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

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I have been tearing through books lately, somewhat due to our weekend read-a-thon.  It also helped that the three books I read before the read-a-thon were on the shorter side.  I didn’t love them, but it raised my self-esteem to see my “read” list growing longer, so I stuck with them.  I sometimes make bad reading decisions like that just because I feel like crap when I feel as if my “read” list is short at the end of the year.

I don’t deal well with reading pressure; even self-imposed reading pressure.

I’d like to do a reading challenge, but I don’t think it would be motivating.  I just think it would feel like work.  Ditto for book clubs.  I like the idea of a book club and socializing around a book, but it turns out that I really hate reading books that other people have told me to read, even when I intended to read them in the first place.  Again, it feels like work, even though I love getting book recommendations (recommendations, yes, assignments, no).  I have to read so much for actual work that I want my down time to be fun reading.

Do you like reading challenges and book clubs?

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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 Verge has a very cool optical illusion that it borrowed from Reddit.  If you stare at the picture long enough, it disappears.  Stare at it for a few minutes without blinking.  The screen will go white in front of you if you relax your eyes.  If it doesn’t work for you below, click over and look at it on the Verge.

This picture will fade away if you stare at it (may take a minute) from r/woahdude

How does it work?  According to the Verge:

The reason the colors disappear is because the brain stops paying attention to visual scenes that don’t change … Usually, movement in the environment and of our eyes is enough to keep a scene vivid. But in this case, with a blurry image and a fixed gaze, the colors fade away.

It made me think about all the other things that fade out because my eyes grow accustom to seeing it.  A metaphor for everything that we take for granted.

The twins and I are having a read-a-thon this weekend.  Josh is busy with a committee he’s on, so we’ve made stacks of books and purchased a lot of snacks from Trader Joe’s.  We plan on reading books and eating Cat Cookies for People non-stop all weekend.

The Wolvog is reading Moonwalking with Einstein and The Most Human Human.  The ChickieNob chose books about various members of royal families including Sally Bedell Smith’s book about Queen Elizabeth and The Royal Sisters.  I am reading Shades of Grey (the Jasper Fforde book), Hello, Sunshine, and A Study in Charlotte.

My plan is to emerge from the weekend covered in crumbs with more books added to my “read” list.

What are you reading?

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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: The Emperor Has No Tea” (NotMyLinesYet)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Dwelling in Possibility has a beautiful post that, while not about pregnancy loss or neonatal death, will resonate as she discusses the reality of widowhood.  Especially this thought about depleted energy tanks: “Even when we’re well into the experience of living while grieving, even when we’ve re-entered our lives and have gone back to work, gone back to being present for family and friends, gone back to what looks like, for all intents and purposes, a functional life. We still need a bigger top off on our tanks to take us through.”  Her words about crying in the car sent (good) chills down both arms.

Res Cogitatae has a fascinating post about the people who are important to us that people outside our community or country or culture don’t know.  Again, not about infertility, but I couldn’t help but think about the individuals who loom large in our personal worlds — children not here — that other people never know about.  It also reminded me of all the times I’ve walked through the Portrait Gallery and wondered, “Who is that?”  And to another community, that person is one of their most important representatives.  Jump into her comment section, too, after you read the post.

Bent Not Broken wins for first Mother’s Day spotting.  As she points out, does a minor holiday really need a month of lead-up time?  Though she made me laugh with her ending: “But yeah, it looks like we (at least those of us here in the US) have a full month of advertising for a holiday that doesn’t apply to us ahead of us! Pass the pineapple ale!”

Lastly, Lavender Luz ponders the future of adoption.  She looks at the two ways the needle has swung in the past and the problems with both ways of thinking.  And she proposes a different way of contemplating openness and doing the hard work of exploring feelings so people remain open to all possibilities, all experiences.

The roundup to the Roundup: We’re having a read-a-thon.  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 13th and 20th) 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.

I used up one of my monthly free New York Times articles reading an extremely short piece about how replacement works better than resistance when it comes to breaking bad habits.  So whenever you get the urge to do your bad habit… let’s say… eat a handful of cookies (what? They’re small!), you do something else, such as get a glass of seltzer.

Except that puts you in the kitchen near the cookies.

Which is bad.

So instead I replace walking into the kitchen with walking around the block.  Instead of eating cookies, I’ve used up five minutes of my day (plus the two minutes it takes me to tie my shoes because I’m terrible at tying shoes) to take a walk.  Walking makes me thirsty so I swing by the kitchen for a cup of water and see the cookies… and the whole process starts all over again.

This isn’t really my point.  My point is that the New York Times made me waste one of my free articles on this advice.  It’s not clever.  It’s not earth-shattering.  By default, if you’re resisting any behaviour you are doing something else, which means you were already practicing replacement.  But now I’m out one article and no closer to resisting the handful of cookies.

Strangely, this piece of advice was in the money section.  I’m not sure how it relates to money because the author never related it to money.

New York Times, I want my one free article back.

I learned from the title of a Forbes article that 9 – 5 was out and 1 – 6 was in.  I was intrigued because I can barely get everything done working 9 – 5. (Or… really… more like 8 – 8, but who is counting?) How would I get the same amount of work done in 5 hours per day?  25 hours per week?

The first part of the idea is sound.  We all waste time doing things that aren’t high priorities.  If we boil down our work to what actually needs to get done, it probably would fit into fewer hours.  Also, if we’re more productive at certain times of day, we should shift our schedule to fit those times.  Someone who is not a morning person may get to work at 9, but may not really kick into high gear until 11.  Why spend those first 2 hours wasting time when you can run errands and shift your work back by a bit?

But then the author lost me when she got to the meat of how she was managing to only work 5 hours.  She delegated.  She pushed off her work to other people, or, as she called it “outsourcing everything humanly possible.”  Well, sure, if I hired someone to do the tasks I had to do, I would have oodles of time because someone else would be doing chunks of my job.  If I asked my co-workers to take tasks off my plate, all I’ve done is move the task to someone else’s plate.

By that token, if I ate out every night, I’d save myself tons of time that I use on cooking.  Ditto for hiring a cleaning service so I can save time on cleaning.  An errand-running service plus a driver to get everyone to their activities.  In all of these cases, I have taken my task and asked or paid someone else to do it.  The task doesn’t go away — it just gets transferred to someone else’s plate, ensuring they have to stick to that 9 – 5 life while I get to enjoy the 1 – 6 world.

THAT feels like a larger time suck — playing hot potato with tasks.  I’m waiting for the next part of the article which is “You could have 10% more money if you stopped outsourcing tasks you can take care of yourself.”  The never-ending financial advice cycle.