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

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Mental Floss recently had an article about bibliotherapists.  They are support staff for therapists who recommend books with the understanding that a book can sometimes change your mood or help you see a situation in a new way or simply transport you somewhere else for a few hours.  Mental Floss explains,

Patients fill out a questionnaire about their reading habits and issues they might be having, and get a prescription for something that speaks to their specific set of circumstances.

I kind of love this idea, though I don’t know how I would feel about going to a bibliotherapist.  I love getting book recommendations, but I sort of balk at being told what to read.

What do you think?  Do you enjoy being told what to read?

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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.

We’re snowtrapped in the house.  But I have a lot of eggs.  Like a lot of eggs.  And two bags of clementines.  It’s still coming down and will continue well into the night.

Riddle me this, Batmans (Batmen?): Do you leave your windshield wipers up or down when it snows?  Have you ever seen this done?  Before the snow starts falling, people pull their windshield wipers away from the windshield so they stick out.  Josh does this.  I told him not to do it this time because I was worried the snow would weigh so much that it would crush those fragile wipers.

While I love a good snowstorm, this one is making me really nervous.  I woke up early yesterday and started bleaching down the house.  I wanted to be able to take out the garbage one last time and have everything clean, but it was also about trying to tame my anxiety and instate order when there is no order.

Capital Weather Gang made me nervous about roofs collapsing.  I’m worried about neighbours not being prepared because it’s their first time around snow.  I’m worried about trees falling and houses being damaged and people dying in car accidents.  I’m worried about people not being able to get to the hospital if they fall ill at home.

Cleaning didn’t help.  I am still nervous, but there is nothing I can do about it.  It’s not as if I can stop the sky from dumping snow.  I’m just going to hope that we keep power so I can plow through work and then play some Doctor Who Monopoly.  But it’s sobering as much as it is pretty.

Well now I’m glad that I kept my spelunking suit because we are about to get 6 million feet of snow.  For the first time ever, I received a weather alert warning of an impending blizzard.  Impending blizzard!  That sounds like something that happens in Antarctica, not Washington, D.C.  But I dutifully went to the food store and bought up staples like clementines and bread flour (if I’m going to be snowed in, all I’m eating is citrus and hot pretzels).  And now we wait.

The only thing I’m sad about is that I intended to buy myself a decent pair of boots this winter.  I wear a pair of Docs most days, but they’re not actually waterproof so they leak in the snow.  I was going to buy myself actual snow boots, but I didn’t.  And now I’m sort of screwed on the shoe-front despite my waterproof pants.  How was I to know that we were going to have a historic snow event where we get 28 billion feet of snow?

We have books.  We have video games.  We actually have a pile of work to do.  And we now have an open weekend since everything is going to be closed due to the 97 trillion feet of snow.  I feel like I shouldn’t squander these last few minutes before the snow comes, but I have no clue where to go except perhaps the food store to replace the container of peanuts I spilled across the kitchen floor.  Ha — as if there are peanuts left on the shelf.

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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:

• “Whose Story Is It?” (Lavender Luz)
• “Our Adoption Photo Shoot” (My Path to Mommyhood)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Infertile Fantasies blows my mind once again with the questions she asked this week about her donated embryos.  The other woman’s pregnancy didn’t go well and she has lost her fallopian tube.  The questions are so thought-provoking, though I suspect the answers will be different from person to person.  Still, these are the sorts of posts the general public needs to read to fully grasp IVF and frozen embryos and donation, et al.

Project Progeny is back with a post about the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016.  My favourite line: “This job is not my own personal salvation and I think my biggest mistake has been thinking that it was.”  What incredible insight, and I wonder where else this applies in life.  The things we take to heart that we could also look at with this perspective.

Lastly, River Run Dry’s post this week is especially apt due to the name of her blog.  She has run dry, but she does a wonderful job of boiling down a familiar situation into its separate components and discussing how to get over the guilt and shoulds.  For anyone feeling stretched thin, go over and read this post.

The roundup to the Roundup: We are getting 400 quadrillion feet of snow.  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 January 15th and 22nd) 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 recently said something in a Twitter chat that didn’t seem radical but got a big response. I admitted that blogging sometimes affects my mood.  Like in a bad way.

Sometimes it also affects my mood in a good way — actually, more often than not, I would say blogging is a positive force in my life. But there are also times when I find it difficult not to carry feelings from blogging into the rest of my day.  On certain days, it affects my productivity because my mind is elsewhere, such as on a negative comment or lack of engagement.

I was surprised that people were surprised that I said it mostly because I THINK WE ALL SAY IT.  Okay, maybe not directly, but what about all of the posts out there where people have written about feeling hurt by a comment or a lack of readership or having their words misunderstood?

