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.

The one thing I forgot to add last week; we went to IKEA immediately following the royal wedding.  After getting no sleep the night before and watching six hours of television before 10 am, we got in the car and drove to Swedish Overstimulationland.

We were going for a sofa for the teen room.  The old sofa had been hauled away, leaving us sofa-less, and we decided to purchase a sofa bed to accommodate overnight guests.

Do you know what it is like to try to make decisions on no sleep?  I ended up with an Ändlig knife set for $6.99.  What do knives have to do with sofas?  I don’t know, but they ended up in my bag because they seemed like a great idea at the time.

We ordered a beautiful grey sofa, and they delivered it mid-week.  We paid to have contractors set it up for us.  Best $30 we’ve ever spent.  They were finished in minutes and the whole thing feels solid.

The teen room is finally coming together.  We still need to spend tomorrow cleaning out a few more things, but by nightfall, the teen room will be totally teen-i-fied.  We’ll hang out down there watching movies, and I won’t think about all the baby toys that once filled the space.

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I have read every Listserve email.  Okay, maybe I skimmed a few, but I opened every single one, and I’ve been on since the first day.  (I also wrote about it over on BlogHer before it officially began.)

I’ve known the Listserve writer three times — though each time it was a surprise when I opened the email and realized who was speaking.  We also made a huge family decision about the twins’ education based on a Listserve letter, and it was so emotional for us that I became friends with the writer of that letter on Facebook.

In other words, The Listserve was a happy moment in my day.  (Or a challenging moment or a thought-provoking moment or an eye-rolling moment.)  And now it’s over.  The owners sent out a note this week that The Listserve was coming to an end.

I am relieved that I was never chosen because I didn’t want to write a letter.  Choosing your topic is daunting when you have a lot of things you’d like to say.  Actually, choosing the topic wasn’t difficult, but I didn’t know how I would write about my topic.  And now I won’t ever need to write the note.

So my topic would have been the letters IF and how they’ve popped up with different meaning at points in my life; from infertility to interactive fiction to what if.  So that’s the letter I’ll never write.

My brother wrote a book called Little Disasters, and it’s kinda sorta a big deal.  As in every major publication has reviewed it. (In case you were wondering, it’s very trippy seeing your brother in the Washington Post.)  We’re going to visit copies of it at the bookstore this weekend, and if you are so inclined, you too can visit copies at your local bookstore and purchase it.  Or order it online.

I am insanely proud of him.

[Yes, we are a literary family.  Yes, we are trying to convince my sister to write a book, too.  Yes, our goal is to take over one complete bookshelf.]

My book review comes with a warning; there is baby loss in the book.  You will ache for the couple who loses their child at birth.  If you’re in a vulnerable space, bookmark this and return to his book when you can read it.  If you’re not currently in a vulnerable space, this book is a page turner.  Bring it to the beach or the pool this summer.  I love it.  I love the person who wrote it, but I really love this book.  It’s an incredible accomplishment.

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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:

• “#Microblog Mondays: My Un-Mother’s Day” (My Pathway to Mommyhood)
• “There’s So Far to Go” (An Engineer Becomes a Mom)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Dubliner in Deutschland has a post about the reality of parenthood.  I love the title: “You Don’t Have to Love Every Second.”  It comes from a familiar idea: “…The fact that her daughter was such a miracle, she would feel a lot of pressure to enjoy every moment even the hard ones.”  It’s a pressure a lot of people put on themselves after infertility.  It’s a reassuring post that growth moves in spurts and the hard days are often replaced by easier ones.

Northern Star is back!  Constant in the Darkness has an update about her three year adoption wait.  They had such a positive experience with their first child’s adoption that they thought they’d have a similar wait for their second child.  She writes, “It was crushing. It was hard on our marriage. It was hard on my heart.”  It is about life throwing you curve balls, and how some knock you down and others you catch in amazement.

Lastly, My Path to Mommyhood has a post that outlines the difference between the words childLESS and childFREE.  I love this thought after a wonderful albeit stressful trip: “I could recover without needing to split my energy.”  Not a small thing.  And this: “And now I can give so much more to you guys, to my wonderful students who I love and embarrass and laugh with as if they are my own.”  Beautiful.

