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

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Every year between Christmas and New Years, we watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  The goal is to get Aragorn and Arwen’s kiss as close to midnight on New Year’s Eve as possible.  We rarely succeed.  By which I mean that we don’t succeed at all.  Like we sometimes get stuck watching the Two Towers well into January.  We suck.

But this year, we made a commitment.  Watch at least one hour, but hopefully more, daily.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Do not allow life to get in the way of our goal.

This year, we succeeded.  Even though we had to take a few days off because the kids slept at my parents’ house, we timed it carefully and got the kiss in at 10:59 pm on New Year’s Eve.  I wanted to run around the house, screaming, because I was so proud of us.  Instead, I tiredly ate some M&Ms and said, “Well done, team.”

Sometimes it’s not the big wins.  Sometimes it’s the small victories.  What was your latest small victory?

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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.

It’s the first of the year, and it feels like everyone is writing the obligatory resolution post about how this year will be different from the last; how we’ll finally become our best self.

But I’m not feeling it.

I am facing 2017 with a lot of trepidation.  Did you ever go to River Country as a kid?  There was a platform in the man-made lake with a wooden post and a swinging arm.  The person hung from the arm and swung out over the water before they dropped down.  When it was my turn, I was hanging from the arm, and I looked down into the water.  I saw a flash of an orange fish beneath the surface, and I couldn’t make my body drop.  I was suddenly aware that there were fish in the water; and if there were fish, then there were probably snakes and turtles and all sort of other things below the murky surface.  The other kids were screaming at me to drop off the arm because they wanted their turn, and I finally released myself so I could quickly swim out of the water.  I remember spending the rest of the day going down a water slide with a tube so I could be in the water without really being “in” the water.

The point: 2017 makes me feel like I’m staring down into murky water, and I’m wondering what is below the surface.  This is not where I thought we’d be when we started 2016.

This is a downer of a New Years post.

These are my goals for the year: Before December 2017, I want to be the world’s best backgammon player (why aim small?), return to fiction and complete a new novel, and get into grant writing (by which I mean proposal writing, since… you know… you write proposals for grants).  All do-able with the possible exception of world’s best backgammon player.  I may need to settle for “able to always beat the computer on the expert setting.”  What are your goals?

Last year, I admonished Stephanie for running into a store for tampons and bypassing the Michael Jackson frog statues.  Who the hell leaves behind a Michael Jackson frog, especially one grabbing his crotch?  Fine, fine, fine, the ceramic cow skull I understand (those hollow eyes are sort of creepy), but Michael?

Fast forward to this week when Josh picks up the mail and texts that there is a package for me.

Guess who has come to live in my house?

Great statue or greatest statue?  Ever.

Thank you, Stephanie.  This made my year.

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We went to see Jackie this week.  Normally I hate going to the movie theater because I can’t relax with a bunch of strangers around me AND I had already endured the movie theater recently to see Rogue One,  but I wanted to see Jackie that badly.

It didn’t disappoint.  There were chunks of the movie where I forgot that I was watching Natalie Portman.  It was so beautiful.  It’s one of my top favourite movies of all time, and I already know that I’m going to buy it the moment it comes out on DVD in March.

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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:

• “Holiday Grief Sneak Attack” (My Path to Mommyhood)
• “MicroblogMondays: Trigger” (In Quest of a Binky Moongee)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Empress and the Fool has a post about the media’s coverage of infertility as well as the stories out of Hollywood of women easily popping out babies in their forties without a care in the world.  Okay, so I loved this post for the term “cryo-stash,” but she makes a really important point about the stories we put out into the world and how they affect people beyond ourselves.  And, moreover, “I’m not sure how much of my private life I’m morally obligated to divulge in the interest of the public good.”

My Path to Mommyhood has a bittersweet story about a misunderstanding stemming from the fact that she was holding a colleague’s baby.  She writes, “I found their flash of belief in this magical baby delivery endearing though, and their amazement and brief moment of OH MY G-D IT FINALLY HAPPENED! to be just incredibly heartwarming.”  It’s really a post about everyone who is waiting with you when you’re waiting to build your family; even the people you don’t really think about who are silently cheering you on.

