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

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I would describe myself as impatient.  I excel at delayed gratification when I already know that I have X (like saving a piece of chocolate to eat for an indefinitely amount of time), but… well… here’s an example of my impatience: When I begin writing a new book, I feel anxious by the end of the first day that it’s not already complete.

Like I said: impatient.

Which, you know, can be a good thing because I am always motivated to move forward.  But I know I also waste a lot of time wishing things forward when they’re going to unfold in their own, sweet time.  I liked this post by Darius Foroux:

The book you’re writing, the presentation you’re making, the business you’re building, things can’t happen fast enough. There’s nothing wrong with wanting things to happen fast. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons people and companies innovate.

But we have to realize there’s a difference between a desire to achieve things and impatience. The former helps you, the latter harms you, especially your creativity.

Do you consider yourself a patient or impatient person?

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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’m in love with three things right now.

1. The Good Place

Oh my G-d, how did I not know about this show until now?  Josh started watching it while I copying over notes in bed after the Great Water Spill of 2018.  And I started snickering even though I was barely paying attention.  (It’s like even my subconscious knew that it was hearing something funny.)  And then my pen stopped moving.  And then I set aside the papers.  And then I became a frenzied television watcher trying to convince Josh of just one more episode every night while we made our way through season one on Netflix.  Season two is currently running on regular television, but I guess we’ll need to wait until it comes to Netflix since it’s nearing the end of the season?  Unless there’s a way to start at the beginning of season two right now?  All I know is that I like every character (though especially Chidi) and it consistently makes me laugh.  What a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant show.

2. Solve for Happy

Mo Gawdat’s book was on sale last week so I took a chance on it, and it has changed the way I feel and I’m only a few chapters into the book.  I can feel myself worrying a little bit less.  Or coming up with ways to shut off my worried brain for a few hours, which you’re allowed to do while solving for happy as long as you don’t use that as your go-to strategy to deal with life.  The whole book just makes sense.  It’s do-able.  It’s very X – Y = happy.  Plus it’s an enjoyable read; it doesn’t feel like work to get through it.

3. Every Heart a Doorway

Seanan McGuire’s book was also a sale purchase.  I downloaded the sample because the description sounded interesting, and I started to read it while I was waiting for my browser to update.  I got sucked into the story and felt so sad when the browser was done updating and it was time to get back to work.  I bought the book on the spot.  I’m in the middle of reading it right now.  Not only was it a great purchase BUT it’s made even better knowing there are two other books already out in the series and the fourth will be out some time in the future.  Go over to Amazon and read the first few pages using their “look inside” feature.  It was like someone wrote a story… for me.  Like she knew exactly what I would love and wrote it to make me insanely happy.

What are you smitten with right now?

I managed to spill an entire glass of water into my desk.  16 ounces of water, flooding the inner cabinet of my secretary desk.  Beyond the computer (which was miraculously fine), I store a shit ton of papers in my desk.  Post-it notes with “brilliant” ideas (cough), books, and notebooks.  Random LEGO characters.  Mala beads.  All of it swimming in 16 ounces of water.

I ran for paper towels while Linus “helped” by standing on his hind legs and watching as the water cascaded onto the floor, soaking the carpet.  It was a great moment; the highlight of my week as I peeled dripping post-it notes apart, trying to read the smudged writing.

I did manage to save maybe 500 post-it notes as well as some important papers that I decided to recopy so I had a clean, non-water-logged version.  That’s how I spent my week: recopying old notes.  Trying to decipher them.

Along the way, I found funny things the twins said as babies, a bunch of short story ideas that will probably never get written, and reminders to call people whom I haven’t spoken to in years.  There were notes that I made while negotiating a contract, and it made me so sad to see how much I undervalued my work once upon a time.

It was emotional archaeology, digging through a pile of fiber samples of things that at one point meant something to me.

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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:

• “On Letting Go of the Colour” (An Engineer Becomes a Mom)
• “Plinko” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Jess!
• “Attention Management” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you for this, too!
• “I Don’t Have Unlimited Resources” (Infertile Phoenix)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Jewish IVF ponders whether to transfer more than one embryo.  Her research brings up a glaring hole in the arguments: “The thing is that the article educating against multiples is talking about first transfer success rates. Not sixth transfer. They’re not taking into consideration someone who has tried single transfers multiple times without results.”  It’s a tough decision coloured by more than their past results.