The roundup to the Roundup: My brother wrote a book.  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 18th and 25th) 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.

Josh and I finished cleaning off the bookcases, and now all the books (for the most part) fit.  We went with a gut approach when making decisions; this book made us happy so it stayed, this book was sort of boring so it went.

There were books we tossed because we no longer liked the authors, either because we moved in the same circles and the person wasn’t particularly kind or they had said something rude.  They weren’t terrible people and these weren’t terrible books.  But there was something yucky about the author, and it didn’t feel like we needed to give them space on our overly packed shelves.

BUT.

There was the guy who was a total dick to me, who has a reputation for being a douche overall, AND has a writing style I can’t stand… but we kept his book.  Josh wanted to toss it, but I moved it back onto the shelf.  I don’t know why.  It just felt like I couldn’t toss it because maybe the twins would want to read it in the future.  So we kept it.

There were the authors that we culled because they had been named in the #MeToo movement.  Who wants to keep someone on their bookcase who sexually harassed women?  Or sexually assaulted someone?  Or held people back from career advancement unless they’d have sex?

BUT.

There was the guy Josh kept.  He couldn’t explain why this one guy was allowed to stay while we had confidently tossed out the rest.  But there he is, still on our bookcase.

Our bookcases are not clean.  For the love, we even kept Knut Hamsun.  But I won’t bring Orson Scott Card into my house.

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The moment the shelves had a little breathing room, we went to the bookstore.  I’ve been wanting to read Agatha Christie, though I’ve never been able to bring myself to buy one of her books when I know that there’s a smörgåsbord of hate nuggets scattered in the pages.  For instance, here’s part of the opening for And Then There Were None (plus let’s not forget the original title of that book!):

He had said it in a casual way as though a hundred guineas was nothing to him. A hundred guineas when he was literally down to his last square meal! He had fancied, though, that the little Jew had not been deceived – that was the damnable part about Jews, you couldn’t deceive them about money – they knew!

How can I in good conscience give money to Christie’s estate?  How can I support her words?  Even checking her out of the library and leaving money out of this is paying her with attention.  I wouldn’t give energy to someone in the face-to-face world who used the racial slurs or anti-Semitic statements.  And yet there I was, thumbing through Murder on the Orient Express.

I’ve been mulling over the exceptions; the ones who slip through because we let them slip through.

This will be the most interesting question you read this week.  (I know, a big promise, but I’ll deliver if you get through the background information.)

A person has a device implanted that helps regulate his mood through electrical stimulation.  In order to calibrate the voltage level, the doctors have to test out different amounts of electricity, watching to see how the person’s happiness levels improve and anxiety diminishes.  The doctors get the person to the point where the person reports that they are at a 10 for happiness but a zero for anxiety.  At that point, the doctors dial back the voltage to leave room for healthy mood swings.

The patient is about to leave when he asks if the doctors can bump up the voltage.  Why should he deal with levels of sadness if he doesn’t have to deal with levels of sadness?  The doctors respond that they need to set the voltage at the level they determine is a healthy level, and the patient leaves without fighting it.

BUT.

Should the patient be allowed to choose their happiness level if they’re in a situation where they can choose their happiness level?  The article points out that this is different from other medical decisions, such as choosing the calibration of a pacemaker: “Few laymen understand how to regulate heartbeat, but everyone is an expert on his or her own disposition. Why not allow patients to set their own moods to suit their own circumstances and desires?”

We’re talking about a situation that is black and white; not a medication that may or may not improve mood.  If you could set a dial and control a person’s mood, who should be in charge of setting the dial?

The patient or the doctor?

Especially in light of the fact that a person needs to report their mood and thoughts for their doctor to do their job.  Even though some data can be gained from observation and testing, mood isn’t like your pulse, which a doctor can measure.  Or you temperature or various hormones in your blood.  This is something slipperier.

See, I told you that it was interesting.  Who do you think should be in charge of the decision?