Josh got me a real, live, immortal quokka* for my 44th birthday.  Technically, he needs to keep living his immortal life in western Australia, but he’s totally mine.  And I’m his.  And his name is Akiva.

But I call him “Keevs” for short.

We got him from the World Wildlife Fund.  Apparently they believe this is just a monetary donation and they’ve given Josh a certificate in return.  BUT NOPE.  He is totally mine.  I have his picture up on the refrigerator, and I’ve been filling in his back story; how he spends his days and the fun we’ll have together when I finally get to Rottnest Island so I can watch him frolicking with his quokka friends.

So Akiva will live forever in Rottnest Island, and I will bore the family forever with imagined tales of Avika’s hijinks.

I LOVE MY QUOKKA.

This is the best birthday ever.  Happy birthday to meeeeeeeeee.  (And Akiva, who is an extension of my heart.  I love my quokka so much.)

* World Wildlife Fund said they couldn’t put status of his immortality on the certificate itself, but they let Josh add it to the message so I have it formally in writing because I hate the idea of being given something that will die.  My quokka will never die.

One of my books is on sale for the first two weeks of June on all platforms, and it’s for the best reason EVER.  (Okay, maybe not ever, but it’s a really cool reason.)  Apart at the Seams is on sale for $1.99 from June 1st to June 15th because June 13th is National Sewing Machine Day.  There is a whole day on the calendar to celebrate sewing machines.  We live in an amazing world.

So head over to your favourite place to get books and pick up Apart at the Seams for two dollars.  Technically under two dollars.  You can’t even get a spool of thread for that price.

Please help me spread word.

And the twins’ book was chosen by Amazon to be one of their Summer Toy List picks!  They get a super neat badge above the book name.

Hello Scratch! is on their STEM in the Summer list.  Amazon’s explanation:

STEM toys go beyond the classroom and after the school year to educate and excite kids of all ages. STEM toys encourage kids to learn and develop skills in the core disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The 2018 Summer Toy List captures the best STEM toys which have clear goals and encourage kids to learn and continue developing STEM skills while having fun during the summer. Keep your kids learning this summer by using the Amazon 2018 Summer Toy List where you can explore hundreds of this year’s top STEM toys.

I am so freakin’ proud of them.  Their book rocks AND teaches basic computer science concepts AND how to make retro video games.  And they indulge me in my Yahtzee obsession.  They really are cool kids.

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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:

• CIO Citizen, which is the awesome Facebook project of an ALI blogger
• “MicroblogMondays: Santa Cruz” (Searching for Our Silver Lining)
• “Gifts of Infertility Series #25 – A Reminder of What is Important” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Constant in the Darkness has a post about how infertility colours our experience.  She sees a child wearing a t-shirt that reads: Bio Kid.  Guess where her mind (and my mind!) went…

The Road Less Travelled has a hard post about what is always a hard time of year.  20 years ago this month, she was happily pregnant with Katie.  20 years later, she is delaying travel plans to care for her ill father-in-law.  She writes, “On the bright (?) side — I was fretting that by taking vacation in early August, we would not be here for Katie’s milestone 20th ‘anniversary’ dates. Be careful what you wish for, right?” Sending a lot of love.

Lastly, My Path to Mommyhood has a post about what it means to look forward when you know you need to honour and remember what came before.  She explains, “Immerse is the key word — you can visit, you can reflect, but you can’t be a functioning, forward-thinking, forward-planning person if you are forever immersed in the events of your past.”  It’s a beautiful post about getting to a place where you can “celebrate the life you have and not the one you were denied for inexplicable reasons.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Apart at the Seams is on sale AND the twins’ book, Hello Scratch, is being featured by Amazon.  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 May 25th and June 1st) 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.

An art exhibit opened downtime a month or two ago featuring the art of Burning Man.  I don’t have a lot of interest in Burning Man itself, but I am very interested in seeing Candy Chang’s piece called “Before I Die,” which is part of the exhibit.

The piece came out of a time in life when she was grappling with a loved one’s death:

She wanted to start a conversation, so she covered a crumbling house in her neighborhood in New Orleans with chalkboard paint and stenciled it with the prompt, “Before I die I want to _____,” so anyone walking by could pick up a piece of chalk, reflect on death and life, and share their personal aspirations in public.