Andmom has entered the world of tweendom.  Due to the way their school system is structured, the 10-year-olds are around 13-year-olds; a big age spread.  She writes, “I’m just not ready, and I don’t think they are either, but apparently we’re all going to run out of the option of innocence soon.”  Me too.

Empty Arms, Broken Hearts points out that parenting doesn’t erase the feelings from infertility.  She explains, “I thought infertility would go away once I became a mother. Not that I would become fertile, but that the unfairness, the raw emotions of not being able to conceive and bear life, it would somehow lessen when children started calling me Mommy.”  But I love this post for the brilliant final line.

Lastly, Inexplicably Missing has a post about her clinic.  I do not want to ruin the effect by trying to describe the situation, but this line perfectly sums up the way my jaw dropped with the post: “I don’t know… it’s just… I feel a bit like… can someone just take this seriously please?”

The roundup to the Roundup: Wish I had used a smaller cup.  (Or, 16 ounces of water is a lot of water.)  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 January 26th and February 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.

Every time we used to go shopping at Politics and Prose, a bookstore near my old apartment, I would tell Josh that I wanted to work there.  “It makes me happy,” I argued.  “Books make me happy and this space makes me happy.”  But he argued that I liked it precisely because it wasn’t my work space.  It was my relaxation space.  If I started working there, it would no longer be my relaxation space because I couldn’t exactly hang out and rest in my work space, even if it was off-hours.  I’d no longer be a customer.  It’s be an employee who happened to not officially be at work.

Touché.

Fast forward many years later, and I have made some of my hobbies into jobs.  I made it my goal to become a professional gamer several years ago, and while I haven’t actually been paid to play video games, I have been paid to create games.  And I got paid to write a book about creating games.  And I can now play games without a second of guilt because they’re part of my job.  So… there’s that.

I read two articles this week, both in the same place.  The first was about why hobbies make us happy.  When asked what she does, the author responds with career information.  But she realizes everyone else is answering with the stuff they do outside of work.  They surf, hike, play music.

Thus begins a dissection of the American obsession with defining ourselves through our work and the importance of also looping in your hobbies.

Americans, so the cultural-industrial myth goes, are doers. But is that all we are? Not if we want to be healthy, according to Patricia W. Linville … Linville has studied the idea of “self-complexity” — or how a human sorts the many traits, roles, and other identity markers that make up him- or herself. She has found that the narrower a person’s vision of their “self” is, the more prone they are to depression and anxiety.

On the other side was an article about why we should keep our hobbies as hobbies and not try to turn them into a side hustle or our career.  (Uh… too late for me?)

At a time when Etsy shops and craft fairs and food trucks are decidedly mainstream, every domestic hobby is at risk of becoming a side hustle. I don’t want to boil and slice eggs for money. Messing around with a stand mixer or a sewing machine is fun for me because it’s not work. Personal pleasure is what makes a hobby a hobby.

There isn’t really an argument about why you shouldn’t except that people report losing joy in their hobby once it becomes work.  But I’ve found the opposite — it made me feel like I could really enjoy my hobby vs feel like I had to apologize for the time I dedicated to my hobby.  I have zero guilt about playing games because it helps me do my job better.

What are your hobbies?  And would you ever want to make your hobby your job?

A really interesting study was released a few weeks ago based on sleep information obtained from FitBits.  They discovered women sleep 25 minutes longer than men, but they are also 40% more likely to have insomnia.  Northerners go to bed 5 minutes earlier than Southerners, on average.  East Coasters go to bed 7 minutes later than West Coasters.  The average American goes to bed at 11:21 pm.

Super interesting, especially because the data was collected by so many people over such a long period of time.  It wasn’t one night in a sleep lab.  It was hundreds of nights at home, just going about your regular life.  Sleeping as you normally sleep.  This is very valuable information.

But, of course, the people were participants in a study without knowing they were participants in a study, unless they read the TOS of the FitBit.  On one hand, no harm no foul because giving up anonymous data about sleep isn’t exactly earth shattering.  On the other hand…

We are having information collected about us every single day.  Every device, every place we go, everything we purchase: it is all being monitored and that data collected and analyzed.  It’s interesting when it gives us anonymous studies like the one above.  It’s unnerving when we think about the fact that there’s a guy named Conor Heneghan who also knows how you sleep if you wear a FitBit.  You’ve invited him into your bedroom without really thinking about how you’ve invited him into your bedroom.

Anyone else a little creeped out?