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

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A few months ago, Gizmodo asked a question in a post: how much would you pay to live one extra year?  With expensive life-extending drugs a possibility, how much should we consider spending in order to grab another year?  And who should foot the bill?  And who gets the limited supply of drugs?  Will this be the latest division of class: those who can afford the extra time and those who have to make do with the time allotted?  It’s already the case with treatments for common diseases.

But if you strip away all the questions about medications and the worth of certain lives more than others, it comes down to a thought-provoking question.  If you were decently comfortable and mobile, how much would you pay for an additional year of life?  Is it worth take out a second mortgage or borrowing money that your loved ones will pay back?  What number is too high when it comes to grabbing time?  And is there any way you could walk away from that choice if it was possible to make?

The question chilled me to my core.

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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 have no idea what prompted me to try to reach the bottom of my saved post folder in Feedly, but one day this week I scrolled all the way to the bottom and discovered that I had over 1800 bookmarked posts going back to 2013.

Did I need 1800+ bookmarked posts?  I mean, I clearly wasn’t returning to the really old posts, and most of the new ones were only helpful to keep around for a few weeks.  For instance, I sometimes bookmark an article about a movie or show I know I’m going to see but haven’t gotten to yet.  Once I see it, I read the article, but then I should unsave the post.  And I haven’t.  It is clear, 1800+ posts later, that I haven’t.

So I started deleting.  And here are a few things I noticed.

The Posts You Deleted/Altered Are Still There/the Same

If I bookmarked your post (and this is not special to me; if anyone bookmarked your post), even if you deleted the post, changed the post, or took down your blog, the post is still there.  I know because I saw that the opening lines in the teaser of one post was about how the person was going to remove the pictures in the post within 24 hours, and when I opened the post, the pictures were still there.  But when I clicked over to her blog, the pictures were gone.  The same goes for a person who mentioned they would be removing their child’s name from a post in the future (again, it was in the post in my reader, though not on the person’s blog) and an old post from someone who deleted their blog.  All of it, still intact.

What should you learn from this?  Don’t post anything you don’t want to live on out there.  There will be times when you post and have regrets, and you can’t avoid all of those because you can’t predict the future.  But the times when you intend to remove the information or image in the future — don’t post it at all.

Bookmarking is a Great Way to Create Future Post Ideas*

At least 30% of the posts I bookmarked made me say, “Oh, that would make a great post topic.”  I started creating a list of links to those particular posts and realized that if I wrote about all the posts that I’ve added to the list, I’d have months of posts at my fingertips.  So… if you start seeing me discussing posts from 2013, you know where they came from.

Even more interesting are the posts that predicted how something would unfold.  Now, with the passing of time, I can return to those articles and say, “No, this didn’t happen” or “Oooh, this is eerie, but scientists said this would be the case.”  Retrospect adds a new layer to those discussions.

I Learned a Lot About Myself

Going through my bookmarks taught me a lot about myself.  I seem to have an unusual love of ghosts and haunted spaces.  I wish I had kept track of how many ghost-related/abandoned space posts I had bookmarked before I started deleting, but suffice to say that it would have been a high number.  I knew I liked the topic of ghosts, but seeing the sheer number of posts made me say, “Mel, you really love ghosts.”

The same goes for magic tricks and fun math games.  And posts about the act of writing.  And anything Harry Potter, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Doctor Who, or Lord of the Rings related.  And on-the-go vegetarian recipes; the vast majority breakfast ideas.

Have you ever gone through your bookmarks and cleaned up the clutter?

* Listen, I’m going to challenge you and join the challenge as well.  Once a week, let’s say on Sundays, I’m going to post about a bookmarked article — usually old, but sometimes new.  I may talk about why I bookmarked it in the first place, or simply respond to the ideas in the post.  Go through your bookmarks — in your Internet browser or the articles you saved in Feedly or Pocket or Evernote — and write about one of yours, too.  Bookmark Sundays.  If there is enough interest in this, I’ll post a linky list so everyone can find each other’s posts.  It becomes at least one more post that you have on your blog each week.

Are you in?

When Page, Stages, and Rages wrote to let me know that the Hamilton lottery would be going digital for a few months, I ran around the room in excitement. Until I read this tweet:

Due to over 50K unique entries, @BroadwayDirect‘s lottery site has fully crashed. As a result, we cannot award any #Ham4Ham winners tonight.

— Hamilton (@HamiltonMusical) January 5, 2016

Um… 50,000 entries? I guess we’re back to having zero chance.

I am not smitten with Hamilton, but the ChickieNob is obsessed. She loves American history. This is a great thing because I know next to nothing about American history, and so without having to do any work, I now have a satellite brain that knows all the facts and can spit them out at the appropriate moment when asked. I have always called the ChickieNob the “brain for my brain” because she is this wonderful sponge that remembers everything. And since I take her everywhere with me, it’s like carting around a little extra brain that I can use as external storage.

So she is obsessed with Hamilton, which means that I am obsessed with trying to get her to the play. Though this is looking less and less likely. Sniff.

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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. (Well, two weeks ago.)  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Are You Ready?” (Tales of a 30 Year Old Nothing)
• “Not a Creature Was Stirring” (Searching For Our Silver Lining)
• “Kohl’s Adoption Video Brings Out the Either/Or Brigade” (Lavender Luz)

Okay, now my choices this week.

A lot of people talk about what they’re reading, but I haven’t seen as many posts talk about how they’re squeezing reading into a day.  So I loved Anabegins post about where and when she is reading.  If nothing else, it will make you realize that everyone has times in life where they don’t get a page read and other times when they devour books.  If nothing else, she has bumped Max Barry’s Lexicon towards the top of my to-read list.

