I am aware that (1) a beach in the backyard is probably against the homeowner association’s rules, (2) would attract mosquitoes and not sea gulls, (3) would not look like the pictures after about an hour, (4) would require a lot of upkeep, (5) would probably destroy the lawn…

…but I want one.  I want a backyard beach.

I bookmarked this article in USA Today, and keep returning to look at the crystal blue water and white sand.  You can see larger images if you search for the construction company and swimming ponds.

They have filtration systems like a pool, but they look like a beach.  Like your own, private beach.  Like you’re Edward Cullen with his Isle Esme except that your Isle Esme is in an American suburb and not Rio de Janeiro.

I love the ocean.  I’m less of a fan of ponds, lakes, or rivers — and I’m aware this is closer to a pond than Chincoteague — but I love the idea of being able to access something that resembles a beach in my backyard.

I think Josh is going to nix this idea.

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

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Pascal said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”  All?  I’d probably argue over the word “all” since it makes a lot of assumptions about humanity’s capacity to create or solve problems.  But it is a value skill: to sit alone with your thoughts and no other distractions.

I am pretty good with this even if I struggle with meditation.  I can sit quietly with my thoughts easier than I can clear my mind of thoughts.

Like I can sit in silence on a bus for hours and stare out the window.  Or in a room; I’m good in a room with complete silence and a good wall to stare at.  No one taught me how to do this; it just naturally occurred.  I remember driving cross-country as a child and staring out the car window for days on end without a need for a Walkman or book.

And the twins are pretty good with this, too — especially the ChickieNob.  I didn’t teach them; they just started doing it.  But as I move through all of these attention-building or bettering exercises this year, I keep wondering if this is something that can be taught.  That should be taught.  Should we teach people how to sit silently without distraction for long periods of time?

Are you good at being alone with your thoughts and no distractions?

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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.

So I realized something interesting lately.  Sometimes when you know an actor off-stage/off-screen, it can be very difficult to watch them perform because you can see the performance.  Do you know what I mean?  If I don’t know an actor at all, I have no clue what is their personality and what is the character; it all feels seamless.  But if I know them, I can see how they’re acting as if they’re angry or acting as if they’re sad.  Does this make sense — have you experienced this?  Anyway, what this means is that I don’t really love meeting actors or knowing too much about them because I like to keep the illusion that they are the character.

The opposite is true when it comes to books.  I seek out books by people I know.  I am ten times more likely to give a new author a chance if the book was written by a friend, a friend of a friend, or a former classmate.  Even though I can see how they differ from their narrator (or, the opposite: how they’re the same), it doesn’t bother me.  It’s the opposite of the actor; I marvel at how they can construct a character so unlike themselves.

If I don’t know the author at all, once I’m a few pages into the book and I’ve absorbed the characters’ voices, I flip to the thank you page to see whom we know in common.  I sometimes look up the author online if I don’t know them personally to glean where they went to school or where they’re living now.  Gathering a mental picture of the author makes me like the book more.  Or… I guess sometimes less.  But usually more.

Is it just me?  Do you like to know actors off-stage/screen and then see them perform?  Do you like to know authors off-page when you read their books?

I clean when I’m anxious.  Everyone knows that when you’re losing your mind about global warming, the next best thing to fixing that situation is having a neat desk.

I spent one night this week removing books from my MTBR list.  That’s my Maybe To Be Read list.  All books that end up TBR (to actually be read) pass through this list.  It’s like the Ellis Island for books.  I hear about a book I want to read, I download the sample from iBooks, and then I read the sample and if it’s good enough, I buy the book (or reserve it at the library) and it goes on the TBR list.

I ended up removing over 120 books from the list because iBooks had become so cluttered that I couldn’t easily find the full books among the book samples.  I wrote the removed titles in my bullet journal because these books had been in a limbo state between getting approved and getting purchased, but I doubt I’ll ever return to them.

I left about 16 samples on the list to either purchase or check out from the library.  A much more manageable amount.

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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:

• “A Different Mindset” (Inconceivable!)
• “Stolen Bases” (NotMyLinesYet)
• “Recital” (Once a Family of Four)
• “Prayers for Charlotte” (Carolina Charm)
• “Tired (Literally) of Sharing My Story” (Infertile Phoenix)

Okay, now my choices this week.

This week marked 20 years since The Road Less Travelled’s daughter, Katie, died.  She writes, “I wish things were different. I wish she was here. She’d be all grown up now, a young adult, likely at university, maybe with a boyfriend. (I was 20 when I first met her father, after all…) I wonder what she’d look like, and who she’d look like, and how she’d be like me and how she’d be like her dad.”  It is an aching post of what ifs and memories and thank yous.

Jewish IVF writes on the eve of her next IVF cycle.  The first cycle is hard because you don’t know what to expect.  But the 8th IVF cycle is hard because you do know what to expect.  She writes, “It hit me like a ton of bricks last night and now I’m terrified of another failure. The thought that we did all that we did to get to this point, and made all those changes in hopes for a better outcome, only to be dealt the same story is terrifying.”  Sending so many good thoughts for this cycle.

Lastly, By the Brooke has a post about Harry Potter that made my heart hurt (in a good way because it also made my brain think).  She explains: “It was a tragedy, to be certain, but it was one that made narrative sense. This was the way things worked. No one was writing a story about a wizard baby who died and how his parents had to limp along and figure out how and why to go on living without him.”  Wow.  What would the series be like if it was his mother avenging her son’s death?  His father grieving his son?  And maybe a bookend to Lori’s post above: “So I mourned Harry Potter and the lost opportunity to share those books–and every book I’d loved–with my daughter.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Cleaned up the Maybe To Be Read list.  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 3rd and 10th) 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.

The Washington Post set this fact in front of the reader without comment: it is reaching 90 degrees in the Arctic Circle.  I saw it a few weeks ago and have seen the news repeated in various places.  It’s not new news; scientists have been pointing out that it’s warmer in the winter, warmer in the summer.  Scientists are not surprised, though I keep getting stunned every time I encounter this fact.

There is talk about difficult-to-live-in spaces becoming unlivable.  Of temperatures becoming too hot for humans.  If it’s 90 degrees in the Arctic Circle, what hope do traditionally hot areas of the world have?

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As we were riding through Glencoe in Scotland, our driver commented that Scotland has the most freshwater in the world.  This statement turned out to be wrong, but I mentally went with it at the time because he continued unpacking the idea.  “The end of the world is going to be a fight for drinkable water.  And when that happens, Scotland is going to need to protect itself because we have a lot of water.  Scotland is going to be one of the last ones standing at the end of the world because we have so much water.”

I instantly started panicking because I’m reading a dystopian mystery trilogy and that is exactly what happens at the end of the world: people are murdering each other for drinking water.  I started Googling things like, “How difficult is it to move to Scotland” from my bus seat.

It turns out that the UK as a whole is 54th in terms of drinking water.  I’d be better off heading to Brazil (#1) or simply staying home in the US (#3).  Though what does any of that even mean if the world is ending?

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The world is not ending.

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Except it feels tenuous.  It feels politically tenuous and environmentally tenuous.  It feels like it’s so large that you can’t see where anything begins or ends.  I feel like I need to spend some time today just staring at the ceiling and not thinking.