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

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I still read aloud to the kids.  At this point, it’s usually something I want to talk about as we read it.

But even though I love reading books aloud, I hate having books read to me.  I am not a fan of audio books, even on long car rides.  I probably would not have fared well in the time before the printing press, before consuming stories became a silent exercise.

Isn’t it strange to think that if I had been born only 100+ years ago, the norm would have been spoken stories?  This piece in Quartz on the history of reading places silent reading as the norm only around the late 1800s.  Would my brain be different if the only option I knew were stories read aloud?

Do you like people reading aloud to you or audio books, or do you prefer to always read silently?

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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.

No pranks here because I am not a fan of April Fool’s Day.

But I was curious how churches would handle Easter falling on April Fool’s Day.  Are church leaders joking around during the sermon or using the convergence to talk about how we should treat each other better?

I’ve never been to church for Easter — only random services on non-holidays — so I’m not sure how somber the sermon usually is on a non-April-Fool’s-Day Easter.  I’m assuming it usually focuses on rebirth and spring and family building because our spring holiday — Pesach — has themes of rebirth, spring, and family building.

The last time Easter fell on April Fool’s Day was 1956.  The next time it will fall will be 2029.

So if you went to services, what did your church do today?

Pesach begins tonight.  I’ve spent the week alternating between cooking and cleaning; two tasks that don’t really work well together.  Cooking creates more mess and requires a clean-up afterward, and cleaning burns energy and requires you to cook afterward.  But somehow the two tasks have slowly come into balance so I have a clean house and food for the seder table.

My cousin and I both host — one of us takes the first night and one of us takes the second night.  We’ve been having Pesach together for 42 years!  Isn’t that incredible to think about?  There have only been maybe two or three years where we haven’t been together for Pesach.  That is why I host; why I continue to do this tradition year after year: Because our mothers have had decades of Pesachs together, and we have had decades of Pesachs together, and our kids are now into their second decade of having Pesachs together.

Unlike the older generation, my cousin and I change the menu every year.  We make meat for the meat-eaters and make everything else on the table vegan for ourselves.  We make tiny tweaks each time the holiday rolls around to make it a little bit better, like last year’s realization that I could get Josh to roast the shankbone outside so I don’t need to smell it — win!

Realizing your own history is sort of amazing…

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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:

• “Words of Wisdom” (The Road Less Travelled)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Different Shores has a post about an article on living child-free that I would have missed otherwise.  I especially loved this point: “One thing that hit me around the same age as Elizabeth was the notion that my future was a bit amorphous, potentially a long stretch of nothing; what were the landmark events that would punctuate it, give it structure, slow down time?”  It’s the story of a woman who has taken control of her life and given it shape.

Pages, Stages, and Rages has a post about how the Beatles keep looping back in her life, including Yoko Ono’s experience with secondary infertility.  Like her, I never thought about Paul McCartney and gun violence together until the march, but he did lose his best friend not far from the march site in New York.  There have been many things written this week about the marches, but I loved this post because it weaves it into a personal history vs thinking of it as a single point in time.

Lastly, Dubliner in Deutschland has a post about finally holding her daughter at the end of a long family building road.  I was teary at the opening, imagining the world waiting while she looked at her daughter: “It’s Friday morning. The house is quiet. My husband’s at work. The kitchen is a mess. There’s a huge pile of laundry in the basket and I wonder if I’ll even find a moment to shower today.”  It can wait, and I’m glad you have these days of wonder in the meantime.

The roundup to the Roundup: Pesach begins tonight.  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 March 23rd and 30th) 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.

Beyond brushing and flossing your teeth or washing your face, what do you do before bed?

I need to tell you my bedtime routine backwards because the things closest to lights out are things I always do, and the earlier we get, the more variety you’ll see.  So right before lights out, we listen to the Shipping Forecast.  (And sometimes whisper to each other, “Crap, Iceland is going to be dealing with squally showers tonight.)  Before that, I write one sentence in my bullet journal.  Before that, I check email one last time.  Before that, I am looking up something on the Internet from a television show or book.  Before that, I’m probably watching a television show or reading a book.  Before that, I am almost definitely playing one last round of some stupid game on my phone.  Before that, I am playing all the earlier rounds of the stupid game on my phone.

Night after night after night.

A survey looked to see if your score on a Myers-Briggs test could predict your nighttime routine, proving that our personalities naturally draw us towards certain activities.

Remember how I was trying to figure out if I was an ISTJ or an INTJ?  I am definitely NOT an ISTJ — I don’t drink any alcohol much less hard liquor.  But I am totally an INTJ.  Internet before bed?  Uh, 5 out of 7 pre-bed activities use the Internet.  I was also able to eliminate the possibility of ISFJ, because I only watch television because Josh wants to watch television.  I don’t think I’ve ever turned the television on when Josh has been out-of-town.  INFJ is still a possibility because I like to read.  But INTJ sounds the most like me.

So what is your Myers-Briggs type and what is your bedtime routine?  Does it match up?

The first meditation app I tried told me to count my breaths.  An interview with a popular meditation champion told me to count my breaths.  A book about meditation told me to count my breaths.

And then finally someone told me why you count your breaths.

Do you know?  Because I didn’t.

I thought it was something about the way you were supposed to breathe, though I noticed on one app that you could set a timer to your preferred breathing pattern, accounting for things such as whether you like to pause at the top of the breath or just inhale and exhale back-to-back.  One app told me to intake the air through my nose and out my mouth, while another said under no circumstances should I ever exhale out my mouth.  (Why?)

Everyone kept bringing up breathing but no one was telling me why focusing on breathing was important.

Because it’s happening now.  Or, as Smiling Mind stated it, breathing is an anchor to this moment.  In other words, it’s the one thing every single living person is definitely doing at this moment.  You may be sitting or standing or lying down.  You may have your eyes open or closed.  (Well, I assume they’re open right now if you’re reading this.). But there is only one option when it comes to breathing: You are breathing.  Or you’re dead.  Or you’re temporarily holding your breath, but you’re going to go back to that whole breathing thing in a moment.

So if they need you to focus on something that is happening in the present moment so you stay in the present moment, breathing is a safe bet.

Not only that but because you’re always breathing, unless you had a moment where you couldn’t breathe, you most likely don’t have distracting thoughts from your past about the act of breathing.  The act of not breathing, yes.  The act of breathing… well, I can’t remember how I breathed yesterday or last week or last year.  And you don’t have any strong feelings about breathing in the future beyond the fact that you’d like to keep doing it.  So you can focus on your breath without your breath becoming a distraction because it’s reminding you of other things.  I came up with this last point on my own, but I’m going to guess that it’s true, too.

So now you know.  (Unless you already knew, in which you’ve been using different meditation apps and books.)

I’m going to stop thinking that it’s optional and focus on the breath.