Answering the question really becomes talking about life.  What you want to do while you’re here on this planet.  And the best part is that there are no wrong answers.  Well… I mean… I guess if you said you aspire to pollute all the oceans before you die, people might feel that answer crosses the line.  BUT almost everything else.

There are now 4000 Before I Die walls around the world, and you can click over to see pictures of the original one in New Orleans.

Before I die, I want to see how the twins turn out as adults.  I want to visit the Faroe Islands.  I want to give a TED Talk.  I want to hold a puffin.  (And I want the puffin to want to be held so it cuddles into the crook of my arm.)  I want to take a class with Josh.  I want someone to tell me that I’ve always reminded them of the title character from “Really Rosie.”

What do you want to do while you’re alive?

I bookmark articles about ghost towns.  I love abandoned houses and empty storefronts.  My goal this summer is to get to Mockhorn Island.

I don’t know why I’m not equally drawn to untouched spaces; to open land and rolling fields without houses.  I don’t know why I’m drawn to emptiness and decay.  All I know is that when we’re passing a house with the roof caving in and a condemned sign on the door, I sometimes hear the kids sigh in the backseat and say something about how we’ll have to pull over.

“Mum loves things that are falling apart.”

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There was an article last week about how Snapchat has become a ghost town, and that emptiness is a welcome change to the faster pace of the rest of the Internet.  The article is an ode to an Internet ghost towns.

But the article begins with a description of the early days of blogging and social media:

It’s difficult to believe now, but there was a time when the internet was nowhere instead of everywhere. Before the social internet had mapped so completely onto our social lives that attempting to separate the two or call life away from the internet “real” became a ridiculous endeavor, online was where we went to escape, to be unseen, to be nowhere.

And THAT is the Internet in my memory.  I remember how carefully I used to hide my blog from people in my face-to-face world, and how exposed I felt when one informed me she was reading it.  I remember how we used pseudonyms — there are still old bloggers that I only know by their online handle.

In 2006, I knew about and read a handful of blogs.  After a few months, that number grew into the hundreds and the sound from all those stories was a happy buzz.  It was exciting.  We were a large, close-knit corner of the Internet.  We knew each other’s spaces, and could talk about one another easily.  Everyone at least knew of everyone else’s blog, and chances were that they read it, too.

And then the blogging scene exploded and suddenly the community was enormous.  New blogs came and went.  I started finding that people would refer to other bloggers and I had zero clue who they were.  My face-to-face friends joined social media sites, and the wall came down between the online world and the offline world.

And now the blogging world is quieting down.  It has been quieting down for a long time, though I don’t believe it will ever entirely disappear.  In a few weeks, I will celebrate my 12th year of blogging.  About a quarter of my life has been spent writing this site.

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Before something is built, it’s just a blank slate.  And after something is gone, we describe the loneliness of that emptiness.  The article has a continuous graphic of tumbleweeds.

Which is strange because I read about the same number of ALI bloggers that I did in 2006 or 2007, back when I knew hundreds (as opposed to thousands or tens of thousands) of bloggers.  Back then, the space sounded so loud.  Now it sounds so quiet.  But it’s the same number of people, give or take.

When something is starting out, we focus on what could be.

When something is quieting down, we focus on what isn’t there.

But I welcome the tumbleweeds.  Noting they exist means that we’re still here.

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

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We ran to the beach this weekend to celebrate my birthday early, so I grabbed a new book to read on the sand.  I picked up the book — The Last Policeman — because the cover looked interesting and immediately got sucked into the writing style and plotline.  It’s a trilogy, which made it even more appealing — there were two more books after this one that I knew would be enjoyable, too.

I started reading and realized that it was set in New England.  I used to live in New England, so I flipped to the acknowledgements page to see if we knew anyone in common.  I saw that he thanked an old friend from high school — someone I knew from Maryland, not Massachusetts.  Then I flipped to the front of the book and saw that he had dedicated it to the same friend.  Some quick Googling and I discovered that the author was my old friend’s brother!

So one book not only provided me with hours of entertainment at the beach, but it connected me to my old friend via Facebook.  See; books really do bring people together.

Have you ever made a connection to another person over a book?

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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.