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

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I read a very old post and I loved the idea, so I’m throwing it out here.  An accomplishment box.  It’s impossible to believe that you’re not getting stuff done when you’re faced with a clear jar filled with tiny slips of paper detailing what you’ve done.

The idea is that when you feel good — when you check something big off your list or get praise at work — you write it on a slip of paper and drop it in the jar.  It’s not just helpful when you’re working on your resume down the road; it’s there when you’re having a crap day and feeling like you’re not achieving anything.  You can look in the jar and have hard-and-fast proof that it’s your mood talking and not reality.

My most recent slips would be finishing an animation for work and donating the baby stuff.

What’s going on your slip?

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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.

We are in the middle of the Great Basement Renovation.

The baby stuff is done.  Mostly.  There are probably still boxes in there underneath other boxes, but the vast majority of the baby stuff is out of the house.  The stuff we kept is going to be here for the long-haul; the most special toys that the twins wanted the ability to revisit ironically during their teen years, a few outfits that mean a lot to me, a few odds and ends to have around when people bring babies over to our house (such as toys and a clip-on high chair for dinner parties).

We’re currently in the middle of culling the bookcases and redoing the main hang-out area; putting in a new sofa and moving down a gaming system.  We’re calling it the “teen” room, and I keep clapping my hands and saying things like, “Oh, isn’t it swell?  You’ll be able to have your little friends over for punch and cookies in the teen room!”  And then the twins roll their eyes at me and return to giving away their childhood.

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This is the problem with organizing; I want it to happen faster.  I want it to be done, now.  I want the old sofa out, immediately.  I want the new sofa chosen and in-place, two seconds after the old sofa is gone.  I want the piles to magically disappear, the books instantly donated, the whole project behind us.

I will say that it has helped to tackle it backwards in order of difficulty vs. importance.  The sofa situation is so much larger and important to deal with so the room is usable.  But the baby stuff was the most difficult to part with, so it helped to have it behind us instead of looming large.

Soon we will be down to just random boxes of tchotchkes and papers, and then we’ll start tackling all the other living spaces.  It’s a little addictive getting rid of stuff.  I’m not going lie; as much as I dreaded giving away even one book at first, after I broke the seal and dropped the first few in the bin, I became obsessed with tossing everything.  And after I saw the neat shelves, I started thinking about everything else in the house that I wanted gone.

It’s about gaining breathing space.

An indoor sky diving place (like this one) is being built nearby, and I am obsessively going back and forth between “I must do this” and “I cannot do this.”  On the must-do-this side: it is safer that real sky diving and it’s over in one minute if I hate it.  On the cannot-do-this side: fear of the sensation of falling.  I need to talk Josh into doing it first and then have him walk me through how everything feels.  And then dither about it for a bit longer.  And then finally work myself up into an anxious lather.  And then finally do it but only enjoy the last ten seconds because I spend the first 50 freaked out.

You know, just be me.

Would you do it?  Indoor sky diving?

Um… have you done it?  What is it like?  And do you like roller coasters and such?

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May the Fourth be with you.

(I had to say it.)

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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:

• “NIAW: Don’t Stay Stuck” (Capturing Jewels)
• “You Won’t Always Be Sad” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

My Path to Mommyhood has a post musing on that distant day in the future when they’ll finally be done telling people about ending their family building efforts.  Oh my G-d, I love this so much: “It’s a tough balancing act, conveying the enormity of what we lost along with how incredibly happy we are to be living our life, free of the tetanus-rusted chains of uncertainty.”  And this: “It would be lovely if we were done. If future conversations could center on who we are NOW, rather than the roles we’d hoped to have but failed to acquire, every single time.”  Read this whole post.  Now.

Inexplicably Missing has a post about finally getting an appointment — 9 months in the waiting — with a particular RE, and finding out that the RE is currently out for a hurt foot.  The clinic was going to put them with someone else in the practice, but this is it, a final round of IVF.  Does she wait and see the person she wanted to see, or does she go with someone different, knowing that she may or may not have “what ifs” in the future?  This is the stress of infertility you don’t hear about; the big weight of every decision.

In Quest of a Binky Moongee has a post marveling at how different life has turned out.  It is their anniversary, and she reflects on her marriage, stating: “After all the struggles with Bob’s parents and building a family, it is nothing short of a miracle that we have both my in-laws and our babies sleeping under the same roof.”  Here’s to being on the other side of struggles and the next seven years.