Non Sequitur Chica leaves her husband to spread news about her pregnancy.  And what happens is… well… a lot of confusion.  It’s a very funny post.

Something Remarkable has a post about setting goals for the new year.  Without a large goal in front of her, she writes, “Nothing is urgent, which makes everything feel urgent.”  What happens when you enter the happily ever after?  I like her idea of keeping the goals small rather than setting them for a year, especially because she’s right: how do you know what life will look like next fall?  This post is a nice take on grand resolutions, and how at some points in life, smaller goals work better than larger ones.

Lastly, please hold Torthúil in your thoughts. Her father died this week, and she memorializes the moment with an achingly beautiful post about loss and love and what life looks like when boiled down to its core elements.

The roundup to the Roundup: My brain for my brain is never going to get to see Hamilton.  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 1st and 8th) 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.

We’ve needed a new hot water heater for about two years.  We still had — albeit inconsistent — hot water, so it was difficult to muster up the energy to replace the heater.  But we finally hit our breaking point and ordered a new heater, even though I will sort of miss the daily family question asked after every shower: “Did you have hot water?”  Followed by one of two responses, “Oooh!  Lucky!” or “That sucks.”

We went with a big business rather than ordering the heater from a plumber; the thought being that if anything went wrong with the heater, we didn’t want to be dependent on a sole proprietor.

I laugh now at this mindset.

The heater came, a man installed it, and all seemed well.  We took showers and there was an abundance of hot water.  There was much happiness in the household.  It was nice to be warm.

A few days later, we did a load of laundry.  As we were getting ready for bed, Josh went to move it into the dryer, and I heard him yell, “SHIT!”  I ran to the laundry room to find it flooded with a half inch or so of water on the floor.  It had seeped out into the next room, soaking the carpet.  Everything on the floor that wasn’t made of plastic was ruined.  The flood had picked up the glue trap from behind the heater and cricket corpses were floating on top of the water as salt in the wound.

We spent an hour trying to soak up as much as possible.  What happened was that when the installer drained the old water heater, he used the washing machine’s drain.  But he failed to re-hook up the washing machine to the drain before he left, so when the laundry was going through the final cycle, all the water that was in the machine ended up on the floor.

Anger doesn’t really cover how I felt mopping the floor at 12:30 am.

We went to bed and dealt with the store in the morning.  They were apologetic and sent a company to clean up the mess.  There was $1400 in initial damage, and that doesn’t cover replacing things like the baseboards which were destroyed in the process.  We’ve had industrial fans running for days as well as a dehumidifier.  The clean up company is supposed to return to finish assessing the damage and work to put back together the laundry room again.

But here’s the thing: we had to front the money to pay the clean up company.  We’re supposed to get reimbursed by the big store and have that fact in writing.  But, of course, we can’t get a person to return a phone call nor tell us when we can expect payment.  Someone else’s mistake has become our headache, eating up work time and energy.  We can have our insurance cover the additional costs, but we would still have to pay the deductible, so in the end, we’re still paying for someone else’s mistake.

I can wrap my brain around needing to be responsible for my own mistakes.  When I cause a problem, I understand that I will have to deal with the consequences and pay the price, even if it was an accident.  That is life.  What I can’t accept is that because an installer made a mistake, we have to pay for the damages.  We have to deal with righting it.  We have to make phone call after phone call and front the money to fix it.

Humans make mistakes, it happens.  But businesses need to step in and fix mistakes in order to have any trust between consumer and provider.  And fixing that mistake means jumping in and doing everything possible so the weight doesn’t rest solely on the customer.

Fine.  I made a resolution.  It’s something I’ve been very consciously doing for a while now, but I decided to take it up a notch so I’m accountable.  I mean, if it’s my resolution, it’s serious.  I need to do it.

I’ve been asking myself a question every time I reach for my phone.  It’s pretty simple; I just say to myself, “Melissa, why are you reaching for your phone?”

Sometimes I have an answer for myself. “I am looking at my phone because I’m checking to see if there are any work emails.  I haven’t looked in a while, therefore it is entirely possible there is something I need to answer.”  Or, “I’m going to play one game of Solitaire because I’m thinking right now, and playing this game helps me think and problem solve.”  Or, “I have the time since I arrived early to my meeting, and I feel like connecting with people, so I’m going to check Facebook.”

If there is a good answer, I look at my phone.

BUT.

There are a bunch of times when I lie to myself, and then I need to call myself out on it.  “I’m checking for work emails,” I’ll say, even though I know I checked 5 minutes earlier.  “I want to connect with people so I’m going to check Facebook,” I’ll say, even though I’m not connecting with the human beings who are physically around me because I’m looking at my phone.

And other times, I’m honest with myself, even though I know the answer has no legs: “I’m bored, so I’m checking my phone to stave off that boredom.”  Or, “I’m checking my phone because it’s easier than tackling the stuff I have to get done.”

Those times, I don’t look at my screen.  I may touch the phone through my pocket, but I don’t turn it on.  Sometimes I have to deny myself the screen a lot.  Other days I barely remember that I have a phone when I’m moving through the house or out-and-about.

I don’t know why I am limiting it: Do I feel like I am missing out on the world around me because I am looking at my screen? Or do I think other people think that I look at my phone too much? Or have I realized that I don’t always use this tool well?

All I know is that I’m setting some conscious limits.  Not a time budget since my needs will change from day-to-day, but instead forcing a mindfulness of why my hand reaches for this tool.