Do you need a distraction? It sounded like people needed a distraction from this day.  So I present to you the most fun article from Mental Floss this week: Cool features in people’s homes.

Think hammocks as floors or slides instead of stairs.

Which makes me think about what I’ve always wanted in my future home: A dolphin pool like the one in the movie 2010.  I may be misremembering this scene, and Googling has not brought me a clip, but I have vague memories of the family having breakfast in the kitchen, and the floor opening up into a dolphin tank.  The dolphin could swim right up to the kitchen table.  How amazing would that be?  Or what if there was a thick glass floor overlooking an aquarium, and you could lie on your stomach underneath the table and look down at the fish while you read a book?

I know this is in direct conflict with my desire for a tiny home, but… you know… dolphin pool filled with dolphin friends.  How cool would that be?

The only other thing I really want is a window in the shower.  I had that in an apartment in Rome and have wanted it ever since.

What feature would be in your dream home?

It has either been raining or in a state of pre-rain for… weeks. At least, it feels like it has been weeks.  Baseball has been cancelled a bunch of times, and I’ve been using up the cheaper hair gel because why bother with the good stuff when my hair is going to frizz anyway?

I’m not a big fan of rain (see above: frizzy hair), but I didn’t realize how much it affected my mood, especially since I consider myself immune to needing outdoor time.  Josh always says that when we need to crawl into underground bunkers because zombies are roaming the surface of the earth, I will thrive because I am perfectly content never stepping into the sun.

But we may need to rethink this because every time I wake to another day of greyness, I want to curl up into a ball and sob.

Are you affected by the weather or indifferent toward rain?

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My friend and I took our sons to an arcade that had an original Super Mario machine.  [Quick trivia question: Mario made his first appearance in this arcade game before showing up in Super Mario Bros.  Don’t Google.  Put your guess in the comment section.]

I haven’t played in at least 24 years but probably longer.  It was amazing to feel the muscle memory kick in the second my hands grabbed the joystick.  I wasted a game getting accustomed to the controls, and then immediately started sailing through the boards.  I remembered the location of every hidden coin, every portal.

I coached the boys, telling them where to squat down and jump up.  The only thing I was missing was a track suit and whistle as I prowled behind them, critiquing their technique.  That’s what I want to be when I grow up: an arcade coach.

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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:

• “#StartAsking for Recognition” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “NIAW: #StartAsking Yourself” (Unpregnant Chicken)
• “Perfect Imperfections” (Lavender Luz)
• “#StartAsking About What Causes Infertility” (Searching for Our Silver Lining)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Family Build With a Twist has a post about life long after resolving infertility.  As you’ve probably guessed, resolving infertility doesn’t wrap up the experience in a neat package that you can set in a storage box, never to look at again.  As she writes, “As the mother of a tiny human well into childhood as opposed to babyhood, I should be over all this infertility stuff, right?  I’m not.”  Clearly this resonated with me because I feel the same way.  (And, yes, I am a glass half empty person, too.)

No Kidding in NZ has a post highlighting the Joy Olympics — the exact opposite of the Pain Olympics in which the person is told that they have no right to be happy (instead of no right to be sad).  It’s a bizarre idea; that people believe there is only one path in life in which you can feel joy.  And it made me stop and think about all the other places we play the Joy Olympics in life: you can’t be happy if you don’t get married, own a home, go on vacations.  It’s a really thought-provoking post that will have you recheck the way you view the world.

Lastly, do you ever get that feeling where you think you should do X without really knowing why, and then by doing X, you end up being in the right place at the right time?  Hello, Universe?  Our Wish has a post about a day when she was considering taking a day off of work, and what happened when she decided to go in anyway.  Trigger warning: a miscarriage is discussed in the post.

The roundup to the Roundup: The rain is bringing me down.  Super Mario muscle memory.  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 April 29th and May 6th) 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.

Image: Angela via FlickrMother’s Day in the UK happens 2 months before our Mother’s Day in the US, so I read this post about JK Rowling back in March and then remembered it today.  She had a bit of brilliant advice, one that twists the holiday in my mind.

She writes, “If your mum isn’t here to treat, do something nice for yourself, because she’s part of you.”

Today’s Mother’s Day in the UK. If your mum isn’t here to treat, do something nice for yourself, because she’s part of you. Take a hug, too” class=”emoji” draggable=”false”>

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) March 6, 2016

I love this sentiment because she didn’t write, “Because you came from her,” which would have ignored a chunk of the population that has built their family through non-traditional means.  She didn’t write, “Because she raised you,” because that may not be true, either.

“Because she’s a part of you.”

And regardless of your situation, the person you consider your mother is a part of you, even if you’ve never met her.  Maybe she contributed genetic material.  Maybe she contributed the right words.  Maybe she contributed perfectly timed hugs.  Maybe she protected you from the larger world.  And because that woman has touched your life, her actions or her words live on inside of you.  Every single human being in this world is tethering, in their own, small way, the generation before them.

You can make the day about looking ahead, or you can make the day about looking behind.

I am very lucky that I get to celebrate Mother’s Day with my mother this year.  But I also like this idea of taking time to honour yourself because, in doing so, you also honour her.

