guess that moniker doesn’t really work.)

Anyway, $50,000 for a honeymoon!  Or more.  The minimum is $20,000 to use their services, and they talk about one that cost $1.8 million.  FOR A HONEYMOON.

We went on a great honeymoon.  We went to St. Lucia.  We had good intentions to explore and learn the patois, but we ended up face-planting on the beach and sleeping or reading every day.  We managed to head into a nearby town twice, catching a street fair one night, and we went on a hike (though quit early so we could go back to sleeping).

If you’re married, did you go on a honeymoon?  If not, where would you want to go?

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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.

Josh and I talk a lot about sleep, namely, that we should get more of it.  We’re not great at actually getting to bed when we say we’re going to get to bed, and then it takes me a long time to fall asleep.  So I’m getting about five or six hours per night.  That’s on a good night.

I’ve been looking up sleep information, and I found out about the Epworth Sleepiness Scale.  The good news is that I only scored a two, which is low.  But the bad news is that I am not sleepy during the day.  I’m not sleepy from my lack of sleep, so I can’t take a nap, let’s say, and grab sleep during daytime hours.  I’m not sleepy at night, AND I’m not sleepy during the day.

Which doesn’t mean that I’m not tired.  I am tired.  But I’m not sleepy.  I’m like a little yappy dog on high alert for any squirrels that may run by the window.  That dog may be exhausted, but it cannot let itself drift off into sleep because… SQUIRREL.

Anyway, I was researching my chronotype (none of which — by the way — take into account that your life may not fit your chronotype and you may not be able to do anything about it), and I think I’m somewhere between a wolf and a dolphin.  I’m a wolphin.

That will make more sense if you read this chart.

I don’t know this scientifically because the chronotype quiz seems to be down at the moment, but it’s what makes sense based on the descriptions.  I’m a wolphin living in a world where I need to do tasks on other people’s timetables.  I cannot roll out of bed at 7 am or hold meetings at 4 pm.  I can’t do yoga or exercise at 6 pm because I’m freakin’ making dinner at that time.

Anyway.

What is your chronotype, and are you also a hybrid that sounds like the stuff of nightmares?

Okay, Riddle me this, Batpeople.  We were driving over a bridge on the way to the Kennedy Center, and I saw the sparkly lights of a restaurant on the water in the distance.

“What was the name of that restaurant we loved in Georgetown?” I asked.  “It was on the waterfront.”

“You must have gone there with your other boyfriend,” Josh commented.

“No, it was you.  I mean, we haven’t been in years, but it was very early on in our relationship… it was on the water and it had sparkle lights… We also went there after a graduation or something like that…”

“Now you’re really talking about another boyfriend,” Josh repeated.

That was all that we said about the restaurant.  That it was in Georgetown, on the waterfront, and had sparkle lights.  Plus Josh insisted that we’ve never eaten there together, so he had zero clue what this restaurant was called.

The next day, Josh was scrolling through Facebook and his face changed.  “Melissa… Is this the restaurant you were thinking about yesterday?”  He flipped his phone around, and it was an ad for Sequoia — THE RESTAURANT I DIDN’T KNOW THE NAME OF.

If you Google “waterfront, Georgetown, restaurant,” it pops up as the second hit.  So if we had ever bothered Googling it, we would have had our answer but

1. No one Googled it.
2. No one said the name.
3. Microphone access is off for Facebook.

So either (1) Facebook is telling the truth — when you deny it access to your microphone, it cannot listen — or (2) Facebook is lying and it absolutely listened and the algorithm spat out the most likely option, or (3) it is just the most amazing coincidence in the world.