CountingPinkLines has a great analogy post comparing the stress of infertility and the stress of pregnancy to the stress of a PhD program and the stress of medical school.  It actually makes perfect sense if you go over and read the post, and I had never thought about it that way.

Lastly, More Than Riley’s Mama has a post about telling people about infertility… and hearing crickets.  We can’t just ask people to talk about infertility or loss; we need to do a better job at asking people to be better receivers of information.

The roundup to the Roundup: To try or not to try indoor sky diving.  It’s Star Wars Day!  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 April 27th and May 4th) 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.

David Brooks had a column on social wealth, and I’ve been trying to write about it for days.  The gist is that while we speak somewhat (not enough) about monetary poverty, we rarely discuss whether people have social capital:

I summarize all this because loneliness and social isolation are the problem that undergird many of our other problems. More and more Americans are socially poor. And yet it is very hard for the socially wealthy to even see this fact. It is the very nature of loneliness and social isolation to be invisible. We talk as if the lonely don’t exist.

Talking about social wealth, it turns out, is just as squirmy as talking about monetary wealth.  I mean, there are clearly people who talk about their monetary wealth, but I feel pretty squirmy when they do.  I can guesstimate someone’s salary based on the nature of their position, but there’s something very different from assuming someone earns $80,000 per year and having someone concretely tell you, “Hey, did you know my salary is $80,000 per year?  And I spend it on X, Y, and Z.”

It feels equally weird to consider — aloud — your social wealth.  Inside your brain, sure.  But admitting whether or not you’re socially wealthy?  It turns out that it’s a hard thing to say aloud without sounding like you’re bragging or overstating.

And then the flip side is that unlike your salary, which is likely unlisted unless you hold a certain position, your social connections are numerically there for everyone else to see.  At the very least, we can see follower counts and friend counts.  We can see who has hundreds of career connections on LinkedIn, and who hasn’t organized their connections in those public spaces.

I don’t agree with many of Brooks’ assertions — I actually think that heavy internet users are just as likely to be socially rich offline and their online behaviour is a mirror of how they move through the brick-and-mortar world — though I did agree with this:

Such big subjects didn’t come up in the Zuckerberg hearings because socially wealthy and socially poor people experience Facebook differently and perceive reality and social problems differently.

His point: people in public office by default tend to meet and know a lot of people due to their position.  They are socially rich.  They are there representing people who may be socially poor, but they have no clue how the other side processes the social site.

Unlike Brooks, I don’t think the problem is just online.  I think the problem is offline, too.  And that the socially poor have always existed and been swept under the mental rug by the socially wealthy because they cannot imagine a world where people do not have friendships, or — at the very least — connections.

Because like monetary poverty, there is also a wide range to social poverty.  You don’t have to be friend-savvy or friend-rich to have a basic network; to live above the social poverty line.  You just need to have basic connections; people you can call on to help you out or give support.  Your friends, family, community, coworkers; they’re all part of that network; and it exists offline just as much as it exists online.  But Brooks is distinguishing between those who live near the social poverty line and the social 1%.  That wide discrepancy between those who move through the social world with ease, and those that struggle with connections.

I rarely agree with Brooks, and this is just one more case of that, but the topic itself — social wealth — definitely resonated with me.  It made me take a long hard look at my connections and where I fall on the social wealth continuum.

Cleaning the storage room is like picking at a scab.

No.  Not quite.  You shouldn’t pick at a scab; doing so leaves a scar.  You should clean out the storage room, gutting it of everything you don’t need anymore.  But in both cases, you bleed.

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There was a line on page 85 of The People We Hate at the Wedding: “Explore your grief until you’re one telling the story, instead of the story telling you.”  The fact that we kept so many baby items tells a story.  We thought we’d have more children.  Each item tells a story.  This is the baby mat that our imaginary baby was going to play on.  This is the stacking toy our imaginary baby was going to use to demonstrate eye-hand coordination.

Cleaning out the storage room means telling a different story.  We’re not having more kids.  We’re choosing to take control of our space and clean out the items we don’t need.  We’re the ones in charge; changing the space so it fits our needs.  This is the stuff we don’t want anymore.

But that’s the funny thing about stories: you can tell them, but that doesn’t mean you believe them.

I don’t have any need for an old stroller.

It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to have a need for an old stroller.

I wish I had someone to tuck into the stroller.

But I don’t.  So I’m telling myself a different story and gutting the storage room again.  One of these days, the last of the baby things will be gone.