So I am going to do something nice for myself this weekend.  I’m going to go to a comic book store — something my mother has probably never stepped foot inside because it really isn’t her thing.  But in doing so, I’m honouring the woman who encouraged me to march to the beat of my own, very loud drummer and not give up the things I love to fit into someone else’s idea of who I should be.  So I’m spending some time with my Marvel friends before heading to her house to say thank you.

So do something nice for yourself this weekend.

Lauren Marie Fleming (otherwise known as Queerie Bradshaw) wrote a fantastic post on BlogHer about not having a lot of followers but her blog and social media accounts still having worth.  The irony is that I read the post, and ultimately ended up featuring the post, because her name caught my eye.  It was an instantaneous, “what does Queerie Bradshaw have to say?” moment of recognition.  Which is ironic since she was told by publishers that her platform wasn’t strong enough:

Four years and one major brand redesign later, my numbers are still not impressive to many people. On a regular basis, I am still shot down, rejected, and denied simply because I am not famous enough.

Clearly famous enough in my world.

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I know that publishers and PR people and the gatekeepers of the world need to start somewhere, but numbers are such a bizarre way of determining a person’s worth and reach.  A person could write hateful, anger-producing things and ultimately gain a lot of attention by trolling people.  So big numbers, but do they really have big reach and big influence?

The people who get under our skin, who ultimately influence our spending habits or move us to action, are rarely the big names associated with far reach.  That type of influence is personal, and because it is personal, it usually happens on a smaller, more intimate level.

For instance, JK Rowling can tell me to buy something, and maybe I will if I was already inclined to buy the product anyway and was looking for a reminder to push me over the edge.  Or maybe I won’t because in the back of my mind, I just don’t feel that sort of connection to her because I’ve never interacted with her.  I’m sure she’s a great person and I certainly love her books, but there is a piece missing in that relationship.  It is entirely one-sided.

On the other hand, my mother can tell me to buy something, and even if I wasn’t thinking about buying that thing at first, it’s now in my mind because I trust my mother’s opinion.  We have a personal connection.  The same goes for other family members, friends, and bloggers I loyally read.  If you’re in my feed reader, it means I trust your opinion and am interested in hearing what you have to say.

True reach is having a small core group of people who are so smitten with your words or thoughts or product that they’re willing to use their reach to extend your reach.  And those big names who have never gotten a chance to connect personally with people skip that step.  There is no foundation to their reach so it folds like a card house once the wind changes.  But a small, steady blogger like Lauren Marie Fleming — I would argue — has farther, longer-lasting reach because she has loyal readers who are willing to extend her reach by letting her indirectly use their reach.

Like this post.

Listen, I don’t know Lauren personally, and I’m sure she couldn’t pick me out of a crowd.  But I spoke to her once at BlogHer and clearly was impressed enough to retain the name and read her online.  And now I’m writing a post about her post, which means that her words are spreading to a new audience (or, at least, partially a new audience since I’m sure we have some overlap).  THAT is more important — being able to get people to lend their reach — than having that reach yourself.

Because here’s the thing: you can have 1 million followers on Twitter.  Unless all 1 million followers are invested in your words and want to support you, that enormous number is meaningless.  Remove the bots and spam accounts and you still have a large chunk of those followers who are as insubstantial as air.  They are going to drift away the moment they don’t feel like they’re getting any value from your words.  Easy come, easy go.

But a person with 1000 followers, who has built personal relationships and supported the people who support her, has lasting power.  And when she needs to use her reach, she not only has 1000 followers.  She likely, with a simple request, has their followers and maybe even those follower’s followers.  THAT is true reach, and that is something the people mentioned in her article don’t really get because it’s difficult to measure.  It’s easier for publishers and PR people to flock towards the person with 1 million followers because they can point at a number and say, “See, people listen.”  And sometimes that does pay off, but I’m willing to bet that a lot of the time, it doesn’t pay off for the long haul.

But there is no clear way of measuring lasting power and extended reach.

Her post is food for thought, and the end message is simple: keep writing.

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

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There’s a new game for the PS4 which sort of blew my mind.  It’s called Everything, and every object in the game is playable.  Meaning, you can make anything in the game the player character for the game.

Pause for a second and think about that.  Because in your life, YOU are the player character, and everything around you is seen in reference to you.  A mug is helpful to you because you can fill it with coffee that you will drink.  And the shower head is helpful to you because you can turn it on and bathe.

But what about the world from the point of view of the mug?  To the mug, you’re just a big pair of lips that touch it while it’s trying to go about its non-existence.  To the shower head, you’re just this lump standing underneath it that it’s pelting with water.

The idea that everything is playable means that you can experience everything’s point of view.  And therefore everything is of equal importance.  And nothing is the star of the show.

If you could really see the world through anything or anyone’s eyes what would you choose?

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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.

1.	Raven	9.	Parul | Happiness & Food	17.	Virgí nia
2.	Mali (A Separate Life)	10.	Conceptionally Challenged	18.	Wendy English
3.	Mali (No Kidding)	11.	Isabelle	19.	Rain
4.	Lori@ Laughing IS Conceivable	12.	Shail	20.	Stephanie (Travelcraft Journal)
5.	Catwoman73	13.	Cyn K	21.	Suzy
6.	Unpregnant Chicken	14.	Traci York, Writer	22.	* Our Wish*
7.	IF Pom	15.	Just Heather
8.	Cristy	16.	Grass Haiku