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

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In the same vein as learning about the history of lines, Atlas Obscura had a brilliant piece on the concept of a moment.  It begins by asking the length of a moment, since a moment could be several months (the #metoo movement marks a moment in time) or a few seconds (“wait a moment”).

Moment was first defined at 1/4oth of an hour (or about 90 seconds), but clearly that’s not how the word is used now.  But more interesting, do YOU define a moment as a short or long period of time?  If I said a vague sentence like: “Preparing the thing you’re about to see took a moment,” would you think that it took me a few seconds or a few minutes or a half hour without having any further context?  Or do we only know the length of the moment when we have the context?

I usually think of a moment as almost instantaneous, a period of time so brief that it doesn’t warrant measuring.  But… clearly that isn’t the case.

So what does a moment mean to you?

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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 read two and a half amazing things this weekend.

One

Pauline Dakin’s recounting of the Weird World on the BBC.  This was such a riveting and heartbreaking story that I couldn’t do anything else until I finished reading it.  Wow.  I’ll admit that I saw the ending coming when it got to the part about the doubles, but… it was still moving to see how it resolved.  If you can only read one thing, read this one all the way to the end and then let me know what you think.

Two

Jerry Selbee breaking the pattern to win the lottery.  It felt like a real life Sherlock, working in a cereal factory.  A math genius who could see and break patterns that other people don’t notice.  It gets even better when the MIT kids enter the story.  It’s also an eye-opening look at how to play (or why you shouldn’t casually play) the lottery.

The Half

Not really a great read, but definitely an interesting thought: Atlas Obscura asked if you could be homesick for a place you’ve never been.  There are plenty of real places and fictional places that I feel homesick for.  Fillory, definitely, enough so that I just start the first Magicians book again when I get through the third one, so I’m always somewhere in the loop, reading about Fillory.  But then also Middle Earth, Hogwarts, and the world beyond the Phantom Tollbooth.  At the same time, I feel fernweh for the Faroe Islands and Newfoundland and Holland Island — three places I’ve never been (and one of which I never can because it’s underwater now).

Is there any place that fills you with homesickness even though you’ve never been, as if the space is somehow genetically coded into your heart and it’s a place you’re supposed to see?

So I went to get the mail and there was a letter addressed to someone else in my mailbox.  My address, someone else’s name.  This happens sometimes, so I went into the post office to hand it over to the postmaster so he could return it to the sender because it was clearly a check.  But the thing was, the name on the envelope wasn’t the person who had my address before me (I still get her mail all the time), AND it was a check, which meant a transaction had happened recently.  Strange to have the wrong address.

As we were standing in line, ChickieNob was playing with the envelope and suddenly she said, “This is from Puerto Rico.  And it’s going to our address in Puerto Rico.”  So it was our address but in Puerto Rico vs. our state.

But this is where it gets even stranger.  Mail is stamped with a number or barcode that is used for routing purposes.  The routing was a number off, sending the letter to our state instead of Puerto Rico.  If the rest of the address hadn’t been correct, it would have hit an obstacle at some point and returned to the sender without reaching me.  But because the address exists in both places, it continued on its merry way into my mailbox because the machines reading the routing number didn’t see anything else amiss.

I wonder if that family has ever received our mail, or if this was a one time thing.  Unfortunately, they took the envelope from me before I could write down the person’s name or I would write them directly and say, “Hello, I’m your address Doppelganger.”  Actually, now writing that out, it’s sort of creepy.  Cool to think about, but… yeah… probably shouldn’t write them.

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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.

My mind was blown by My Path to Mommyhood’s post about death cleaning; in other words, decluttering so if you died tomorrow, other people wouldn’t have to deal with all of your stuff.  Or, really, that they’ll deal with less stuff.  I laughed at this: “Leaving your home with mostly wonderful things you truly love and not, say, leaving a drawer full of exotic dildos for your grandchildren to find (a real example from the book!).”  But she points out that all of these books also make a lot of assumptions about family situations; namely, the existence of children.  This was my favourite part of the post: “It just amazes me how some people are so removed from infertility struggle. And how ever-present it is in my life.”

