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

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I had a 35 day streak going on Smiling Mind, and I missed one day because I kept putting off meditating.  I am beyond pissed with myself because I really liked the counter in the dashboard listing a nice, high number.  And now it says 10.

I decided that I had to meditate at a set point every day or this could possibly happen again.  No more wherever-I-can-squeeze-it-in.  So I’ve now made it my pre-work ritual.  On weekends, it’s my pre-first-activity-of-the-day ritual.  If we’re in a hurry, I do the shortest meditation, which is only a minute or so.

It all goes back to a piece of advice I read: If something will only take you two minutes, do it immediately.  If you put it off, you will spend more than two minutes remembering to do it and it will still take you two minutes to complete the task.  Meditation technically sometimes takes more than two minutes, but it could take two minutes.  So I just do it and get it over with.

And then my mind is calm because I’ve taken care of the task.  Win!

What is something you need to do that will only take you two minutes?  Go do it right now.

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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 New Yorker has an article about a Japanese service that allows you to rent missing family members.  You may use the service to replace an actual person — a wife dies and the rental wife steps into her place to pretend to be your wife for a few hours — but it can also be used when a person hasn’t entered or exited your life at all.

A rental boyfriend or girlfriend.

A rental best-friend.

A rental baby.

The article gives the reason for why the creator started the service: “A lot of problems, it seemed, were caused by some missing person, and often the simplest solution was to find a substitute.”

It’s brilliant, actually, because comfort given by an actor is still comfort.

While this is about emotional comfort and emotional connection, the service isn’t that far from other forms of caretaking: “What are babysitters, nurses, and cooks if not rental relatives, filling some of the roles traditionally performed by mothers, daughters, and wives?”  Or, I would argue humans, since, you know, people with penises can fill those roles, too.

The article points out that sometimes the fantasy family ends up being better than the real thing.  One woman says that the husband she divorced had been abusive.  The rental father-of-her-child that she got in his place makes her happy; makes her laugh.  The fake ex-husband says after she leaves: “It proves a possibility that—even if we’re not a real family, even if it’s a rental family—the way we interact with each other makes this a form of a family.”

There was a part of this that appealed to me in the same way that helping out with babies sometimes appeals to me.  During those times, I get to experience the cuddles without having to go through any injections to get there.  There is no crying, no two week wait, no expensive bills from the clinic.  Just a moment of imagination while I change a diaper, give a bottle, rock in the chair.

I don’t pay for the service, but it seems like I take it anyway.

What do you think?

I am still riding the energy of the read-a-thon.  I only managed to complete one of the books (Hello, Sunshine) because there were many pauses to muse on the state of Kate’s uterus and its inhabitant.  I moved the read-a-thon to the beach because… I mean… it’s the beach.  But the ChickieNob was very concerned that she would miss the royal birth.  We compromised by bringing my laptop on the off-chance that she delivered while we were read-a-thoning, though we didn’t need to turn it on because she delivered on Monday.

So we swam in the hotel pool and ate a lot of ice cream.  We parked the car facing the ocean and read inside with the windows cracked so the wind streamed through.  We stopped early one night and went to see A Wrinkle in Time.  We rode our bikes around the nature reserve, stopping for fifteen minutes to observe an animal that looked like a woodchuck with a long rat tail, swimming down a stream.  We played with the hotel owner’s ponies.

I was able to ride that reading energy into the week and made a dent in Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey.  (Liking it a lot so far, Jenny!).  I needed a weekend like that.  I’d like to have more weekends like that, with Josh joining us so he can do the ice cream runs.  Just the beach and books and nowhere we have to be.

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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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Manapan’s Space has a brilliant post playing off the Welcome to Holland essay to explain her child’s diagnosis.  She points out: “What nobody ever seems to reference, however, is having a child with hidden disabilities.”  Please go over and give her support.

