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

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Chalk up this story to twenty kinds of awesome: A library patron is confused because several of the books she picks up have the page number on page 7 underlined.  She asks the librarian, whose imagination runs wild to spy codes and secret messages until she discovers that the elderly patrons of the library have each chosen a symbol which will be their symbol for marking a book read.  That way, if they pick up the book again, they’ll know whether or not they’ve read it.

It’s like an offline GoodReads.  Because technically, if you know someone else’s symbol, you can also see who else has read the same book.  It’s not only a catalogue of your own read books, but it’s a way of seeing someone else’s read books.  At least, if you pick up the same book.

My symbol would be a little stick figure on the inside cover.  I’ve always wanted to get a stick figure tattooed on my ankle, and this would get that idea out of my system.

What would be your symbol?

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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.

I’m always looking for good tomato sauce recipes because we eat a lot of pasta.  After I try one, I go back to making the same one, over and over again, because it’s easy.  My sauce is ready in a half hour, and it’s fine.  But it’s lacking.

I’ve never found a pasta recipe that I like as much as this sauce my grandmother made for me one weekend when I was visiting during graduate school.

It was the best bowl of pasta and tomato sauce I’ve ever had.

I remember that she used Pomi chopped tomatoes in a carton, but then I sat down at the dining room table and I didn’t watch anything else she put in the pot.  It was the most incredible bowl of pasta I’ve ever had, and I think about it all the time.  I’ve never been able to recreate it.

Someone linked to a Marcella Hazan sauce recipe in the middle of the week, so I decided to try making it Wednesday night; just another sauce in a long line of sauces that would probably be fine, but I’d go back to making the easy sauce afterward.  This one took so long and it had so much butter and the onion thing was plain weird.  But what the hell; I’d try it out.

And it was my grandmother’s sauce.

This sauce is the sauce that has been inside my brain for 20 years, the sauce I’ve always kicked myself for not nailing down the recipe with her before she died.  I got to eat my grandmother’s sauce again.  And it had so much butter in it.  Like so. much. butter.

I got to taste it again on the sort of week when I miss her a lot because I can’t buy a Mother’s Day card for her anymore.  But I got to call my mother and tell her that I found it; I found THE sauce.

I like to think that maybe my Internet-unsavvy grandmother somehow guided the universe into dropping the recipe onto my screen right when I needed it.  Thank you, Grandma.  I’m not going to make it too often because did I mention the butter?  But it’s going to be the recipe I pull out when I need to feel close.

Mother’s Day is a hard day for so many people, whether due to infertility or loss or death.  If you want a good comfort dish, this is it.  Or leave your own favourite comfort dish recipe below so someone else can grab it.

I have had Childish Gambino’s “This is America” stuck in my head on a continual loop for days.  I wake up hearing his voice in my head.  Then I move through my day, muttering an approximation of the lyrics.  (Like Josh, I thought he was saying, “underpants, underpants, underpants.”)  I think about the song as I drive and as I cook and as I clean out Linus’s cage.

It has been a long time since a song has gotten under my skin like that.

That song is taking up all the space normally held by my mental calendar.  That continuous conversation my brain has with me about everything that needs to get done each day.  I somehow conflated Mother’s Day with the royal wedding, believing they both were occurring this weekend, and that I had to make scones immediately so we’d be ready for breakfast while we watch.

Clearly I have a little more time than I thought.

A warning if you haven’t seen the video: it’s violent.  I wish I had been given that warning before I saw it, so I’m passing it along to you.

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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:

• “Flipping The Script: Solidarity, not Pressure” (Inconceivable!)
• “Aunt Mila” (The Next 15000 Days)
• “Tell the Story” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Jess!
• “The Curious Misunderstanding About Grief” (Searching for Our Silver Lining)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Searching for Our Silver Lining has a post about how things look from the outside on International Bereaved Mother’s Day.  I love this: “Because though from the outside we look like a normal mother-daughter pair, our story is more than that.”  It’s the definition of bittersweet; a beautiful post about honouring loss and cherishing the child who is here.

