The twins and I have started reading The Cursed Child.  It took us a few days because we had other stuff on the to-do list that had to get done.  But now we’re chugging through it.

We had a few read-aloud methods we considered beforehand since we wanted it to be a one-woman show.  At first I thought I would place pieces of paper on the floor with each character’s name, and then stand on the correct piece of paper when I was speaking for that character.

But in the end, either due to laziness because moving from paper to paper started to sound less and less appealing or because it was going to take too long to shuffle through the papers and lay out each scene’s papers, I decided to read the character’s name aloud before saying their line.  So name (said in a normal voice) + lines (said with feeling).

I bawled reading the opening scene.  I know it’s just a repeat of what is already in the seventh book, but it’s a reunion.  I’ve missed these characters so much.

But I’ve got some strong feelings about some of the passages.  I’m going to write it up in a post and put a spoiler message at the top.  Skip it next week if you haven’t yet read the book.  Or bookmark it for the future.  But… yeah… there is no way to talk about some of it without mentioning spoilers.  Sorry.

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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:

• “Things I Can Do and Things That I Can’t” (Torthúil)
• “Be Fair to Yourself” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “Tribes” (The Empress and the Fool)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Mom PharmD looks at the bright side of nearing the end of family building attempts: no more vitamins.  As she goes toward a final attempt to add a third child to their family, she also sets a loose end date to the process.  It is, as she says, the only way to ensure that she doesn’t remain in infertility limbo.  It’s a tiny post about being okay with the end, whatever that ending may be.

In Quest of a Binky Moongee has a post about another facet of infertility: the age gaps that exist between people.  She writes about her 18-year-old niece, about the joy of being her aunt and watching her age.  But in that aging is another fact: “She is only a couple of hours away for college but it seems almost impossible for her to get to know my future child(ren) like the way she knows her little cousins because of all the time they have spent together.  My child(ren) will not know their oldest cousin the way I would want them to if they had been born a few years earlier and growing up in the same town together.”  It is just food for thought; one more thing infertility takes.

Lastly, for anyone who has followed the enormous love I have for Truman, it’s no wonder that Searching for Our Silver Lining’s post about quantifying love hit home.  She writes, “We encourage all types of love, make no mistake. But when one half of that relationship is suddenly gone, either through death or the relationship ending, grief is immediately quantified based on the type of love.”  She admits that while we can rationally say that the type of love we have for various people or animals is different, that one type of love does not trump another.  Love is love is love.

The roundup to the Roundup: How to read The Cursed Child aloud.  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 5th and 12th) 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.

I used to be a pick-up-a-book-and-read-it sort of person.  I could read a description of the book on someone’s blog or in a magazine, glance at the first page, and generally get through the whole thing, happily.  I rarely stopped reading a book in the middle, and because I only started books that piqued my interest in the first place, I almost always had a four-or-five star experience.  I considered myself an excellent judge of a good-for-me book.

[I like to qualify that as good-for-me, because there are plenty of books that other people enjoy that I find unbearable.  And plenty of books that I love that you may find a yawn-fest.  The only person I can accurately recommend books to is myself.]

Recently, I started two books and abandoned them each after a chapter, completely disappointed with the story and characters and writing styles.  These were books that were on the best-selling list on iBooks and Amazon, so clearly other people thought they were readable.   They had received a lot of media attention.

They should have been good-for-me.  But they weren’t.

So was it me?  Or was it them?  Maybe I’m in a reading slump.  Have you ever had one of those nights where you’re hungry, but nothing sounds good when you’re trying to figure out what to eat?  Maybe that’s where I am right now with fiction.

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Josh came home with a few books and told me he was auditioning them for the beach trip.  Were they beach-worthy?  Because… you know… you’re on the sand, you’re stuck reading what you’ve brought with you to read.  And while I had never had to audition books before, I decided this was probably a sound idea because I have been a crap judge of books this month.

I grabbed from my to-read list and then scoured the library, building an enormous stack of books.  And now I’m going through them, one-by-one, auditioning them.  Making sure they’re right for a role on my beach trip.

So far, six have made the short list.  One will be given the lead role and two will be brought along as supporting cast.  I’ll file the headshots of the last three books and hold them for the next reading production.  It’s good to have books waiting in the wings.

Do you ever audition a stack of books?  Which books made leading roles in your world this summer?

The same day that I was telling a friend about the Wolvog’s imaginary land from childhood (and she was telling me about the one her daughter invented), I read about Jerry Gretzinger’s map.  Jerry started drawing the map of his imaginary land in 1963, and it is now 3200 panels.  Bright hues, tiny towns, and sometimes spaces eaten up by voids.  It’s a living, breathing space that doesn’t exist.

