In the middle of the Mitzvahmoon, I walked down to the water with my phone and filmed the waves for a minute.  I thought I would put it on a loop and then upload a half hour version to Youtube so I could let it run while I worked once we were back home.  Feel like I’m at the beach.  But then I got home and didn’t have time to actually complete the task.  So much for bringing the vacation home.

The New York Times had an article about the optimal length of a vacation, and research puts it at eight days.  I mean, you can go beyond eight days, but the average person receives most of the benefits in the first eight days and loses them within one day back at work.  One day.  That’s all you get.

I actually read the article because of the Mitzvahmoon video: this idea that we can remember and revisit the vacation through photos when we get home.  It’s sort of true in my experience — ChickieNob and I love to sit with albums, remembering trips, and I carry about a dozen pictures of Chincoteague on my phone and look at them when I’m feeling stressed.  But this thought jumped out at me from the piece:

My patient had no pictures or videos to show me, just a sharp and indelible memory that e carried with him. And that I suspect is key to a great and long-lasting vacation: He allowed himself to be open to the unforeseen and immersed in his experience … It made me wonder whether in the attempt to record and preserve our pleasure, we become observers of our experience rather than full participants in it.

“Preserve our pleasure” — I love that because why else would I point my camera at a random stretch of ocean?  It’s to try to capture the wonder we felt staring at the water while it exploded into tumultuous waves due to a hurricane still several days away and the relaxation it brought to stare at sea foam instead of a computer screen for a few hours.

At the same time, it wasn’t a profound enough thought that I’d ever leave my camera at home because I love looking at the pictures when I get home.  But it was definitely food for thought.  When am I taking a picture I’ll use in the future, and when am I taking a picture just because I think I should take a picture?

Do you look at your vacation photos enough to make them worth taking?

Last week we took a Mitzvahmoon.  It’s okay if you don’t know what a Mitzvahmoon is.  I Googled it and couldn’t find it, but the ChickieNob informed me that just because no one else has done it yet, it didn’t mean that it wasn’t a very good idea.

I’ll attest to that: It turned out to be a very good idea.

We have been knee-deep in prepping for their B’nai Mitzvah, and we had a bunch of things we needed to write.  They both needed to work on their d’var Torah (a speech about their Torah portion), Josh and I needed to work on our speeches, and we had a bunch of quatrains to write for a candle lighting ceremony.  The ChickieNob suggested that we all go to the beach and take the weekend away from home to write without distraction and relax at the same time.  Sort of like a honeymoon or a babymoon but with an emphasis on the productivity side with the relaxation mixed in.

So we drove to the beach.

It was exactly what we needed.  We ended up doing a lot of the writing beforehand at home because we wanted to do more relaxing, so we got the work accomplished.  The beach was mostly empty because the waves were rough and it was the off-season.  But that just made us love it more.  It was sunny and quiet; and we all read and took breaks to write the quatrains while on the sand.  We ate ice cream at night and watched Guardians of the Galaxy 2 back in our hotel room.  I think we all left recharged so we could power through the rest of what needs to get done.

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But there was a moment in the weekend.  We drove into town after 8 o’clock, and it was dark as we made our way down the main street.  When we got near the pharmacy, we saw an elderly man had somehow driven his car over the six-inch high barrier that lined the parking lot.  His front wheels where over the barrier, but his back wheels were still in the lot, and he was stuck, revving his engine as he tried to go forward and get free.

Our car, stopped at the traffic light, was perpendicular to the front of his car.  If he went forward, he would smash into my door.

The man was clearly panicked and confused.  His windshield wipers were moving at high speed even though there was no rain.  We light changed and we crossed the intersection to get to the pizza place so we could call the non-emergency police from the counter and they could come and help him.  We never found out what happened to him, though his car was gone by the time we drove past the area again a half hour later.

I don’t know why this story is noteworthy except that, at the time, I saw it as a portentous sign that our Mitzvahmoon was a doomed idea.  That we got over the first hump but would ultimately get stuck.

It’s nice to be proven wrong by the universe.  Sometimes an elderly man driving over a barrier is just an elderly man driving over a barrier.

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

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Kelly Wickham Hurst recently said something that stuck with me: “People are magic.” She was talking about that human impulse to insert yourself into someone else’s life, somehow at the right time, and help. But, of course, it could go the other way, too. Magic is often used to trick the senses, misdirect your attention.

That is the thought that came to mind as I read this story about the start of the BRCA1 research. It is incredible that this project, which had an inauspicious start, led to knowledge that has potentially saved life. It’s not a long piece, but it is the best example of people are magic — both in the good and bad sense — in a single story.

Read it, but don’t ruin the twist for anyone else in your comment.

And tell us about a moment of magic that someone brought into your life.

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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 clicked on this Science of Us article because I also feel exhausted after sitting in front of the computer all day.  Like disproportionately tired considering I haven’t done much more than think and type.

The article outlines how your brain uses up enormous quantities of oxygen; how it requires 20% of the energy in your body as a baseline and then thinking hard uses even more energy.  It totally makes sense, until it doesn’t make sense.

Because here is the thing: if thinking hard makes you tired, then why am I up all night, unable to sleep because I am THINKING?  Shouldn’t the thinking be wearing me out and making me sleepy?  Shouldn’t it be using up all of my energy and tiring me instead of making me feel more awake?  Surely worrying burns through energy faster than, let’s say, writing a blog post.  Bedtime is when I am doing my best, anticipatory stress work, much more so than when I’m in the zone and think that I will accomplish everything on my to-do list.

I need to poke around through some of the links in the article.

I thought the world was going to end, but it turns out that it probably isn’t.  Wheeew.  Though I was so certain that tomorrow was it for mankind that I stopped rounding up posts.  Didn’t make a lot of sense to highlight great blogs no one would have time to read.

Okay, maybe I just heard about the world ending thing today from the Washington Post, but it sounded like a better excuse than saying Rosh Hashanah derailed my week.  Between the cooking and the cleaning and the services, I didn’t have time to write up the stuff I bookmarked.  So you’re getting a non-post, and we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program next week.

Provided the world doesn’t end before that.

So… when is the next world ending prediction?