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

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I have an article on L’Inconnue de la Seine open in the Internet browser on my phone.  It has been there for days.  The article itself made me so sad, and then it felt wrong to close the page, as if doing so somehow diminished this nameless woman’s life as much as turning her into death mask.  Or Rescue Annie.

There are dozens of other open searches, from a pinball machine to a video on how to find all the minikits in one of the LEGO Dimension levels to the lyrics of a song I was trying to remember a few weeks ago.  And those are just the open pages on my phone.  Please, let’s not even go into all the tabs I have open on the computer full of random things I’ve looked up this week and never closed.

Do you leave web pages open for days?  Which ones are currently open on your phone or computer browser because you looked up something and never closed the tab?

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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.

You know that I like to find games that waste time… I mean… help me relax while I’m waiting in line.  I am currently obsessed with a game called Merged (here it is on Android), and it’s so good, though it has a bit of a learning curve.  Okay, so this is how you play.

You start off with a blank board and a single die at the bottom of the screen.  You can place it anywhere on the board.  I like to always begin at the lower right corner, but that’s just me.  In the example below, I randomly start out with an orange 2.

I place it in the lower right corner of the board.  Once I do that, I receive either another die or set of dice.  In this example, I get two dice.

The key is to get three die of the same colour to touch.  So, in this case, I could slide over the dice (they move together) so that they run purple, orange, orange at the bottom of the screen.  But that is NOT what I do.  Instead, I tap the purple/orange dice until they are stacked, purple on top and orange on the bottom.  I move that onto the board as seen below:

This is where it gets fun.  You can see that I get another die in the queue: an orange 2.  Perfect.  I place that to the right of the purple die on the board, and that connects three orange 2s in a row.  As long as they are touching, they are connected whether they’re in a straight line or an L shape.  Once you have 3 (or more) connected, they merge and become a single die, one number higher than the group that just merged.  So all those 2s will become a pink 3.

You’ll notice that the new die will be wherever you placed the last die (or dice) that kicked off the merge.  So those purple 1s (once they have 3 dice in a row) will form a 2.  Another group of 2s will form a 3.  And hey, those 3s will all merge to clear out a little bit of the board and form a 4.  The game keeps moving on, and you can place any new die anywhere on the board, so don’t feel as if you need to have the new ones touch the old ones unless they help with a merge.  And don’t forget that when the dice are in the queue, you can tap them so they shift around to fit a space better.

Be strategic.  You want to start growing your 1s pretty close to any 2s on the board because the 1s will eventually merge into 2s and therefore join along with the existing 2s.  Make sense?

What happens after you get 3 6s in a row?  Those yellow 6s merge together to form an M.  It’s just a big, white pulsating M, and when you get 3 Ms in a row, they go off like a bomb, clearing out a bunch of other dice around it and giving you major points.  My high score so far has been 896.  The game is over when the whole board is filled and you can’t move anymore.

Happy playing…

I joined LinkedIn this week.  I don’t know why I resisted for so long considering that I’m a freelancer.  That site was essentially created for people like me, and yet I would ask Josh to poke through his account to find stuff for me whenever I needed it.  No more.  I am now a big girl with my own big girl account.

So if you are on LinkedIn and would like to connect over there, please click over and hit that blue connect button.  I’m not giving LinkedIn access to my address book, choosing to manually add everyone rather than have the site send a message to several thousand people on my behalf.  So… um… help me find you.

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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:

• “Stop Asking Why” (In Due Time)
• “Men Are Like Waffles” (Waiting for Baby Bird)

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding In NZ has a post about being the keeper of memories for her family after her mother’s death.  It resonated with me because (I think) I play this role in my family, being the keeper of the family tree and the collector of photographs and audio interviews.  She wonders if she has become a keeper due to the fact that she doesn’t have children, but I ultimately think my reason for doing this is the same as her reason: “Doing it out of love and a feeling of connection, a belief that the past will matter to the future. That without the past, there is no future, even if personally, I am not going to be part of that future.”

Bent Not Broken recounts the conversation she had in her head vs. the things she said aloud when her sister complained about life after pregnancy and birth.  While her other sisters were difficult during pregnancy but amazing after delivery, this one sister was the reverse, implying through pregnancy that they would be able to easily navigate the chasm and yet complaining to her sister once the baby arrived.  It’s as much about the things that are left unsaid as it is about considering the world from another person’s point-of-view.

Lastly, Two Adults, One Child has a post about how miscarriage made her an accidental expert, and how what she thought was set aside from her life, no longer affecting her, bubbled up as grief when she had to use her expert knowledge to comfort a friend through a loss.  She explains, “But then I realized that those very thoughts and emotions are what makes me the perfect person to help her through this.  She can tell me everything she is feeling, and I won’t judge her, because I’ve felt those things, too.”  Loved this post.