I also had an imaginary world when I was in elementary school that I still think about.  I kept an imaginary friend there, and we wrote imaginary letters back and forth to each other as pen pals, detailing our day-to-day lives.  My imaginary friend found my life fascinating because it was so different from her own, but… you know… vice versa.  She lived in a fishing village and had already been put to work in the local economy, assisting on a fishing boat.  Hard life for an imaginary elementary school girl.

I think I like Jerry’s story so much and looking at his map because it was created for his own pleasure.  It has since gone on display because other people are interested in it, too, but the project, at its heart, is a private one.  Even if no one ever looked at it — and for the first 20 years, no one did look at it — he would continue drawing it and thinking about it and bringing the world into existence.

I feel like we’ve moved into a time period where most people take a “why bother” attitude when it comes to creation.  If no one is going to see it/read it/like it, why bother making it?  I see posts all the time saying the person is stopping their blog because no one is reading it anyway.

I guess Jerry’s map is a tangible reminder of why we should bother.  Why we should write down words even if no one else reads them or draw pictures even if no one else sees them.  We should do it for the pleasure of entertaining ourselves, of bringing something into existence that would never exist if not for our imagination.

There’s a divide between what we make for public consumption vs. what we make solely for ourselves, and it’s skewed heavily towards sharing.  With limited hours in a day, why make something that only reaches inward if you can use those creation minutes to make something that reaches outward; that may bring accolades or attention or connection?

Do you think you could take real joy in designing your own world, knowing you’d never share it with anyone, or do you get more pleasure from releasing it into the world and seeing how the world receives it?

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

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Happy Olympics!

I’m on an eternally-going group chat.  It started out for talking about game development, and while it sometimes is still about game development, it’s more just talking about our day.  A while back, someone from Brazil posted about a brigadeiro-flavoured ice cream treat.  Everyone else seemed to know what brigadeiro was, but I had to Google it.

It is the national truffle of Brazil.

So we obviously must make some in honour of the Olympics.  Wish us luck.  We’re using this recipe.

Did you make anything good to eat for Olympic watching?  Do you tend to make something special for television watching events (like the Super Bowl) or just grab whatever you were going to eat anyway?

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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 posts.

I was squicked out this week by the Daily Beast article about Glow, a fertility tracking app that had a few creepy features and security loopholes.  Glow has addressed the problems that Consumer Reports found in their study, but at its core there is a really uncomfortable question: Is Glow for the user or are the users for Glow?

I ask because the data being collected by the app is really important to the user.  Knowing your cycle is vital if you’re trying to get pregnant without assistance, and, frankly, I kept charting my cycles even when my cycles were being controlled by the RE.  It’s important to know the first day of your cycle, the length of your cycle, ovulation window… even if you’re not family building.  And if you are, well, again, vital.

But this is what I know: Glow is a free app.  And we always tell our kids that if they’re not paying for an app with money, they’re paying for an app with data.  For instance, my data and content and attention is what I’m paying in order to use Facebook.  It’s not free; it’s just not charging money.  And the same goes for Glow.  If you’re not paying money to use Glow, then you are paying with something else.  And that something is the data you are uploading to the app; data that helps you, but data which also becomes an asset to the company.

In fact, Consumer Reports highlights the mission statement of the company.  HVF is the maker of Glow:

Data is becoming our most plentiful, and most under-exploited commodity. The insights mined from it will unlock enormous productivity gains, create efficiencies where none existed before, and meaningfully improve lives … We are interested in consumer finance, enterprise document security, and disease prevention/wellness industries. But if it’s got data, we want to think about it.

So our own data IS our most under-exploited commodity; meaning, we don’t know enough about ourselves, and we don’t value all the information we can mine from ourselves by paying attention.

But doesn’t it sound like… Glow is paying attention to the value THEY can get from data?  Because they are sitting on a lot of information: Women’s sex habits, medications taken, amount of exercise, alcohol consumed.  Don’t you think a lot of companies would like to know that sort of information so they can market to them?  Data is a valuable asset for any company, and this is a company that is making data its only asset.

The Daily Beast writes,

Glow is an app by men, primarily for women. One woman sits on the company’s six-person executive team. The app is the brainchild of former PayPal CEO Max Levchin. If his career pivot from money-transfer mogul to professional period-planner seems a strange one, consider Glow the way Levchin does: as part of a broader network of data collection companies.

Which is a far-cry from Fertility Friend’s business model, which charges for the service so they don’t have to make their money selling your data.  I am taking them at their word, though I would exercise caution in uploading data to any site.  I’m a big fan of paper and pens.

And this post is not to single out Glow.  I am wary of any free app that has you enter in a lot of information about yourself, including ones I use like My Fitness Pal.  I hand over so much information in order to see my patterns.  It helps me, but it clearly also has to be helping them or they wouldn’t be able to give me the app for free.

It’s an interesting fact to note in this day and age of health tracking.  Jotting down what we eat, how much we sleep, how far we walk, or the date of period: It all comes at a cost.