Which option do you think is correct?  I’m going with door #2…

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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:

• “Pan.dora’s Box” (An Engineer Becomes a Mom)
• “Day 12 – The Best $150ish I Ever Spent” (Anne Heffron)
• “#Microblog Mondays: How We Take Pictures” (My Path to Mommyhood)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Life Without Baby has a post about letting go of the life you wanted when the road that leads there is an unhappy, stressful path.  In other words, it’s not just about the destination.  It’s about being okay with the road to get there, and when you’re not okay with it, having the ability to remove yourself from that path, even if you really really really want the final destination.  It’s such a good post about how it’s not all about the ending.  It’s about the beginning and the middle, too.

Much Ado About Nothing has a post about grief.  It is a post about how her grief about her own father’s death mixed with her sister’s father’s death this summer (same mother, different fathers).  She writes about the loss: “I held up my nieces and nephews and sister, all while feeling these huge waves of grief for the loss I knew and was now watching someone I loved deeply feel. I didn’t have any words other than ‘I am so sorry.’ But I guess that is the truest life lesson… love hard and show up for the people you love when they need you.”  Such a simple and true life rule.  It’s a gorgeous, heartbreaking post with a beautiful ending: “My grief allowed her to be more loving in her father’s last months.”  Go read the whole thing.

Risakerslake has the ability to make me crack up about the beginning of a cycle.  From quietly plotting her day 3 monitoring from a coffee shop to the goat rodeo that comes from coordinating care between clinics, she makes you laugh as often as she makes you groan in sympathy.  And I love what she writes about returning to the clinic: “Some women experience PTSD going back to the fertility clinic. For me, I don’t know. I didn’t feel any of that. It was more like coming home.”  Sending really good thoughts for this go-around on baby making.

Lastly, My Path to Mommyhood explains why inspirational messages sometimes aren’t so… inspirational.  In fact, they can be downright unhelpful.  My personal pet peeve is “quitters never win and winner never quit.”  But she points out how with just a little more explanation, these quotes CAN get someone started on something difficult.  Though… it’s sort of as if we need to sweep the truth under the rug sometimes to get people to try.  I don’t know.  That feels wrong, too.  As she points out, this is kinda sorta complicated when what you need to convey can be twisted and simplified.  And I love how she ties in the frustration and accomplishment pieces.

The roundup to the Roundup: Facebook is the creepiest kid on the block.  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 24th and 31st) 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.

My friends and I had fun debating this question at dinner last week, so I’m turning over the situation to you.  Ask the Salty Waitress had an interesting question, one that begins with a basic fact.  If you are ordering an entrée at a restaurant, they’re all mostly within the same price range.  So restaurant to restaurant, the prices obviously are higher or lower, but most entrées are within $10 of each other within the same restaurant.

But alcohol doesn’t follow that rule.  Alcohol is the one item in a restaurant that appears in a single section — the wine list — but can cost anywhere from $15 to $1000 (or more) for a single bottle of wine.

So Ask the Salty Waitress had a question about tipping when alcohol has been ordered, making the argument that whether the person ordered a $15 bottle of wine (and paid a $3 tip) or a $100 bottle of wine (and paid a $20 tip), the waitress did the same job of uncorking and pouring the wine.  They wanted to know if they could pay a single tip for the wine, let’s say $5, and call it a day.

The answer is a decent one, albeit with judgement hurled at the asker, but it doesn’t really answer the question.  By the waitress’s argument, no one should eat in her section unless they’re going to order a lot and tip big because a person doing otherwise is taking up a space that could be given to someone who will give her more money.  By that token, the answer should include that it’s not about the wine; it’s why isn’t the question asker ordering triple appetizers because if they don’t, they’re a cheapskate, too.

So her answer doesn’t really work.

The question has to do with the enormous cost range in this one menu item: alcohol.  We’re talking a few dollars difference in tip if you get the steak or the pasta dish, but there’s a huge difference in tip between the cheapest and most expensive bottle of wine.

My friend mentioned the New York Times once covered this, and I was able to find the article, but it’s a really confusing answer that involves different math applied to different situations.

So what’s your take on this?  I’m assuming that few of us ask for the $1000 bottle of wine from the New York Times article, so let’s go more with the $15 vs. $100 bottle of wine.