I like chocolate. I like pistachios. I like kadayif. I wanted to try Dubai chocolate, but for like… under $8. Preferably less than that.

Trader Joe’s had their version of the chocolate for a hot second, but it sold out within a day, and they’re not getting more until the fall. Places we’ve found it were selling it for much more than $8, so we passed. But we finally found a bar of Dubai-style chocolate — made in Turkey — for $5 and grabbed it.

The bar was fine. Not amazing. I couldn’t really taste the pistachios or kadayif. Better than the chocolate itself was their website, which contained this strange line: “You’ll called for yielding male, so lights Stars abundantly, is their.” What could this possibly mean?

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We’ve watched the Taskmaster seasons out of order, but we’re finishing Series 19, and it is an excellent lineup. We liked all of the comedians very much, and even the Wolvog, who does not love television, joined to see all of the episodes. If you’ve never watched Taskmaster, it’s a good lineup to start with because everyone was really funny.

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Quentin’s favourite thing is to beg for me to fill his ceramic dry food bowl with baby food, stand next to it to make sure I’m watching, and then pick it up with his teeth and throw it so the food goes everywhere. Then he runs around in a circle, wheeking and popcorning with happiness while I yell, “WHY DID YOU DO THAT?” It’s actually pretty impressive because the ceramic bowl is heavy for a little guinea pig mouth.

But on the plus side, he will never pee on you. If he has to go to the bathroom, he will bite your shirt and gently tug (and then frantically tug if you do not immediately start moving), holding it in until you set him down in his cage. Good piggy.

Andrea Gibson’s “Wellness Check” is the most profound and simple guide to focusing on the right thing:

In any moment
on any given day
I can measure
my wellness
by this question:

Is my attention on loving
or is my attention on
who isn’t loving me?

— Andrea Gibson (@andreagibson) December 28, 2020

I put it up on my computer screen as a sticky note so I wouldn’t forget when I started going too far down the worry road.

P.S. Hate to link to Twitter, but this was the only place where I found their words on their own account.

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

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I know I say every game is my new favourite, but this one has the staying power of a Wordle.

With Whittle, you get two unrelated words. You have to tap letters to erase them while still making real words. For instance, “adds” can become “ads” if you erase the second “D,” but you cannot erase the “A” and make “dds.”

You win when you erase all letters, but then you can continue playing until you find all of the hidden words. Once you win, you see the words you’ve already found near the bottom of the screen with a blank box for any missing words. This is helpful because you can know how many letters the missing word has, and it goes in alphabetical order, so you can know the missing word comes between these two words you’ve found.

It is really brilliant and super simple. And it’s the sort of thing you can keep putting down and coming back to as you try to find the final few. Plus, you can play the archive, so there are hours of play.

Love this.

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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 connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

A friend of mine died after high school, and I encountered her mother for the first time in 34 years last week. We talked about her and cried a little. And as she looked between me and the ChickieNob, she commented that we wore the same necklace.

She is the second person ever to have commented on it, and the first person was a jeweler, so I expect him to pay attention to jewelry. We told her the story of the necklace, and while she gave me a lot of physical hugs that day, noticing that detail was an emotional hug because it’s something special to us. We’ve been wearing the same necklace in different iterations for 16 years. That’s a long time for only two strangers to comment on something.

And then I got home and the necklace clasp broke.

It was an easy fix, and I called a jeweler we use to see if he could fit us in. He’s about an hour away, but I trust them with really special things like this necklace. The woman who answered told me they wouldn’t do a same-day fix for me, no matter how easy or small the fix. She didn’t care that we would be driving an hour or that they had just done a same-day fix a few months ago. I hung up the phone and started looking for another jeweler.

But the ChickieNob told me to hand over the chain. She was taking it to the jeweler and getting it fixed that day. She drove it the hour, walked it into the store, and got them to change the clasp. The time in the store was about five minutes.

She was a lioness. Completely fierce. Making things happen. I am so grateful I have a fierce woman on my side.

Josh was away most of the week at a conference. When the kids were little, they always got sick when he went to a conference. Things always broke. There was always… something. Don’t get me started on the time when he was overseas at a film festival, and the local government suggested that we all prepare for a dirty bomb, and I ended up at Home Depot filling my cart with duct tape and plastic sheeting.

Anyway.

Before he left, I thought to myself, whenever Josh goes away, all sorts of things go wrong. I bet I will have to deal with a cricket.

Quentin ended up having an accident in our bed while the ChickieNob and I were watching television (first time ever, which makes me wonder if he was having issues because he was also totally chill, which is not like him), which necessitated two loads of laundry late at night. I was swept up in that strange Facebook glitch, which locked people out of their accounts. (Though I thought at first that it was just me and felt all kinds of panicked.)

There was a salad dressing disaster where I tried a recipe the New York Times promised was the most amazing dressing in the world, wasted a lot of olive oil, and had an enormous clean up, and it was inedible.

And the cricket came on the last night. Our final night. All the cricket had to do was wait a few more hours, and it could have been Josh’s problem. But it wasn’t. It was my problem. And I made it the Wolvog’s problem. He sucked it up in the Dyson, but also got water in the Dyson. So now I’m drying out the Dyson for a few days and hoping it still works.

And these things happen only when Josh goes out of town.

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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 to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

And now the blogs…

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But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Road Less Travelled writes about her mixed feelings attending a wedding for a person who is the same age her child would have been. There is the happiness for the couple and the joy of seeing family, but there is the emotional pain of what ifs. It’s a reminder that loss doesn’t magically resolve at a single point. There can be triggers, 27 years later.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ leans hard on lessons learned through infertility as she experiences a different difficult situation. She asks if you remember going through infertility, when it consumed your whole day and every thought. But one day you reach a point where it is not your entire day. It’s just part of a day. And then it’s only part of a week, a month, a year. She reassures herself and the reader: “It helps me to understand that it will pass, eventually, whatever the outcome, although the fits and starts might last the rest of my life. It helps too to remember the nature of grief, of worry, of irrational thoughts, and know that it is all normal.” Sending a hug and a thank you for this reminder.

The roundup to the Roundup: When Josh goes out of town… 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 August 8 – 15) 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.