Bereaved and Blessed marks the ten year anniversary of Molly’s birth and death by revisiting the CarePage from that time.  The site is shutting down, and it compiled her posts into a 199 page PDF.  She writes: “I’ve re-read what I shared about our journey with Molly many times over the past 10 years, but not as much as I did today in a while and not the specific comments we got on my posts from those who followed and supported us on our CarePage.  It was surreal, painful and affirming.”  It’s a must-read post about why we write; why it is so important to record life.

NotMyLinesYet has a post about her inner monologue stuck on a loop.  She explains: “Lately, I’ve realized that my inner monologue has lost its utility and become focused on loss and infertility. The words ‘7 pregnancies, 8 babies, no living children’ just keep swirling around. I’m concerned that this is becoming how I define myself.”  I love her redirection exercise for getting her mind onto other aspects of self.

Lastly, Laughing is Conceivable has a post about NIAW and this year’s theme: “flip the script,” which has long been used by the adoption community.  It’s sort of a strange theme because no one has been speaking for infertile people (more like ignoring infertile people), so there isn’t really a script to flip?  Anyway, she brilliantly points out that it’s important to have the script fit your needs.  Telling people because you need people to hear it. (Or not telling because you don’t.)

The roundup to the Roundup: Trying to hold onto the read-a-thon feelings.  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 20th and 27th) 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 are in the process of gutting the basement.  We’ve been in the process of gutting the basement for a long time.  We cull out the things we don’t need, but then we shift things from our normal living area into our storage room, and the process starts all over again.  (I know, why don’t we skip this step and just move it out of the house?  Because sometimes we don’t know that we don’t need it until some time has passed.  This is our process; we’re not going to change it.)

This time I mentioned that we should add books into the mix.  We have a lot of books.  Like half of our processions are books.  All four walls of the basement are bookcases, and all of the bookcases are filled beyond capacity.  We do not need this many books.

But I find it really hard to get rid of any.

Even when we have doubles of the same book.  (What if we both want to read Ulysses at the same time?)

There are a few that I know I will never read, or the contents will be out-dated by the time I need the subject.  There are the non-special picture books; the ones the twins liked enough when they were little, but they weren’t the ones they always grabbed for story time.  Or fiction that sounded like a great idea, but the first page never grabbed me.

What I can’t get rid of are old travel guides, even though I would never use them even if I was going back to the same place.  College books that remind me of a class.  Signed copies, even if I didn’t love the book.  Anything I may read one day.  Anything I enjoyed reading.

I don’t collect anything else.  We have almost no decorative pieces in our home.

Maybe I should just install more bookcases.

Do you get rid of books?

I finally read a piece of life-changing (or, at least, mind-changing) productivity advice: Hire your to-do list.

So the article starts out talking about how we conduct our life as if the to-do list is in charge and we are working for the to-do list, rather than recognizing that we are the boss of our time and the to-do works for us. It begins by hiring your to-do list; figuring out why you’re keeping it in the first place and how you can make it efficiently work for you as a paper employee rather than a paper task master.

But what I love is that she keeps a three-part to-do list: (1) stuff that needs to get done sometime, but it doesn’t matter when, (2) stuff that needs to get done immediately, or by the end of the day, and (3) stuff that does not need to get done. A not-to-do list, which serves as a reminder of all the tasks she rejects from her to-do list so they don’t weasel their way back on.

She explains:

This realization forces you to acknowledge there are lower priority items that you will likely never complete. Delete those non-essentials, put them on your not-to-do list, and commit to letting them go. This will prevent you from wasting precious time continually re-evaluating whether you might get to them.

It sort of feels like that advice Alton Brown gives about cleaning out the kitchen drawers. Put everything in a box. If you use the utensil, wash it and put it back in a drawer. Everything still in the box in six months are things you don’t need.

Things that languish on a to-do list are probably things that could have gone straight onto the not-to-do list, never to be thought about again.

Nerding out on this one.