Of course it hurts!  Of course it would affect your mood.  Blogging is just a form of communication.  What if other forms of communication operated in the same way as blogging?

What if you were telling someone about how you felt watching the news and they looked you in the eye and responded, “You are such a stupid, fucking idiot.  I hope you rot in hell.”

Or

You were standing in a group, explaining how scared you were to try something new, and all the people silently stared at you for a bit and then walked away with no response.

Or

You were talking about how much you loved your child’s teacher but you really wish she’d include instructions with the homework so you could help your child at home, and the person you were talking to snarled, “So you hate all teachers and hope that they drown?”

That would be weird, right?  People understand that interactions like that affect your mood.  If that happened to you at the grocery store and you came home and told people about it, they would give you a hug.  Because when it happens in the face-to-face world, it’s remarkable.  But when it happens online, you’re expected to just shrug and move on.

Sometimes I do.  Shrug, I mean.  Sometimes I’m really good at shrugging and moving on.  And sometimes I’m terrible at it, and I think about something said to me online while I wash the dishes and drive the car and try to work.

I’m a human being.  If you say rude things to me, I will have my mood affected by those rude things.  If you say kind things to me, I will also have my mood affected by those kind things.  I hold certain expectations in my head.  When they’re not met, I feel unhappy.  When they are met, I feel happy.  It all feels pretty simple, you know.

Sometimes people forget that there is a human being on the other end of each screen.  But if you remove the computers between the individuals, all you have are people communicating.  Sometimes well, sometimes poorly, but communication in the end.

I’m going to answer the question I ask in the title in a moment, but to do so, we need to go back to late aughts when I was hired to write an article explaining the housing market collapse.  I didn’t think twice about taking the assignment even though it was outside my wheelhouse.  I often write plain English translations of muddy ideas; how hard could this be?

I ended up sobbing at my desk after reading through two hours of notes on the topic.  This was so. over. my. head.  There were several terms that all sounded as if they were the same thing… sort of like how wolves and wolves in sheep clothing are both Canis lupus, you know?  I couldn’t write this article.  But I had to write this article because I had accepted this article.  It took hours and it was fairly shitty in the end.

A little bit after that, I wrote a post for BlogHer about the Goldman Sachs fraud charges.  See?  Not much better.  Pretty confusing.

I wanted to see the Big Short because I still think about that assignment.  Well, I think more about lying on the living room carpet and saying to Josh, “I am so stupid, so stupid, so stupid.”  Was I that stupid or was it that complicated?

I may be that stupid, but it was definitely that complicated.  It’s a wonderful film that explains how the housing market collapsed, how the banks built a fraudulent system, and how some people profited while other people lost everything.  Even if anything economic in nature is outside your general interest zone, the movie is fascinating.  I can’t say enough good things about it.  I hope it wins a zillion awards.

(I didn’t actually see who was nominated for Oscars, and I am too lazy to Google the list.  I’m just going under the assumption that the Big Short is nominated for everything and will win everything.)

But I almost didn’t get to see it.  We got to the movie theater with plenty of time to get tickets.  Like enough time that if we had gotten tickets, we also would have read a few chapters in our books while we were waiting.  But the theater recently refurbished, removing about 2/3rds of their seats and doubling the price of the ticket.  The 50 seats in the theater were filled except for the front row.

I don’t run a movie theater and perhaps this was the most economical decision for the owner; a plan that would keep them in business.  But I can’t believe that filling 50 seats at $15 is as good as filling even only 100 seats at $7.50.  Because at least some of those extra 50 humans would have also purchased popcorn or candy.  Instead, we wandered out of the theater without staying and went home.

Josh suggested we try again the next morning since the kids were with my parents until the afternoon.  Maybe there was an 11 am film showing somewhere.  He scanned his phone and said, “This can’t be correct.”

There was a 9:15 am showing at a nearby theater.

Could that possibly be right?  Who gets up at 9:15 on a Sunday and says, “You know what?  I hate sleep but I love movies.  I’m going to go see the Big Short.”

The next morning, we drove to the theater, certain that we were going to find out that it was a typographical error and the movie was actually at 9:15 pm.  But no, the theater opened at 6 am and started showing movies around 7 am.  Would our fellow theater goers be in their pyjamas?  Drinking coffee and chowing down on breakfast while they watched a movie about banking?

We were the first ones there

It turns out that a really odd mixture of people go to the movies at 9:15 am.  Some were alone, some came in groups.  Some seemed to ignore social conventions.  (Really?  So many seats but you needed to choose the one right next to me?)  Others quietly curled up next to one another, yawning.  It was actually the nicest time I’ve had in a movie theater in years.

This experience may have converted me into an early morning film goer.  What do you think of morning movies?  Brilliant time for a film or too weird to consider?