No Kidding in NZ has a post about Mother’s Day and honouring where you are vs. being nudged into someone else’s idea of how you should spend the day.  She calls it “the day that reminds us without mercy that we didn’t become the mothers we had wanted to be.”  It is also her husband’s birthday, so it is a careful dance of being with her mother-in-law and celebrating her husband’s birthday and taking time for herself, too.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled has published a mammoth post on social capital and making friends and loneliness, topics that I find extremely interesting.  There is also the infertility angle; how does infertility and loss affect your friendships?  She writes, “Nevermind the mommy train — many of the friends that I have managed to make here over the past 30-35 years almost literally boarded a train — they moved and left me behind, which was a new (and unpleasant) experience for me.”  Jump into the conversation happening in the comment section, too.

The roundup to the Roundup: “This is America” is stuck in my head.  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 4th and 11th) 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.

This is what I’ve been thinking about.

Resting isn’t doing nothing.  Resting is work.  Have you ever tried to meditate?  Then you know how difficult it is to not think.  Have you ever struggled to fall asleep?  Then you know how hard it can be to relax and let go.  Resting is a skill, and some people don’t have it.

That’s because resting is personal.  What relaxes or recharges me might not be what relaxes or recharges you.  And there’s little guidance out there to help people find what helps them to unwind.  There’s no What Colour is Your Parachute for relaxation.  (Or is there?  I couldn’t find one.)

Finding what help you unwind is as difficult as finding a career you love.  Because career love doesn’t happen for everyone.  Some people love their career and other people do their job.  Both situations earn you a paycheck, but one route is a lot more fulfilling.

The same thing happens with relaxation.  Some people have a clear relaxation plan; activities that allow them to recharge and give them the fuel to power through work time.  And other people circle the standards — the things we’re told are relaxing such as going to a spa or the beach or watching television — waiting for the relaxation we’re promised to come.  And when it doesn’t happen, or it’s short-lived, we point at external reasons — such as a vacation not being long enough — rather than look at whether the activity itself was a poor fit or not explored in full.

What recharges you?

I’ve been thinking about this because I reconnected with an old friend and he told me about his work situation: a few hours of intense, daily work followed by hours to pursue his own interests.  It’s easier to figure out what recharges you when you have the time to figure it out.

Then a week or two ago, the Washington Post had an opinion piece on how we’ve lost sight of the importance of rest, elevating the narrative of hard work and turning work into a mirror for burnout.  The title says it all: “America is obsessed with the virtue of work. What about the virtue of rest?”

What about the virtue of rest?

And do you actually have a game plan, a relaxation career?  Or are you doing what you think might relax you without a clear plan in place?

It seems like a good time to put this in writing.  Josh is my best friend.  I have other close friends, but Josh is my best friend.  I tell him everything, more than he ever wanted to know. (Especially more than he ever wanted to know beginning around 11 o’clock at night when his eyes are fluttering towards sleep and I have a burning need to tell him all. of. my. feelings.  All of them.  Every last one.)

I recently read that “individuals who consider their spouse to be their best friend are more satisfied with their lives overall.  Twice as satisfied, as it turns out.”

[Big sigh of relief.  I was nervous about what the one view would be when I clicked over to read.  What if it said individuals who consider their spouse an attentive listener when they’re trying to fall asleep are happier?  Because we fail in that department.  I constantly have to say, “Josh?  Josh?  Are you listening to all of my feelings?”]

The New York Times had a beautiful infertility essay recently, written by a woman ten years after cancer that ended with this thought: “Nobody tells you how long marriage is. When you fall in love, when you have fun with somebody, when you enjoy the way they see the world, nobody ever says, ‘This person will change. And so you will be married to two, three, four, five or 10 people throughout the course of your life, as you live out your vows’.”

Josh and I aren’t the same people we were when we first said our vows, almost seventeen years ago.  But he’s still my best friend.  And he tells me I’m his, except between the hours of 11 pm and 6 am when he’s trying to sleep and I have so many feelings.