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

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Josh and I both have ongoing mixtapes on our phones where we capture new songs we like or old songs we remember. We mostly listen to his mix, but every once in a while, we play mine instead.

I’ve been adding to the list for years, and my current list (because I had one before this that reached 2.5 hours of music before I started over) ran almost 12 hours. 12 hours!

I cleaned it up this weekend, moving all of the songs I normally skipped over to a new “things I used to like” list. I didn’t want to forget them entirely, but I wanted to bring the list down to things I would be happy to hear. It ended up at a trim 8.5 hours of music.

It feels wrong to delete songs off a mixtape. I never did that in the past; they were a time capsule of what interested me at the moment. But the current list feels better. I may even cut it back a little more.

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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.

I got super into Yoga Nidra when the kids were little. I remember it because I convinced the ChickieNob’s girl scout troop that it would be an excellent idea to Yoga Nidra session together as part of some health and wellness badge, and the girls shrieked with laughter through the whole thing because the person’s voice on my app did sort of sound like an animated corpse.

I stopped doing it soon after, and then saw it mentioned in an article recently, rebranded as a 20-minute no sleep deep rest or NSDR. If you go on YouTube, you can find hundreds of videos for this.

I don’t know where I would fit it in — I don’t really have the sort of day that lends itself to a 20-minute naplike session — but I’m curious about the idea of resting and recharging without sleeping.

ChickieNob and I found someone promising, and we lay down on the living room floor to take our 20-minute sleepless nap. Except YouTube kept interrupting the video with ads, and we’d startled and shriek every time it happened. So not successful so far, but we’ll keep trying.

I have a new pair of glasses coming in the mail soon. It’s a weird idea to get glasses delivered instead of returning to the store, but they told me that it would be faster to do it that way, and they are the experts in their own product.

The more I think about it, the more I don’t know how I feel about it. I’m accustomed to the person handing over the glasses, looking at them on my face, adjusting them, making sure they fit properly. And now it’s all down to me; me and my complete lack of knowledge about how I should judge fit. It’s a brave new world.

I chose something completely different from the frames I’ve been wearing for many many many years. I don’t know if that was a mistake, or if I’m cultivating Melissa 2.0. Too soon to know.

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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:

• “A Simple Life” (Infertile Phoenix)
• “The Dreaded Box” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Jess and Mali!

Okay, now my choices this week.

All & Sundry gives a life update. She is in the middle of a divorce, so it is a time of endings and beginnings. It’s hard to be in this space, but she points out another truth: “I feel certain it will continue to be raw and fluctuating for a good long while and maybe forever in some ways but eventually everything will start to heal and even out and we will both be in much better places.” And I may just take her words as a new motto: “It’s time to be strong, and it’s going to be okay.” It will.

Lastly, Scientist on the Roof gives an update on Helsinki, but it made me think about all of the things you love and don’t love about traveling. Sometimes you don’t realize the things you feel neutral about at home until you realize, “Oh, this is what it is like to not have or to have this thing.” She writes: “I am not sure how to feel about people being very direct in letting you know you were doing something wrong. I thought I missed that… But it sometimes made me feel defensive.” I think it would make me feel defensive, too.

The roundup to the Roundup: New glasses… in the mail. 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 1 – 8) 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 joined a writing group. Once a day, we get on Zoom, chat for ten minutes (sometimes about our projects, usually about something off-topic), then silence our microphones and turn off our videos, and write. Someone is the time keeper, and when their alarm goes off, they turn back on their microphone and video and tell us to return. We chat for five more minutes, and then hop off the Zoom.

I write about one to two pages each time.

I didn’t think I would enjoy it or stick with it as long as I have. I’m a solitary person; I like working alone and in silence.

But there is something about knowing that everyone else is a microphone click away that makes me focus and stick with the task. I won’t lie and say I never go down a rabbit hole of Googling elementary school classmates to see where they ended up (favourite time waster), but I do it less knowing that I’m going to have to get back on at the end and admit how much I accomplished.

I didn’t realize how much I wanted to be average until I started answering the 95 questions (side note: you don’t have to answer all of them to enjoy the experience) and wanted to see myself on what I silently deemed “the correct side.”

The results will change (I’m assuming) over time as more people answer, though they only show the results for questions that have over 500 answers. And if you look above the answer, you can see that most questions have around 44,000 answers.

I’m not sure how it performs on a mobile device — I took the quiz on a laptop — but it’s a very pretty interface, and it’s interesting to see how other people answered.

Anything surprise you when you saw the answers?