Infertilityhonesty has a moving post about a ritual they created to mark the “time of death” for their dream of parenthood.  She points out that the conversations they have with the yearly ritual “are crucial interactions for a loss that does not receive this kind of discussion, or really any for that matter, in mainstream human conversation.”  Another important moment in the post: “Our backyard is a space where I can honor our losses and experiences within a world that doesn’t by vowing to make the resting place of the dream of our children as beautiful as possible.”  I wish the general public would have more recognition and conversation around this type of loss.  But in addition to that, I’m glad that she has written this beautiful post about creating your own way forward.

Lastly, Searching for Our Silver Lining has a post about the concept of being “deserving.”  She writes about a friend who has given birth after a long journey to parenthood, and how another friend congratulated her by saying she deserved it.  At the same time, another baby is born into a difficult situation.  She writes, “Turning terms like ‘deserved’ and ‘blessed’ on their heads and making you wonder about the games that are played. The polar opposite reactions to the exact same news: in one case I’m celebrating and sending well-wishes while in the other I’m mourning for the newborn.”

The roundup to the Roundup: I have an address Doppelganger.  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 February 23rd and March 2nd) 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.

We always knew this day would come.  The kids were so cute and little in 2006 when I started blogging; barely able to hold their own bottle and many years away from Facebook screeds.  A bunch of other bloggers I read all built their families around the same time.

But these kids are now teenagers, and they’re getting social media accounts of their own.

I read a piece on Kveller where the author was talking about finding herself on her child’s social media account.  She writes:

Like many parents navigating this digital Wild West, I’m constantly grappling with these kinds of dilemmas: privacy vs. supervision, trust vs. safety. I’m consciously trying not to start every sentence with “When I was a kid…”

But the questions I didn’t anticipate were the ones that involved me.

Her kid wrote about her once on her main Instagram account, but she hasn’t given her mother access yet to her secret Instagram account.  So who knows what she’ll find when she goes on that one?

You can set limits for what your child can do online, but how do you set boundaries that you personally trespassed in the past?  It’s not just kids; anyone can write about you.

I’ve written about the kids; always respectfully, with an eye towards not embarrassing them.  They know everything I’ve written on here about them, and I still read them any post where they make an appearance before I post it.  They’ve vetoed a few or asked me to change lines here and there.

And maybe that’s the only thing keeping me from quaking in my boots.  I’m hoping they’ll give me the same respect now that they’re in a position to post about all of my foibles.

Would you be okay with someone else writing about you?

Let’s say that you spend 20 minutes per day on social media.  That’s 7,300 minutes per year.  Let’s pretend I do that for the next 30 years.  That’s 219,000 minutes or 3,650 hours.  That’s about 152 days, a little under a half a year of my life within that 30 years period.  Kind of sobering when you think about Facebook that way.

I heard that on a Note to Self episode.  The guest took that number out to two years, 25 minutes per day for the length of the average life span (though I’m going to guess that few babies are online and most people actually use social media more than 20 minutes per day if you add up all the sites).

Manoush was saying that she doesn’t have a Facebook account, and she gave her theory: We join Facebook because we’re scared about death.  We’re scared about admitting that a chapter of our life is over, so we cling to the people from that chapter in life.  And Manoush feels like moving on is important.  Not always looking back or seeing the same people around us.

That fact is why I like social media; because you don’t lose track of people, and if you do, it’s pretty easy to reconnect.  And I like Facebook more than Twitter (and blogs more than Facebook) because it moves at a good speed; not too fast, not too cluttered.  Plus it all comes down to whether I choose to spend my 20 minutes per day online or not.  It’s not as if those people are living on a commune with me.  I don’t have to use my 20 minutes per day.

It’s an interesting distinction because Manoush is on Twitter and Instagram, two other platforms where you collect people from old areas of your life.

Anyway, 152 days.  Even if I cut my usage down to 10 minutes per day, it’s 76 days.

Though if it makes you feel any better, if you cook on average for an hour per day, you spend almost 456 days of that 30 year period cooking.  And no one thinks twice about pulling together a bowl of pasta.