Lastly, Bent Not Broken has a beautiful post about aunthood.  We call that “the honey and the sting” in Hebrew — the thing that brings you so much happiness that also makes you ache at the same time.  Or, as she perfect states: “Definitely a weird gray space of where I held happiness and longing at the same time.”  Go read the whole post.

The roundup to the Roundup: Thank you for the greatest frog statue ever!  Go see Jackie.  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 December 23rd and 30th) 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.

Sometimes when I’m reading SuperBetter I think to myself, Jane McGonigal clearly does not have a bleak outlook of the world.  Then I think to myself, “Well, good for her.”

I am more Strindberg than Pollyanna.  I have more of a Siberian vs Maui internal landscape.

Which is why I really struggled with the idea of asking myself, “What’s the best that could happen?” (p. 143).

I am very comfortable asking myself what is the worst that can happen.  I am excellent at making mental lists of worst case scenarios and then coming up with possible solutions for those situations.  I am less comfortable allowing my mind to go to the best possible place.  Moreover, I’ve found that once I’m there — in that best that can happen mental place — there isn’t much more to do except to get on with the happily ever after.  Worst case situations gives you plenty to mull over or ways to feel like you are proactively working towards something.  Best case situations can make me feel complacent.  Like I’ve reached an end point and there is nothing left to do.

But, as McGonigal also points out on page 145, “Playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”  In other words, the whole point of games is to set up a difficult situation and ask the player to try to overcome it.  She makes the case with golf.  The point is to get a small ball into a hole, but instead of having people walk over to the hole and place the ball in said hole, the game is to use a stick to hit the ball a great distance and see if you can walk around a grassy space to find said ball again.  Not very efficient.  Probably a lot of fun.  (I say “probably” because I don’t play golf, but I have to assume it’s fun or we wouldn’t have so much land tied up in golf courses.)

I’ve been approaching life with the belief that the worst-that-can-happen mindset is the setting up unnecessary obstacles.  I mean, worrying certainly isn’t efficient.  I rarely come up with a great solution before something terrible has happened, and how often has my worrying really staved off disaster?

But in McGonigal’s case, she’s saying that the challenge mindset — that best-that-can-happen mindset — is making life into a game.  She states, “It can empower you to find the unnecessary obstacle within the uninvited challenge you face” (p. 145).

In other words, what is a small obstacle inside a much larger problem that you can tackle right now to stay in the game?  Look at your biggest life challenge right now and think to yourself, “If I try to tackle this, what is the best that can happen?”

I’m writing about SuperBetter the app as well as SuperBetter the book because… well… I learned about them via a podcast and now I want to talk about everything I’m learning on them.  If you want to talk about them, too, join along.  If not, skip the posts marked SuperBetter.

Updated at the Bottom

Like everyone else, I felt sad when I heard on Christmas that George Michael died.  As a Gen-Xer, it is my duty to make the next generation care about our 80s idols.  While I have done an excellent job on the video game/book/movie front, I have not really driven home the greatness of 80s music, though the twins know George Michael from being subjected to “I Love the 80s” weekends on 97.1 FM.

The part I always try to drive home to the kids is how risqué Faith was back in 1987.  The video for “I Want Your Sex” is fairly tame by today’s standards, but I remember a huge divide between kids whose parents allowed them to listen to it and those who had to listen to the radio edit version.  One day an older girl walked down the aisle of the bus, asking every kid if their parents allowed them to play the song at home.  Not only did I have the song, but my parents owned the VHS tape of all the videos from Faith.  Did that make me cool?  I believe the answer is yes.

There were a lot of “I hate you, 2016” posts on Facebook this weekend, but it’s not as if there has ever been a year without a slew of artists dying.  This is not a uniquely terrible year; it is just a year.  I mean, in terms of celebrity death.  For many other reasons, it’s okay to say I hate you to 2016.

Right now, I’m just trying to have faith.  We all have got to have faith-a-faith-a-faith.  Thank you, George, for the good music.

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And now Carrie Fisher has died.  This really has been a horrible end of year.