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

*******

There are so many lists of “good” advice out there, but not enough lists of bad advice. This list aims to correct that.

This one especially made me laugh: “Assume a new dopamine hit is a good indication of long-term joy.”

What was your favourite one (or piece of bad advice)?

*******

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.

This is a monthly series, published near the end of the month summarizing what I found, ate, watched, googled, and felt this month. New categories are added from time to time.

Books Added to My TBR (e.g., books I just learned about that I’m excited to read… maybe)

• Park Avenue (Renee Ahdieh)
• Direct Descendant (Tanya Huff)
• Make Me Famous (Maud Ventura)
• Everyone in This Bank Is a Thief (Benjamin Stevenson)
• Mansion Beach (Meg Mitchell Moore)
• A Family Matter (Claire Lynch)
• Thirst Trap (Grainne O’Hare)
• Bookish (Matthew Sweet)
• Misophonia (Dana Vowinckel)

Notable Meals (new recipes, old favourites, and restaurant items we ate this month)

• Pannenkoeken, which are Dutch pancakes. I served them with cherries and cream.
• Food and Wine’s ramen noodle salad.
• Tofu fajitas.

Television, Movies, and Music (watching and listening)

• Started Grosse Pointe Garden Society. Super fun, light-hearted mystery. I hope it gets a second season.
• Started The Residence. Love, love, love this. It’s like Knives Out in the White House.
• Watched all five episodes of Sirens. Perfect if you liked The Perfect Couple but snickered at it, too. Satire wrapped in Lilly Pulitzer.
• The new Sarah Silverman special, PostMortem. You’ll laugh, but it’s also a moving account of losing her parents and stepmother.
• The new Mike Birbiglia special, The Good Life. It was less cohesive than some of his other specials but had great stories.

Added To My Ongoing Mix Tape

• “Every Woman in the World” (Air Supply)
• “Mr Blue Sky” (Electric Light Orchestra)
• “Sit Down” (James)

Tabs I Left Open (things I Googled and left up on the screen)

• A Wikipedia page for Gotland, Sweden.
• An explanation for why you can’t say “rabbit” on the Isle of Portland.
• A web project collecting scans of my old high school’s literary magazine.

Micro-Joys

• The symphony community outreach staff gave me a birthday button.
• When we travel, we keep an audio journal each night, talking through all of our memories for the day. It often comes in handy when we’re trying to remember something, which in the case of this story was the graffiti that appeared on a building we passed on the train between London and Norwich. To find the passage, we had to listen to a bunch of other memories. I have these audio journals dating back about 12 years, and I always remember something new when we listen to them.
• I had a ladybird on the outside of my car for many days. The first day, I commented that there was a ladybird. The second day, I marveled that it was still there. By the third day, everyone else thought it was dead, but I still held out hope that it was sleeping. A week later, I had to admit that the ladybird probably would have needed food by this point if it was still alive. “It’s just like ladybird ladybird,” I told Josh. He didn’t know that children’s poem and didn’t believe it was real (once I said it aloud) until I showed it to him online.

Mood

• Feeling pretty fearful about the future, and that makes me feel jittery for a large portion of every day.

What about you? Let me know what you’re eating, seeing, listening to, googling, feeling this month.

Many many (many many many) months ago, multiple branches from an enormous pine tree behind our house fell off and exploded in our backyard. The tree owner repaired the fence and patio. We have not yet figured out what we’re doing about replacing the plant that was killed in the fall.

We’ve been asking for years for the tree to be taken down because it looked ill and leaned over our house with each storm. If it fell altogether, it would land on the house. They finally agreed to take down the tree.

A crew showed up on Monday and climbed the tree, first taking off the limbs and chopping down the trunk as they climbed down. My stomach was in knots for them. But in a few hours, the tree was gone, leaving only wood dust in the backyard.

I’m sad about the tree but also relieved. This tree freaked me out for eleven years.

*******

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…

*******

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.

Finding a Different Path writes about balancing the safety of sticking to your comfort zone to the excitement of new adventures and how the outside world sometimes impacts those decisions — from the huge (world stress) to the personal (avoiding the “family friendly” spaces and all that they bring). As someone who thoroughly enjoys going back to places and loves the lack of stress that comes with knowing a place, I stand behind this 100%.

Lastly, The Next 15000 Days thought she lost a part of herself, but it was there all along. Sometimes you need to go out into the world to get that reminder that side of you was with you all along.

The roundup to the Roundup: Goodbye tree. 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 June 20 – 27) 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.

This is a beautiful piece of writing. So many things So Relatable writes speak to me — her blog post about losing her dog got me through losing Beorn — but this in particular got under my skin.

She writes about having a singular dream and angling her whole life toward it. Sound familiar, friends? You grow up thinking you will do X, you do everything you can to achieve X, it feels like you may even be close to achieving X. But you don’t. And then you need to figure out what comes next. She writes:

I needed time and space to figure out if the dream I’d been clinging to for over 20 years was still possible, still relevant. And if it wasn’t, I needed to figure out what could take its place.

She’s talking about publishing, but I think it’s applicable to many dreams that are out there that are beyond your control. Even though she found a path forward where she could be creative without the publishing gatekeepers, she feels the weight of the old dream:

But that old goal still hung heavy over my head, and it made every step toward something new feel like failure. I was ready to loosen my grip on the past so I could reach for something else.

She is such a talented, smart writer. She always makes me think, and I’m grateful that she keeps resharing the lessons she has learned.

I really liked this framing of looking at your life like a video game. If the boss battles are the big things driving you through life (career, relationships, etc.), then it follows that any good game contains a few side quests.

Matt Rutherford defines that as “a mini-adventure that sparks energy and creativity—without the pressure of success or failure.”

It’s all about zero-pressure projects that may (or may not) grow into something meaningful. The point is not to try to make them meaningful. When you do, you’ve moved it from a side quest into something much heavier. He gives you 20 side quests you can start today if your mind is blank.