The roundup to the Roundup: I’m on LinkedIn.  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 February 26th and March 4th) 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 read an interesting article last week from a Facebook link about how you can segment your life into 5 big sections: work, sleep, family, fitness, or friends.  According to Randi Zuckerberg’s 2011 tweet, entrepreneurs (and… um… I’d probably use a more inclusive “everyone” since entrepreneurs do not magically have a more limited time base than the rest of the world) can have 3 of the 5 at any given time, and it’s up to you to choose which 3 segments you want.

The entrepreneur’s dilemma:

Maintaining friendships. Building a great company. Spending time w/family. Staying fit. Getting sleep.

Pick 3.

— Randi Zuckerberg (@randizuckerberg) December 9, 2011

I would probably segment my life in a different way: work, sleep, family, friends, me-time. Fitness is sort of a no-brainer that takes place in the first half hour of the morning. If I want to do it, I wake up a half hour earlier. If I don’t want to do it, I wake up a half hour later.

But work, sleep, family, friends, and me-time are all in competition with each other for the minutes of my day. I give sleep about 7 hours. I give work about 9 hours. Which leaves about 8 hours. That’s actually quite a lot of time. I can give 4 hours to the kids and Josh and 2 hours to friends and still have 2 hours for myself. It doesn’t work out that way most of the time, but it’s completely feasible to actually have all 5 things + fitness for a total of 6 things in any given day.

Randi Zuckerberg may very well have a busier life than I do. Maybe she can only accomplish 3 out of 5 segments of her life on a given day. I guess I don’t see this as the entrepreneur’s dilemma or even the every-person’s dilemma. I see it as the Randi Zuckerberg dilemma and the rest of us are playing fuck, marry, kill with our time for the fun of it with her tweet.

I don’t know — time always feels strained, but when you look at the facts on paper, it doesn’t make sense at all.  7 hours of sleep.  9 hours of work. (Which is a totally respectable amount of work hours per day.)  8 hours are left.  Can we really not eat meals, clean the house, help the kids with homework, have sex, grab cup of coffee with a friend, and play a video game in 8 hours of time?  8 hours is a lot of time, right?

I don’t know why Zuckerberg’s tweet bubbled up to the top of everyone’s mind this month, but it’s certainly food for thought.

Do you agree or disagree that we only have time for 3 of Zuckerberg’s 5: work, sleep, family, fitness, or friends?  And which of these do you manage on a regular basis?

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t really know much about how the military works.  I do know that there are people not only putting their lives in danger to fulfill the decisions of the Americans in charge (from the President down to their troop leaders) but some are coming back from work injured while on the job.  I assumed that the government took care of those injured from a military job, and it sounds like from this Atlantic article that they mostly do.  But not when it comes to IVF.

If you’re on active duty, your medical care is covered by the Pentagon.  And those people do have (some?) fertility treatment coverage if they discover that they need help building their family.  But if you are injured in the line of duty and therefore need to retire from the military, your care is now part of the Department of Veteran Affairs.  And lawmakers have ruled to not cover IVF.  And lest you think that is the only hoop they’ve forced injured military personnel to jump through in order to treat their body and mind, think again.  For instance, I don’t know how any woman could easily receive counseling from a rape that occurred during active duty with this law.  Do we really make our veterans go through this many layers of permission before receiving something as basic as counseling stemming from a rape while on the job?

Infertility, by the way, is discussed under section 106.

The story of the couple in the Atlantic article made me so sad even though they ultimately had their community gather around them and help them raise the money so they could conceive their twins.  It is wonderful that they had other organizations reach out.  But what about all the veterans who now cannot build their family because they were injured on the job and who don’t have their community members holding lemonade stands to take care of them?  Why are we not taking care of the people who do these difficult jobs?  Again, I know so little about the military, but I find it unfathomable that we are creating laws that harm the people who are putting their lives at risk.

At the very least, shouldn’t there be a distinction made between veterans who need fertility coverage because they happen to be infertile and veterans who need fertility coverage because their fertility was removed due to injury on the job?  I think everyone should have access to fertility treatments, but if we need to limit it for financial reasons, can we at least take care of the people who lost the ability to form their family because they were taking care of us?

There is an election coming up.  Please think twice when you are voting and put lawmakers in office that will give a voice to people who clearly need a voice and act in the best interest of their constituents and NOT lead with their own personal opinions while in office.  Thom Tillis of North Carolina, I don’t really care how you feel about abortion.  I care about military families who already lose out on so much due to the job and sometimes make enormous sacrifices such as their ability to form a family all because of their line of work.